In the news

What a week!  It was great to learn about the iPhone 4, and now many of us are looking forward to next week when we can pre-order one and the following week when we can get one.  There wasn’t much iPhone-related news besides the iPhone 4 news I’ve been talking about all week, but here are the items I came across that might be of interest to you.

• When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4’s Retina display during the WWDC keynote this week, he explained it this way:  “It turns out that there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch that when you hold something around 10 or 12 inches away from your eyes is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels.  And so they’re close together when you get at this 300 pixels per inch threshold that all of a sudden things start to look like continuous curves.  Text looks like you’ve seen it in a fine printed book.  Unlike you’ve ever seen on an electronic display before.  And at 320 pixels per inch we are comfortably over that limit.  And it’s extraordinary.” Brian Chen, a former Macworld writer who now writes for Wired, wrote an article titled “iPhone 4 ‘Retina’ Display Claims Are False Marketing.”  That article cites an expert named Raymond Soneira who says:  “It is reasonably close to being a perfect display, but Steve pushed it a
  
  little too far.”  This prompted a rebuttal by Phil Plait, an astronomer who spent 10 years working on the Hubble Telescope.  Plait points out:  “As it happens, I know a thing or two about resolution as well, having
  
  spent a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble. Having looked
  
  this over, I disagree with the Wired headline strongly, and disagree
  
  (mildly in one case and strongly in another) with Soneira. Here’s why.”  Read the rest of his rebuttal here.  In just a few weeks, we’ll be able to decide for ourselves when we get an iPhone 4.
• Dallas divorce attorney Michelle May O’Neil assisted with the development of a do-it-yourself-divorce app.  Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News has the story.  (via Brett Burney)
• Who founded Apple Computer?  Easy question, right?  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the “two guys in a garage.”  Except that there was also a third guy in the very beginning, Ron Wayne.  He’d be a billionaire today if he had held on to his original Apple stock, but instead he just gets articles like this one (by Bruce Newman of the Mercury News) written about him from time to time.  It’s an interesting story.
• David Pogue of the New York Times writes about the costs of upgrading to an iPhone 4.  (By the way; I’d bet anything that Pogue already has an iPhone 4 in his hands right now and is working on a comprehensive review to be published in two weeks.  Apple frequently gives Pogue advance review units of its hardware.)
• Mikael Ricknäs of Macworld writes about a Mastercard app that lets you send or receive money.
• With the right software, an iPad could be a great tool for reading and editing PDF files.  Brian Malcom of the Young Lawyers Blog reviews iAnnotate PDF, an app that allows you to do just that.
• Michael Shear of The Washington Post has a great article on the growing interest in the iPad among senior staffers at the White House.
• Chad Garrett of TiPb has a good review of Documents to Go for iPad.
• Quickoffice is now available for the iPad.  I love the app on the iPhone, and I’m glad to see another good option available for the iPad.
• And finally, a few weeks ago, someone reportedly sent Steve Jobs an e-mail about Apple banning pornographic apps from the iPhone, prompting Jobs to reply that “folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.”  This in turn prompted the creating of the following spoof of this week’s Steve Jobs WWDC keynote address, a parody of a song from Avenue Q, one of my favorite Broadway shows in recent years.  BE WARNED — THIS IS LIKELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK so if you start blaring the audio from this YouTube clip through your office speakers and the managing partner of your law firm happens to walk by your open door, don’t say I didn’t warn you.