Apple kind of accused of stealing ideas for the iPhone

It should not be too surprising that, after the recent questionable rejection of Podcaster for the App Store and the ongoing dispute over the iPhone SDK NDA, suspicions have arisen regarding other actions by Apple. Noted iPhone developer, inventor, scientist, and all-around big brain Jonathan Zdziarski has expressed in his blog such a sentiment; that being that maybe Apple is a thief too.

Intelliscreen is a really great idea as a program: a form of system notification for the iPhone that shows all sorts of useful information on the "slide-to-unlock" screen. The issue is whose idea it really is, and at issue is the recent patent application by Apple for similar functionality. Zdziarski seems pretty sure, saying that it "doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is a clear rip-off of the commercial Intelliscreen product." Supporting his assertion, he notes that Intelliscreen was rejected for the App Store, and that the patent "could be detrimental to the original manufacturer of the software, who is actively selling it for Jailbroken iPhones." And that right there is the problem. The patent application dates back to June, 2007. The iPhone wasn't jailbroken until July. Does that then mean the authors of Intelliscreen are stealing from Apple instead?

Zdziarski also makes an offhand comment about the controversy over Mac OS X's Dashboard stealing from Konfabulator. Instead of suggesting that desktop accessories were something new to the Mac after 1984, Zdziarski would have been better off citing the story of Sherlock 3 and Watson. In 2001, Dan Wood created Watson as a means of extracting information from web services and displaying it in a user-friendly manner. In 2002, he was informed by Apple that they had plans to introduce strikingly-similar functionality into OS X. Apple may or may not have been developing Sherlock 3 before Watson—not, I bet—but there's little doubt the company has been contemplating system-wide notification for the iPhone for some time. It's also quite possible that Podcaster was rejected from the App Store not because iTunes duplicates that functionality—it does not—but because it will. This, of course, would not be fair (not that it matters). In developing software for the iPhone, for Apple, what matters is cruelly and hilariously made clear by Steve Jobs talking to Dan Woods about Watson.

"Here's how I see it," Jobs said — I'm loosely paraphrasing. "You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks."

I guess it takes a railroad engineer to understand this.