Yes, according to Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer speaking at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. During his speech he recounted a call he claimed to be from Apple Legal. According to the transcript:

And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something.

Is Turner telling the truth about this? I can’t say for sure, but it’s instructive to note that in the same transcript he says this about the Laptop Hunter ads (emphasis mine)…

“Oh, I’m looking to spend less than $1,000.” Well we’ll give you $1,000. Go in and look and see what you can buy. And they come out and they just show them. Those are completely unscripted commercials.

Turner’s not being very truthful there. At the very least, it’s bending the truth to such an extent one must violate the laws of physics to pull it off. Unscripted? Please. Aside from certain events being staged, there’s also the kind of dialog that people are just not using unless prompted.

The latest example of this kind of dialog is in the most recent ad where, when showing a silver HP laptop (silver, to help it look like a unibody MacBook), the man talks about how sturdy it looks. No one usually talked about how “sturdy” a laptop felt until Apple began hacking them out of aluminum blocks. Apple’s been getting raves for the unibody durability, so now one of Microsoft’s laptop hunters coincidentally mentions the same thing about a cheap plastic laptop? Right.

I believe that when Microsoft picks a target price of less than $1,000 they’re on solid ground eliminating the Mac from contention. However, the rest of the supposedly “unscripted” dialog is bogus.

So did Apple Legal really call and request the ads be pulled, or is Turner bending the truth again? It sounds farfetched primarily because if Apple really felt they had a case for the ads to be pulled, they’d take action in writing. A written request, maybe even a Cease and Desist letter, would be more the style of Apple’s (or any large company’s) legal team. It just doesn’t seem like something they’d handle via a phone call to the COO.

“With all those zingers flying around, it made me start remembering other instances in which Ballmer has taken a company or product to task.” Link

Good for Palm. According to the official Palm Blog, the WebOS SDK (dubbed Mojo) is now available to “all interested app developers”.

From all the press I’ve read on the Pre the WebOS is very promising, yet the device needs two things:

• Better hardware. The build quality is unimpressive and the keyboard cheap.
• Apps, apps, and more apps. Only about 30 or so available…

There’s nothing that can be done about the first item for early adopters. The Pre they bought is the Pre they get. However, one can hope Pre has listened and future devices will be better.

As for the second, very little could be done until the SDK was available, and no one knew for sure when that would be. It is indeed good news that’s it’s here, and any interested Pre developers no longer have to wait.

It remains to be seen how developers will react to the SDK, and if it will be well-received. I await feedback from the development community with interest. Meanwhile, here’s a post with some initial “quick and dirty” comments on it.

The latest release of iTunes (8.2.1) puts an end to the Palm Pre’s syncing with iTunes. Some have expressed surprise, but it was an obvious and proper move on Apple’s part.

I wrote about this issue on two separate occasions, and believed it was clear that Apple needed to address the exposure Palm was taking advantage of.

In the first article I pointed out that:

it has everything to do with denying Palm a seat at the table to which they’re not entitled. Let the Pre use the old iTunes API, if possible, as others have, but not appear as an iPod. I don’t see why Apple should stand idly by while a third party walks in and acts as an equal member of the iPod/iTunes system…

In the second article I mentioned another reason for which I felt Apple should take action:

In other words, forget the Pre, or even Palm. There’s an exposure for iTunes here that could have BlackBerrys, LGs, Nokias, etc. all passing themselves off as iPods. Again, the obvious question to me is that, having learned there’s this hole in iTunes, Apple should take steps to close it.

In both articles I said there would be many who complain about it if Apple put an end to this, and that’s already begun. But the reality is Apple didn’t build the iPod/iTunes environment for others to trick their way into using. Apple isn’t putting a stop to seamless syncing, Palm and other manufacturers are free to write that functionality for their own devices, just as Apple wrote it for their own. Or Palm could team up with a third-party to distribute something “official” (current Pre users may want to consider these solutions).

Just because Apple has a huge head start (it’s called foresight and vision) doesn’t mean potential competitiors get to use their work for free. The whole point of competition is to build something better, not trick your way into offering someone else’s work.

This is the first computer I ever operated.

You pretty much handled all the I/O and error correction yourself. It’s why I say that to truly appreciate an operating system you have to have been one.

Only Microsoft could offer five freakin’ versions of an office suite and consider it a “simplified” lineup.

And, what’s worse, they now have two versions with “professional” in the name. Really? As if the pro designation isn’t getting old enough as it is, now we have Professional, and Professional Plus.

But it doesn’t stop there, there’s two versions with “home” in the name as well. Home and Student, and Home and Business. Seriously? Could you possibly have any idea what products might come in these versions? Is it even clear how they tie-in to “home”?

Where do they get the marketing morons who name these things, and why isn’t there somebody in the room with a club when the name is suggested?

According to Microsoft, Bing has done well in its first month:

We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading.

I’m sure that, coming from Microsoft, some of this is hyperbole, but probably no more so than other companies “exaggerate”.

In my view, even if the exact figure may be disputed, I am not surprised that Bing has likely done well so far. I rather like it.

In fact, I’ve set it as my default search in Internet Explorer (though I hardly use IE) and  Firefox. Unfortunately, I can’t set it as my default in Safari, because Apple seems to think there are only two search engines: Google and Yahoo. Come on, Apple, let’s open that up a bit, OK?

This Twitter user says so.

…

The Zune Marketplace looks like it’s been formatted to match the new device pretty well.

The user’s Twitter profile says he’s a developer for the Xbox 360, which could easily explain why he has a device to play with. (Of course, it also explains why he’d say it’s “awesome”.)

I wonder if they’ve fixed the main menu item for “marketplace” so the “e” is no longer cut off.

Check out this video, shot with an iPhone 3GS. This guy was the 10th in line at the store, and filmed the queue as he walked out. Wow.

According to one source, the answer is…

Take this with a grain of salt. Even if not true, the RTM date has been rumored to be within a couple of weeks, so it’s probably not far off anyway.

[UPDATE:] From the Windows blog:

We are close, but have not yet signed off on Windows 7. When we RTM you will most certainly hear it here. As we’ve said all along, we will RTM Windows 7 when it’s ready. As previously stated, we expect Windows 7 to RTM in the 2nd half of July.

I got this screenshot off the iPhone:

Sadly, this simplified, easy-to-read EULA has been corrected. The web site has since gone back to normal.

I finally signed up for a Posterous account, and while I’ve only been playing with it a short time I’m impressed so far.

I can use the mobile WordPress app on my iPhone to post here, but it puts pictures at the end of the post, and you really don’t know what it’ll look like until you see the thing on your blog.

Posterous uses email for posting, which is very nice. You can’t make text links, but you can still have links in your post by pasting a URL in the email; Posterous will make it a link…

Paste a picture in the email and it sizes and hosts it for you, nothing to upload (paste multiple pictures together and it makes a cool gallery). In fact, you can paste a variety of files types; Posterous will just do the right thing (see this FAQ for details). I posted an iPhone video and it works great. And, posted videos play great on the iPhone.

Today I posted a mini-review of ColorSplash for the iPhone. The whole thing was done in the iPhone’s email app. I was able to paste the pictures exactly where I wanted them (thank you for easy copy and paste of pictures, iPhone OS 3.0!), and they showed up perfectly.

You might think you saw that same review on this blog. You did. Because another beautiful thing about Posterous is that it can post to other services as well as its own. I registered this blog, my Flickr account, and my Twitter account, and Posterous can post to them all at my command.

I can use one email address to hit all my registered services (Flickr gets photo articles added to your photo stream, Twitter gets a tweet with the article title and a shortened URL). Or I can use an email address that posts to Posterous only, and then in Posterous I can post to the other services with just a click, which is what I did with the ColorSplash review.

There are email addresses you can use to post to the individual services, or any combination of them. I’ve created contacts in address book for “Posterous Only”, “Posterous Flickr”, “Posterous Everything”, etc. to make this easy.

You want comments on the blog? They’re included. An RSS feed? Yep, it’s there, too. Tags? No problem: In the email subject they go at the end like this, without quotes: ((tag: tag1, tag2, etc…))

Please check out thesmallwave’s posterous. You’ll see I’ve even been playing around with Rich Text email formatting. Heck you may as well subscribe to my feed as long as you’re there.

I plan to use Posterous for snapshots and other types of posts that may not “fit ” into this site very well. In addition, if I want to post to this site on the road I might use Posterous email instead of the WordPresss mobile app because it seems so much easier to do via email (and WordPress’ email posting is much weaker).

[UPDATE:] See how my daughter also got on the ColorSplash bandwagon, using an original first-generation iPhone, here.

I’ve been playing a bit with this app on the iPhone, and think it’s simple, easy, fun, and makes the iPhone pictures look better.

While the iPhone’s camera is pretty good as these things go, its pictures can be made more dramatic via this app. I tend to think of its colorization as the equivalent of using bold or italics in text. It draws the user’s eyes to what you want to emphasize:

In fact, it’s even useful for photos taken with other cameras that you’ve transferred to your iPhone, like this:

It’s brilliantly designed (the brush is your finger; since it can’t change size you make the picture itself larger or smaller), very well documented with help videos, and just works.

If you use the iPhone’s camera and share photos, you should look into this app. http://www.juxtaposer.info/ColorSplash.html

Posted via email from thesmallwave’s posterous

This is a test from the iPhone to Posterous only.

It’s my first post here, and I’m adding a picture to see how it works.

I like the idea of using Posterous and email to simplify blogging, and will expand the service to update my main blog  – http://thesmallwave.com — if it works out.

Posted via email from thesmallwave’s posterous

So there’s a new OS that’s based on the web, relies primarily on a web browser, and whose native apps are web apps. Old news, you say? We already know about Palm’s WebOS. No, I don’t mean that one. This one will primarily target netbooks. Still old news, you say, because we know a modified Android is coming to netbooks soon. No, I don’t mean that, either. I’m speaking of a Linux kernel with a modern web browser. Way old news, you say, since Linux distros and Firefox were available on netbooks even before Windows. No, no, I don’t mean that, either…

Read the rest of this article on the Apple Blog >>