Apple and Cocoanetics Reach Licensing Agreement

CUPERTINO, California; VIENNA, Austria —April 1, 2011—Apple® and Cocoanetics.com are jointly announcing today that a licensing agreement has been reached that will allow Apple to distribute the highly acclaimed software components of Cocoanetics.com to registered iOS developers worldwide as sample code. Two specific components for displaying a calendar interface (DTCalendarView) and for displaying charts (DTChartView) will be merged with the upcoming iOS SDK 5.0.

“We wanted to make a joint announcement at WWDC this year, but since the information on this deal has already been leaked it is my pleasure to announce the details of this wonderful partnership.” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, then you know that you can definitely learn from Cocoanetics.”

Apple is also looking at merging the technology from Cocoanetics.com open source project NSAttributedString+HTML into iOS SDK 5.0, but due to the open source nature of the project there are licensing ramifications that need to be worked around. Lawyers of both companies are working to find a way to make the source code proprietary to Apple while exposing the API as native option to developers.

“The Mac always had this great way to make attributed strings from HTML and while iOS 3.2 brought CoreText to the mobile platform this was the missing link to enable developers to ditch UIWebView once and for all,” said Oliver Drobnik, CEO and chief developer at Cocoanetics.com.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

Cocoanetics.com blogs about topics that are of interest to iOS developers worldwide, produces high-quality software components, produces and publishes apps for the App Store and provides consulting and contracting services for clients worldwide. Fashion catalog publishers use Cocoanetics’ iCatalog technology to publish digital versions on iPad.

Press Contacts:
Bill Evans
Apple
bevans@apple.com
(408) 974-0610

Oliver Drobnik
Drobnik.com
oliver@drobnik.com
+43-699-10010110

UPDATE, April 2nd: APRIL FOOLS!

Thank you for all those congratulations that came in, I now also approved the comments that smelled a rat. I kept these on hold to not spoil the joke for everybody else.

I am especially flattered by those statements that tell me that people would actually think that something like this could be true. Those – for the most part – sound sincere which tells me that people generally trust in my opinion and the quality of my work. And hey, stranger things have happened.

The inspiration for this piece came when I had a look at Apple’s press release collection when I started to wonder what kind of April Fools joke Apple would be capable of. Did they every do something like this? I doubt it, since Apple is know for many things, but not their good humor. So I just took the WWDC press release as a template and modified it to achieve the above result.

I found it to be a great ride, April Fools jokes are often really stupid, but the good ones hold sufficient elements of truth to be believable. And more often than not you will also find something appealing in them. An element of “wouldn’t it be cool if …?”. This joke here “worked”, but for the most part only amongst a very select group of people: iOS developers who follow my works and thus have a basis to see the “grain of truth”. The general media seemed to ignore this, which might have been a good thing, since overexposure might have tipped the scale towards the sceptics and would probably have spoiled it for the believers.

So the real upside for this thought experiment is that for the most part people would not be envious of me and feel that I would deserve such incredible success. In the least this tells me that I must be doing SOMETHING right.

You shouldn’t feel bad or even “hang your head in shame”, because if you were fooled, then this means that you can definitely count yourself amongst my inner circle. I owe you a beer or what ever you’re having.

Categories: Apple