On Friday May 18th, Apple filed a motion for a U.S. preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. This follows a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Northern District of California), siding with Apple on the question of whether Samsung is in violation of an iPad-related design patent (U.S. Patent No. D504,889). According to Foss Patents, the source of this story, the request could be valid and is likely to be upheld.

Samsung has until May 25th at high noon to respond. (OK not really…about the high noon thing).

What does it mean though? Will the Galaxy Tab 10.1 disappear from U.S. shores if Apple emerges victoriously with their injunction?

Not necessarily.

First of all, let’s remember the sheer scale of Samsung. They have the legal and financial fortitude to at least see this thing all the way through.

Secondly, a valid ruling doesn’t spell the end of the line, but more likely a technical redesign. However this could definitely affect revenues because of necessary manufacturing changes but it doesn’t mean a Coup De Grace on the line.

Foss paints the picture as more of an embarrassment for Samsung.

[via Foss Patents]

While the iPhone ‘sans cover’ feels much better in your hand, it’s not worth getting a few scratches on the back of your sleek phone. Rather than buy a standard case that looks the same as everyone else’s, with CaseApp, a free download in the iTunes App Store, you can design your own personalized cover, in a matter of minutes.

The app is the brainchild of Dropico Mobile, the Israeli app developers behind Facebook Photo Importer (reviewed here) and Google+ Photo Importer (reviewed here).

The entire process takes place on your phone, from customization to ordering. CaseApp makes it easy to choose any photo on your phone, and preview the case, either using the photo as the entire case, or incorporated into a set of over 20 pre-designed themes. Our personal favourite has to be the one that looks like an old-school Nintendo Gameboy.

Pinch, zoom and move the image around until you’ve got it exactly the way you want, and you can then preview the case in either 2D or 3D. The app will let you know if the image isn’t large enough to use.

The case, which is made of thick coated plastic, will set you back about $30, plus shipping and handling. Thanks to Dropico Mobile, The Next Web readers can take advantage of a special offer available for the next few days. Use the promo code caseapptnw30 when checking out, and you’ll get yourself a 30% discount on your buy, from today until May 25th. Shipping takes about 3 to 5 days.

CaseApp makes it easy for iPhone users to add a personal touch to their phones, so rather than hunt around for the perfect case – why not just design it yourself?

To see how the app works, check out the video below:

➤ CaseApp

My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows — turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy.

As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It’s a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on.

Perhaps the niftiest thing about the CordLite is how you actually fire up those lights — the dock connector’s aluminum body is entirely touch-sensitive, so the lights engage whenever someone goes to plug in the cable. Meanwhile, a pair of indicator lights run along the top of the dock connector so there’s never any confusion as to which side is up.

Pledging $25 locks you in for one of the first CordLites to roll off of the assembly line, so you’d best shell out the dough if you’re interested — after the Kickstarter campaign ends, the price will jump up to $35. Not a bad deal for night owls, especially considering that Apple’s own dock connector cable is nearly $20 without a single frill to go with it.

Though the CordLite is Apple-only for now, Android users shouldn’t feel too left out. The team also has a light-up micro-USB cable in the works, though I suspect we won’t be seeing those out in the wild for a little while yet.

If you’re interested in the upcoming Ashton Kutcher movie version of Steve Jobs’ life, it is set to begin filming in June. The first place that filming will take place is the original “Apple Garage”, as well as in the actual house in Los Altos where Jobs grew up.

The movie also has its own website: www.thejobsmovie.com.

Here is the film’s synopsis according to the site (which sports the tagline “Get inspired.”:

“JOBS” is the incredibly powerful and true story of the visionary who set out to change the world, and did.

The film chronicles Steve Jobs’ (ASHTON KUTCHER) transformation of character from the enthusiasm and self-discovery of his youth, to the personal demons that clouded his vision, and finally to the ultimate triumphs of his later life. Steve changed the way we see the world today through his relentless drive, passion, persistence, and the force of his will, and it is through these qualities that we draw inspiration from his life.

Dark, honest, and uncompromising, “JOBS” plunges into the depths of Steve Jobs’ character, uncovering his motivations, his gifts, his flaws, his failures, and his successes. An immensely private tale spanning four decades, “JOBS” is an intensely character-driven story that is as much a sweeping epic as it is a personal tale.

An rousing narrative of Steve Jobs’ days, “JOBS” pulls no punches and does not speculate, only telling the candid account as seen through his eyes, emotions, and ingenuity. The life of Steve Jobs.

The movie is set to be a dark depiction of the “30 most defining years of Steve Jobs’ life”, seen through the eyes of his friends and colleagues.

There is another movie in the works, based on Walter Isaacson popular biography. We reported yesterday that Sony has brought on Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as an advisor for the Aaron Sorkin written flick.

According to a report by AdAge, location-based check-in service foursquare is starting to get serious about making money. It has hired former Apple iAd exec Steven Rosenblatt as Revenue Chief, the first such role the company has had in its history.

Foursquare has shown that its serious about getting more companies to join its platform by way of claiming their venues with a new simple verification process that will run them $10. The company recently announced that the new feature is available to companies worldwide.

By bringing in Rosenblatt, the company is getting someone who has spent a long career in the mobile space. Before joining Apple, he was a VP of advertising sales for Quattro Wireless. Apple purchased Quattro in 2010, and Rosenblatt went on to help lead the iAd division.

The iAd product was introduced as a highly interactive ad unit only offered to a top tier of advertising partners.

With all of the talk today surrounding Facebook’s IPO, the question of how companies can advertise on mobile platforms effectively continues to gain steam. This appears to be the perfect hire at the exact right moment for foursquare.

Rosenblatt had this to say about the opportunity that foursquare has in helping companies reach all new audiences:

I think what we’re most excited about is helping create new products and building new tools for our merchant partners to be able to reach new customers.

He has a lot of work ahead of him, as does the company, but it looks like the team is on the right track.

Foursquare lost its head of Business Development, Tristan Walker, at the beginning of the month, so today’s announcement will help lighten that blow.

If foursquare is going to make serious money, it must figure out a way to reach its users without forcing them to take a “check-in” action, which it attempted to do with its “Radar” feature. Radar would alert you when you were close to venues and share deals with you, but as is the case with most location-aware apps, it’s an absolute battery drain.

Building a hackintosh—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware—used to require extremely restricted hardware choices and quite a bit of know-how. Now your options are vast and the installation process is fairly simple. With that in mind, here is our always up-to-date guide to building a hackintosh that will walk you through purchasing compatible parts, building your machine, and installing OS X all on your own. Thanks to a new process, it's even easier than before. More »

UPDATE: FreeAppADay CEO Joe Bayen has issued a statement to TNW to clarify its position on its relationship with Socialcam:

Socialcam used their own marketing channels to promote their app on the app store up until April 29th. At which point FreeAppADay gave them additional exposure.

During our initial conversation, which included verifications of his previous statement, Bayen had stated that without FreeAppADay, Socialcam wouldn’t have cracked the top 25. I’m told that the original statement had more to do with the overall hard work and legitimacy of its platform, and not its relationship with Socialcam specifically.
——

Last week I covered some of the tactics being used by social video sharing app Socialcam to climb the charts and engage its users with YouTube videos. In response to the YouTube issue, Socialcam moved quickly to clean up its act.

One side-story of the Socialcam saga is the fact that the company was also using a marketing service called FreeAppADay. Here’s the gist from my original post:

When we reported that Socialcam had hit the #1 free app position on Apple’s app store, I followed up quickly with the fact that the company was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay to drive itself up the charts. Whilst FreeAppADay is normally only used by paid apps going free for a day (SocialCam is free), this type of non-organic growth isn’t “illegal”, and Apple doesn’t seem to mind. Once you get into the top five on the charts, you start experiencing organic growth due to the curiosity of those watching the charts for new apps to download.

I pointed out then that the service wasn’t breaking any rules, it was just a curious part of the entire “Socialcam rise to glory” story. I was told by a source that Socialcam didn’t approach FreeAppADay to use its service, and after speaking to its CEO today, Joe Bayen, I was able to confirm that was indeed the case:

We always strive to showcase to our end-users the very best app in the app store and in this specific case SocialCam met all our criteria to be featured on FreeAppADay. Our junior sales representative did not grasp yet the various plans that we are offering to our developer partners and proceeded to offer our rev-share model to SocialCam which made absolutely no sense since the app was already free.

Bayen told me that after the gaffe the company had started the process of charging Socialcam, but then decided not to. The company makes it clear that “freebies” aren’t the norm for it, so it looks like Socialcam made out pretty good on the deal. Bayen went on a bit further to share how well the campaign went, which started at the end of April or early May:

If it was not for our efforts I can guarantee you that SocialCam would not have been able to crack the top 25.

Just win

Now that we can put all of these specifics to rest, the question “if you could potentially sell your company for a billion dollars. What lengths would you go to find success?” still stands.

In Socialcam’s case, it looks like it got very lucky in that it used a service that advertises itself as being able to help developers find their way up the App Store charts by promoting it to its users through its website, other apps, and more. Again, Apple doesn’t seem to mind, so at the end of the day it’s a job well done by FreeAppADay.

Now that we’re hopefully over the “Instagram for video” debate, I’m interested to see which players come up big with features and value for its users. Because that is how you win.

UPDATE 2: According to a source, along with actual app data, Socialcam reached the #2 spot on the app store on approximately April 24th, which would contest the FreeAppADay CEO’s claim that “If it was not for our efforts I can guarantee you that SocialCam would not have been able to crack the top 25.”:

In OS X Lion Apple decided to hide the Library folder where most of your configuration and cache files are located. This is fine for most people, but for those of us who like to tinker it's a bit annoying. Developer Daniel Jalkut wanted an automated way to automatically show the Library folder at login, so he put together a simple Applescript. More »

Sparrow has today launched version 1.6 of its Mac email client, finally providing support for POP email.

With the addition of POP email, you can now include your Hotmail and other non-IMAP email accounts on Sparrow, bringing them in alongside your existing Gmail accounts to create a ‘True’ Unified Inbox.

This means you ill be able to add favourites and empty spam in the main client, toggling between accounts when composing an email. If you were a fan of Sparrow but didn’t use it because you wanted to include your other personal accounts, you might want to revisit the app.

Sparrow 1.6 for Mac has also been updated to aid the refreshing of starred, unread and priority messages, hitting the Escape key will save an unsent Quick Reply as a draft, avatars are now more accurate and scrolling and display issues have been fixed.

You can see the complete changelog on the Sparrow Blog. If you’re interested in trying it out (or you want to update from an earlier version) hit the link below.

➤ Sparrow

It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2,280 downloads for paid apps.

For free apps, other competitive categories include ‘entertainment’ (6,700 daily downloads), ‘social networking’ (5,800), ‘lifestyle’ (3,900) and ‘music’ (3,900). Interestingly, in the paid app charts photography apps rank just behind games and entertainment apps. Still, it currently only takes about 270 daily downloads to rank in the photography top 25 for paid apps.

These numbers, of course, are always changing and this just represent a snapshot of what Distimo found when it compiled this data last month.

Update: We just talked to one source with a lot of experience in building mobile apps and who also currently runs a top App Store app. According to this source, Distimo’s numbers are too low and may just represent data from a relatively small number of apps. Keep that in mind as you read Distimo’s data.

Given the popularity of games on iOS, Distimo also took a closer look at the various gaming subcategories. Here, arcade and action games lead the pack:

This is the first time Distimo is releasing a detailed set of these numbers. It’s worth noting, though, that at the end of 2011, the company reported that it still took about 45,000 daily downloads to rank in the top 25 of most popular free apps. Since then, though, Apple has been working hard to shut down various scams and bots that automatically downloaded apps and allowed developers to rank in Apple’s charts without having a real user base (then, once you are in the top 25, of course, real users will automatically find you, of course). Judging from Distimo’s latest data, these efforts are starting to pay off and will hopefully make life a little bit easier for legit developers.