For those of you who are out of the loop, I’ll fill you. Several days ago, an anonymous source sent images to Engadget, featuring what was alleged to be the upcoming fourth generation iPhone.

Monday morning, Gizmodo took the story a lot further. They revealed to the world that they were in possession of the same unit from Engadget’s pictures. They wrote a thousand-plus word article covering every aspect of this alleged iPhone.

I’m still shocked at their gall.

When you take the story at face value, it all seems pretty to explain away. After all, Gizmodo is a news site competing in a market where whoever has the story first makes the most money. And I hope, for their sake, that they’re making a bundle off of this story. Because all of the money has the potential to disappear very easily.

In the article they released this morning, there was no direct mention of what they company went through to obtain the unit. Andy Ihnatko seems to have the best summary of what has thus far been revealed.

Step One: This phone was lost in a Redwood City bar;

Step Two: (nervous cough);

Step Three: They got it last week.

Despite the lack of transparency surrounding this particular interaction, Nick Denton confirmed to the New York Times that Gawker Media paid five thousand dollars for the unit.

According to all tellings of the story, the device was originally lost in a bar in Redwood City, California. Here’s an interesting fact: under California law, the finder of a lost item must alert the police and return the items to the rightful owner. Do you see what I’m getting at? Both Gizmodo and the anonymous finder say that the device was indeed found, not stolen.

However, it doesn’t make a difference in California. If the device was indeed found in a bar in Redwood City, then the finder did had the obligation to turn it over to the authorities. When he didn’t the “iPhone” effectively became stolen property. Which Gizmodo then bought. If this alleged iPhone is indeed the property of Apple then there could be some serious legal consequences for Gawker Media.

Legal issues aside, what the folks at Gizmodo did was simply unnecessary. This wasn’t a Woodward and Bernstein scenario. There was no real need for the information about this alleged iPhone to be exposed. There wasn’t any noble intent behind this story. All of Gizmodo’s actions were motivated by greed. When Gizmodo purchased the (illegally obtained) unit, the weren’t thinking of the lives that would be enriched by their story. They were thinking of the money that they could make off of a scoop like this.

But the story doesn’t end there. Only hours after the Gizmodo released the initial story, they published a second article. Rather than talking about the unit itself, or even discuss how the phone ended up in their hands, they chose the specifically target the Apple employee who left the phone in the bar.

Of course, there are scenarios in which this type of article would be appropriate. If this had been a story about a Visa employee who got drunk and leaked thousands of credit card numbers, perhaps this type of personal attack would be merited.

Unfortunately for Gizmodo, this is not the case. No one outside of Apple was hurt by this employee’s actions. There was no need for this second article to be published. The man is likely at one of the darkest points in his life. He makes one stupid mistake, probably losses his job, and then has his misery exploited so that a company can make a profit.

There is no excuse for this type of behaviour. They buy stolen property, they publish an unnecessary article, likely caused a man his job and proceeded to publicly humiliate him.

But hey, at least they want to give the phone back. So I guess that makes everything better.

Update:

Apple SVP and General Counsel Bruce Sewell sent a letter to Gizmodo requesting the return of the unit. Brian Lam (an editor at Gizmodo) responded with a message that included this quote:

Happy to have you pick this thing up. Was burning a hole in our pockets. Just so you know, we didn’t know this was stolen when we bought it.

Stolen. Not lost. Stolen. Interesting.

The central point of my setup is a Penryn MacBook. It’s the black one; a) Because it’s more powerful; and b) Because it looks pretty. That’s right, I paid extra for a fancy paint job and for the 2.4 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive. I’ve had the Mac for a little less then two months and have never once regretted the purchase.

When I’m working at my desk, I slap the ‘Book down on a Griffin Elevator stand. I love this thing because it props the Mac up to a level where it almost seems like a stand alone monitor. I’ve got an aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard and a wireless Mighty Mouse. These four items comprise the main area of my desk. At the time of writing, I don’t yet own an external display, although I hope to obtain an Apple Cinema Display some time in the relative future.

And of course, there’s the software. Roughly in order of affection, it starts with Scrivener. This is my de facto word processor for all things creative. There’s a long explanation why available here. Next, would be Blogo, the app I’m using to write this very post. Then we’ve got Things, my personal choice of GTD apps, I use a nightly build (a misnomer, since I only download it weekly) of Webkitfor browsing the Intertubez, Stanza for reading eBooks, NetNewsWire for RSS, and Pages andKeynote for school work. I’ve got Mail.app serving the obvious purpose, iTunes for listening to music and podcasts almost 24/7, Adium and iChat for IMing, and Coda for web work that I plan to do in the future.

This isn’t necessarily a part of my setup, but there’s a ton of stuff loaded into my pockets on a daily basis. First, is the 16GB iPod touch (the first gen, not the new one), which gets exclusive rights to the front left pocket. There’s a convenient hole in my favourite (Canadian English FTW) pair of jeans, which is great for storing my Uniball Signo 207. My wallet goes in the front right pocket, as well as my PocketMod and my EpiPen (google it). The change pocket stores my Mimobot Venison, which I won on Twitter. I’ve also got a pair of Apple In-Ear Headphones, which are either in my pocket or surgically implanted in my ear canal at all times.

That’s pretty much the bulk of it. Feel free to leave comments about your own setup, and I can assure that I’ll read them.

And to all of the sites other bloggers, why not write up your own setup? Make it an IMP meme.

Previous to then, all we would do was play educational games in Windows 98. You guys remember “Reader Rabbit”? Yeah, that was pretty much all that we did. But I digress. I remember the first thing we were instructed to do was navigate to the start menu and open WordPerfect 2000, that was the word processor that I used for the following 3 years.

In 2004, when i was in the 6th grade, my dad setup a computer for my sister and I to use. One of the programs running on this Dell machine was Word 2003. And compared to what I had been using before, this was a tool of the gods.  I mean, it had spell check. SPELL CHECK. As an eleven year old kid with terrible spelling, those little red line were truly amazing things.

I used Word 2003 for every document that I created (apart from school, where I was still stuck with WordPerfect) for the next 3 years.

Then again, in 2007, my sister and I got a new shared desktop. However, this machine was running something different. This machine was running Word 2007, as was the Acer notebook that i purchased a few months later. This marked another monumental moment in my computing life. The ribbon UI made everything seem so much prettier then any Windows application that I had used before. But even then, it was still cluttered, still to overcomplicated.

Now this is where the story gets good. On December 17th, 2008, I switched to the Mac. As part of this transition, I moved from MS Office to Apple’s iWork suite. Again, this was a beautiful transition. The interface in Pages was so simple and elegant. It completely blew my mind that a piece of writing software could look this good. But no matter how good Pages was, it still succumbed to the universal problem of word processors.

The problem with almost every word processor available on the internet is that they written to work the way that programmers think. The vast majority of modern (and ancient) word processors are designed to be completely linear. A new document starts of with a blank page, and simply adds more blank pages as you go along. This isn’t the way that writers think.

There is one word processor that I have discovered that does work the way that a writers brain does. This is Scrivener.

Say your working on a novel. When you create the document, you start off buy choosing a template, in this case the “Novel Standard Manuscript Format”.

Once you’ve started the manuscript, you can pound out different chapters in different sections using the iTunes style sidebar. And for those days when you just need to get the words out of you head and onto the “page”, there’s a handy fullscreen mode.

But by far, one of the most useful features of Scrivener is the Corkboard View.

Overall, Scrivener is probably, no, definitely the best word processor that I have ever used, and is a fantastic tool for writers of both fact and fiction.

(Image credit Joy of Tech)

Super Monkey Ball was actually the first iPhone app that I actually payed for, as well as the first app that I downloaded from the App Store on my iPod touch. I simply going to start off by saying that this game is well worth the 10 dollars.

When I first saw the demoes of this game, I have to admit that I was a little skeptical. This was mainly because I had played the jailbrake game Neverball just before this game was demoed. Neverball did not give me high hopes. The controls weren’t sensitive enough, and the physics were way off. But I digress. Super Monkey Ball happen to be the exact opposite of that. The game sported incredible graphics, superior control sensitivity, and an insanely great set of levels.

For those of you who haven’t played it , the basic premise of the game is guiding your sphere-encased monkey around a floating platform, collecting bananas a completing the stage by rolling through a glowing hoop.the game has give worlds for you to play through, each of which has ten levels. At the time of writing, I have indeed completed the game. I found the gameplay challenging, while incredibly enjoyable at the same time. The graphics are beautifully designed, and the levels are highly addictive.

The only downfall to the game is that it does not allow you to save your progress through the current level when you exit the game.

Overall, a great game, and a great first effort by SEGA and Other Ocean.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Davos, Switzerland. February 8, 1996

From these pictures, you can see how much of a difference the the curvature of the back makes. The un-recessed headphone jack is also very obvious. An althought the black plastic does look an little cheap. It is still overall, IMHO, an equally attractive phone.