NAB, world's largest broadcast media show, happens once in a year, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Organized by the National Association of Broadcasters, this is one of the events that any company involved in the media industry wouldn't like to miss, but NAB 2008 will miss a big name. Without any solid reason yet, Apple said they won't be present at this event.

Some previous reports claimed Apple may skip this year's largest event aimed at video professionals, and things became official on Thursday, when this became official - Apple's booth at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show in Vegas is MIA. The reason behind this remains a mistery, especially since Apple used NAB to release important products in the past, such as the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Being given the ever-increasing popularity that Apple has in the online world, their move may be, at least partially, justified. After all, NAB 2007 had 111k attendees and over 1,600 exhibitors, while Apple's spokesman Anuj Nayar said "The increasing popularity of Apple’s retail stores and Apple.com Web site enable us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways.". That's quite a difference, don't you think?

While Microsoft files patent suits against everything that moves in the software world (well, the FREE software world, that is...), Apple gets sued by others (not that Apple didn't do shameful things in the past, either...), and this time, it's about iTunes. What about iTunes? Well, it seems it's all about the Allowance function...

The ones that filed the suit are the guys from Restricted Spending Solutions, targeting the feature in iTunes which allows users to create accounts for automatic money transfers via a credit card to an account on iTunes. Restricted Spending Solutions also have a patent describing a method for allocating funds automatically in pre-defined accounts, and their patent gets too close to Apple's Allowance function and its methods...

The interesting part of this suit is that statistics presented in the file suggest Apple's control over 75 percent of the online video market and 83 percent of the online music market, as well as a market share exceeding 90 percent, when it comes to the HDD-based media player market.

Getting back to the trial, I am sure they'll sort things out, most probable off-court... but when this happens, we'll be there to give you all the info available!

There were plenty of discussions and rumors about iPhone's market share so far, as it always happens with innovative products that can either be a success, either a complete failure. Exactly this is the case now, with Apple setting the expectations bar to a pretty high level, level which may not be reached by the iPhone. Anyway, the good part is that most people love it, and considering its sales in the US, as well as the impact on the designs of other producer's mobile phones, the iPhone has been a success. Today, I even heard some interesting news, so there you have it...

According to some recent reports, Apple got the 3rd position in the global hardware market, during the 4th quarter of 2007, and the iPhone manage to grab no less than 28 percent of the smartphone market. This happenes in a world where the smart mobile market got really close to the 120 million units mark in the same year, 53 percent up compared to the previous year.

Things look really interesting, in my opinion, and now we only need to see how Apple's wonder-phone will manage to keep its ground and gain new territory in a market where new models arrive on a daily basis, and its innovative features are everyone's goal, when it comes to designing a new smart phone. Unfortunately, until we'll get to see the first reports for 2008's market status, a bit of time must pass...

Apple's iPhoto application has one excellent feature - with it, you can order Photobooks, calendars, postcards and prints from Apple, than go to the nearest post office and pick'em up when they arrive. This seems great, but for those located in Australia and New Zealand, it wasn't great at all, so far. Why? The answer is simple - the service wasn't available to them...so far, because after two years of waiting, Apple finally announced the availability of this service in that corner of the world, too!


In the last few years, Apple's customers from Australia and New Zealand had to use 3rd parties or find someone with a US billing and shipping address willing to help them, because local Apple stores weren't yet up to the task of providing this service. From now on, all they need is iLife '08, together with iPhoto's latest version, 7.1.2, and a few clicks. Obviously, nothing's free...so let's see what prices we have, shall we?

Individual prints start at $0.29, followed by postcards and greeting cards, priced between $1.99 and $2.69, while calendars and Picture Books go higher, being available for prices starting at $26.99, and $39.99, respectively. At last, postage prices range from $2.49 for less than 9 cards to $7.99, for large books.

To find out more about this topic, feel free to visit the official Apple iPhoto Print Products page, here.

I know that some people may say "Who is Linus Torvalds, after all?", trying to minimize the impact and importance of its declarations, but I must say they are going to be completely wrong. First of all, about 2% of the current Linux kernel code is written by himself, and considering the fact that hundreds, maybe even thousands of people are working on this, he's the most prolific kernel programmer at this time, and second, back in 2006, about 17% of the smartphones available worldwide were using Linux, and in 2008, there are more, for sure. Now, let's get to the topic and see what opinion has Linus about Leopard and Vista...

We all know that Leopard offers the highest customer satisfaction rate in the OS market at this time, but that doesn't mean Apple's operating system is perfect. In fact, just like Vista, Leopard uses an older file system, and that's not such an inspired option, according to Torvalds. "I don’t think they’re equally flawed—I think Leopard is a much better system, but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.", said the man that laid the foundation of the Linux OS as we know it today.

Well, it's interesting to notice that the declaration above was made from the programmer's point of view, but that's not all. To me, is a mistery how Linus Torvalds, the man who doesn't enjoy being a public person and saying anything about the competition, got to bash Microsoft and Apple to the wall. Here's what he said about the way Apple and Microsoft use new versions and updates as reasons to celebrate and do start some new marketing campaigns: "An operating system should be completely invisible. To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment … to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

These being said, we should wait and see if the big updates expected in this period are going to really improve Mac OS X and Vista as users expect, apart from being "causes for celebration and marketing"...