Day: September 23, 2012

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From Ars Technica: Apple apes trademarked Swiss railway clock for iPad’s new Clock app

A comparison of Apple’s iPad clock to the SSB original.

Apple added a Clock app to the iPad in iOS 6, but the company may get into trouble for the visual look of the app’s analog-style clock face. According to Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, Apple’s designers copied the iconic—and trademarked—look of the Swiss Federal Railway (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, or SBB) clocks used in train stations all over Switzerland. And the SBB wants Apple to pay up.

This isn’t the first time Apple has used an iconic design for an iOS app. The original iOS calculator used a design that paid homage to the classic Braun ET44 calculator. Apple SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive is well-known as an unabashed fan of Braun designer Dieter Rams.

However, SBB noted that it has a copyright and trademark on the design of its railway station clocks, which have become an icon of both SBB and Switzerland itself. “We enjoy the fact that the Swiss railway clock is being used by Apple. It once again proves that it’s a real piece of design,” SBB spokesperson Christian Ginsig said. “This act, however, is an unauthorized use [of the clock’s design] by Apple.”

from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: Arctic melt bottoms out at new record low

This year’s melt (blue) has ended up well below 2007’s record (green).
NSIDC

Yesterday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that the Arctic melt season was probably over. This year’s melt had already set records back in August, so the only real question was just how low it would go. Assuming there’s not a downward fluctuation during the next couple of weeks, the answer is 3.41 million square kilometers, or about half of the typical low point observed from 1980-2000. That’s about 750,000 square kilometers below the previous low (set in 2007), an area roughly equivalent to that occupied by Texas.

In fact, as the NSIDC notes, every year since 2007 has seen unusually strong summer melts: “The six lowest seasonal minimum ice extents in the satellite record have all occurred in the last six years.” Although weather has undoubtably played a role in making this year’s melt unusually severe, the strong tendency toward record amounts of open water in the Arctic Ocean seems to lend credence to the ideas of Cornell professor Charles H. Greene, who has referred to recent trends as signs that we’ve entered what he called an “Arctic warm period.”

One of the surprising aspects of all of this is that it’s happening much faster than most climate models have predicted. Many of them had been indicating the ice would be relatively stable for most of the current century.

from Ars Technica