In the letter the company is told that they must change the name of one of there most popular applications iPodRip and also remove the iPod image from another of their application’s logo.

iRip (formally iPodRip) is an application that allows the user to copy and transfer your songs from iPod™ & iPhone™ to your computer. iRip has been available since 2003 and has had over 5 million downloads.

The Co-owner of The Little App Factory decided to send Mr. Jobs an email addressing the request. Below is that email as well as the response.

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

Surprisingly enough, John received a response to his email from Steve Jobs himself. Below is the response… sent from Jobs’ iPhone none the less!

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

A short and pointed reply… I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was because he responded from his iPhone.

Check out the full story my CruchGear.

I’m not sure what I think about this yet but, I do think it could help clean up the App Store a bit. Instead of developers creating a free lite version of their app, they could just make the application free with an in-app purchase to buy the full game thus eliminating the need for free lite versions of applications.

Below is Apple’s memo.

In App Purchase is being rapidly adopted by developers in their paid apps. Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.

You can also simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.

Visit the App Store Resource Center for more details about how you can add In App Purchases to your free apps.

You can check out the new page HERE.

Eight service packages ranging in price from 126 yuan (about $18) to 886 yuan (about $130) per month will be available to Unicom’s 141 million subscribers from a pool of 700 million cellphone toting Chinese. How much will it cost? 5,000 yuan or a steep $733 green retail. Subsidies of about 893 yuan (about $131) to 4,253 yuan (about $623) will be offered for those signing to long-term plans on Unicom’s fledgling 3G network.

Original post HERE.

Q. You put a camcorder on the iPod Nano. Why not on the iPod Touch?
A. Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

Q. How come the Nano can now record video, but can’t take stills?
A. The sensors for doing video are fairly thin. The sensors for doing a still camera, at much higher pixel resolution — and we’d really like to have autofocus — they are just way too thick to ever fit inside the Nano.

You can view the full interview HERE.

• Top Gun
• Real Racing
• Monster Trucks Nitro
• 3D Rollercoaster Rush
• Touch Hockey: FS5
• Homerun Battle 3D
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour by EA Sports
• Finger Foos
• Slope Rider
• A tiny second of a game… I can’t tell what it was!
• 2XL Supercross

Watch the ad on Apple’s website HERE.