News Roundup for December the 23rd

It looks like the latest iPhone Nano rumours are simply refusing to die (although it’s hard to blame people, since there’s little else to blog about this close to the holidays). This ‘concept’ photo shows the little fellow alongside his big 3G brother. Nice try, but by merely shrinking the regular iPhone all you’re going to get is reduced battery life at practically the same cost. And a choking hazard. Seriously. Have you seen some of the new iPhone owners?

In legal news, some hack for Information Week has decided to interpret Psystar’s latest defence as a claim that Apple failed to copyright Mac OS X. Putting aside the fact that copyright is one of those things which just automatically happen when you create something, given the appalling state of the actual document filed, Psystar’s lawyers’ holiday interns could actually mean anything from “Apple didn’t copy OS X to the installation DVD correctly” to “our clients PSYSTAR ignited the computing revolution when they launched the OpenComputer in 1983, so Apple copied us”.

Meanwhile, in the true Dickensian spirit of Christmas, blogger John Gruber, at his sanctimonious worst, has been tearing into technical author and iPhone applications developer Erica Sadun’s endorsement of the occasional use of private frameworks. It’ll be interesting to read Erica’s response to this in the comments over at Daring Fireball. (Sometimes I crack me up.)

I think we all need a little bit of cute to put us back in a festive mood. Here is a picture of a cute felt iPod Shuffle to calm everyone down. Ahh. Isn’t it lovely. And a choking hazard.

Now for a quick dash to the line with some App Store news. Video recording comes to the iPhone in the shape of 12seconds. Well, more or less. Okay, actually less. It basically allows you to stitch photos together into an uber-slideshow, add an audio track and upload the whole lot to their site. Which I suppose is a start, if somewhat quaintly Web 2.0. Meanwhile, Flickr client Exposure has reached version 1.5, added image upload capabilities, and changed its name to the way-cooler sounding Darkslide, which is totally a typical teenage thing to do. You can now find it hanging out in the App Mall here, at the limited-time bargain price of £2.39 ($3.99). Finally, just as it looked like Apple had let a little sanity back into the application review process, we get news that they’ve chosen to ban the book-app Knife Music by CNET journalist David Carnoy, not because the whole idea of standalone book-apps is stupid, but because it contains “objectionable content“. I await Gruber’s post justifying the decision. (It’s a little-known fact, and one which John is understandably reticent to discuss, that Apple actually developed the App Store accept/reject algorithm form the one he uses to decide which Daring Fireball subscribers get to receive their T-Shirts.)