In case you missed it this weekend, daredevil skydiver ‘fearless’ Felix Baumgartner took a helium balloon up until the outer edges of the atmosphere where he then proceeded to jump off at a height of 128,100 feet, or 24 miles above Earth. During the course of his freefall, Baumgartner reached a speed of Mach 1.24, or 833.9 miles per hour, making him the first person to break the speed of sound barrier without an aircraft – notably though Baumgartner said he couldn’t tell on account of his pressurized suit which shielded him from noise, and of course, protected his lungs from exploding.

Below is a video of the event and above you see that Baumgartner brought along a trusty MacBook for the ride. The MacBook photo was taken in the Red Bull Stratos Mission Control before Baumgarnter ascended to the brink of space with a helium balloon that measured in at 5 stories tall.

Upon landing, the Austrian native told reporters, “Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are. When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about breaking records anymore, you do not think about gaining scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive.

The photo above was reportedly taken by Predrag Vuckovic and Limex Images.

via Limex and be sure to check out more photos and videos over at ABC News.

In the weeks since, the following photo began making the rounds. It’s clear that the idea behind this little comparison chart below is to try and convey that Apple itself has been known to borrow, if not downright steal, design elements from other products. Some have even pointed to charts such as the one below as evidence that Apple is a hypocritical corporate machine that sues others for being inspired by Apple designs while, at the same time, unabashedly stealing the design aesthetic of others.

So does this chart raise a good point? Is Apple wrong to go after Samsung when it’s seemingly been inspired by previous Braun designs?

Hell to the no, and here’s why.

There’s a world of difference between Apple looking to the past for design inspiration to creates products that are completely different from the inspirational pieces themselves and Samsung who flat out copied Apple’s design to churn out the same type of product.

Apple’s iPod was never in the market competing with Braun’s T3 pocket radio. And the same goes for all of the Bruan products shown above. In contrast, devices like the Samsung Galaxy S3 compete directly with Apple’s own products, the same products Samsung has clearly looked to for inspiration.

No one has ever put forth the argument that all of Apple’s designs are wholly unique and original. The work it did on the iPhone, however, was a completely new product with an innovative and wholly original user interface. Samsung copied that to an exhaustive degree, effectively piggybacking off of the hardwork put in by Apple in an effort to make a quick buck.

In short, Samsung relied on Apple to compete. Apple perhaps looked to decades old designs as inspirations to create entirely new products.

Now THIS is how you make an iPhone 5 parody. Eat your heart out, Conan. This is legit.

And the accent and delivery of Joe Bloggs is just so spot on and Ivy-esque.

“iPhone 5 is more comfortable to use and reduces scrolling fatigue while reading long documents.”

They set it to the wonderful song “My Back Pages” by one of Steve’s idols, Bob Dylan, and filled it with images from Jobs’ first three decades. You know some of them, but only some. And they include many ones of a happy, relaxed, even silly Steve Jobs that most of us never got to see.

Technologizer credits receiving the video to Craig Elliot, Apple employee 8128 who was reminded of its existance by former Apple employee Tom Hughes who helped design the Picasso inspired Mac logo from the 80′s.

Samsung’s copying of Apple’s iPhone runs deep, and recent evidence introduced at the Apple-Samsung trial reveals the breathtaking extent to which Samsung modeled their own smartphones after Apple own designs and features.

The evidence in question is a massively large document compiled by Samsung engineers which shows 126 separate ways the company’s Galaxy S smartphone can be improved. And how might it be improved? By looking at a slew of iPhone features and copying them.

All Things D reports:

Authored by Samsung’s product engineering team, the document evaluates everything from the home screen to the browser to the built-in apps on both devices. In each case, it comes up with a recommendation on what Samsung should do going forward and in most cases its answer is simple: Make it work more like the iPhone.

In short, the evaluation report makes the case that the Galaxy (identified here as the “S1″) would be better if it behaved more like the iPhone and featured a similar user interface.

Check out the presentation below. You’ll be astonished.

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This past Friday was no different when Scott Forstall – Apple’s Senior VP of iOS Software - took the stand to testify.

During his examination, Forstall spoke at length about the development of the original iPhone and dropped a number of extremely fascinating tidbits.

“In 2003, we had built all these great Macs and laptops and we started asking ourselves what comes next. One thought we settled on was a tablet. We settled pretty quickly if we could investigate doing that with a touchscreen, so we started investigating and building prototypes.”

And then the talk turned to cellphones, a conversation prompted by a number of Apple executives’ displeasure with their current devices.

“In 2004, I remember sitting with Steve and saying we all hated our cell phones,” Forstall recalled. “We were asking ourselves: could we use the technology we were using with touch and use that same technology for phone. Something that would fit in your pocket.”

Forstall continued:

I’ll never forget we took that tablet and built a small scrolling list. On the tablet, we were doing pinch and zoom. So we built a small list to scroll on contacts and then you could tap on it to call. We realized that a touchscreen that was the size that would fit in your pocket would be perfect for the phone. So in 2004, we switched over from developing a tablet to developing the iPhone.

And so the first plans to hatch the iPhone were born. Jobs then approached Forstall about designing a mobile OS for the device, giving him free reign to handle the software aspect of iPhone development, albeit with one major caveat – Forstall could take anyone from within Apple he wanted, but he was not to hire anyone from outside the company.

So armed with that constraint, Forstall went on to approach all the superstars he could find at Apple whereupon he would deliver a cryptic offer.

“That was quite a challenge,” Forstall explained. “What I did was find people who were true superstars of the company, amazing engineers, bring them into my office and say, ‘you’re a superstar in your current role. I have an other offer, another option. We’re starting a new project. It’s so secret I can’t tell you what that project is. I can’t tell you who you will work for. What I can tell you is if you chose this new role, you’re going to work hard, give up nights, work weekends for years.”

“We wanted to build a phone for ourselves, “Forstall continued. “A phone that we really love. A computer in your pocket. We wanted to bring out something great without anyone else finding out what we’re doing so they wouldn’t leak it.”

As far as working conditions go, Forstall described how the orginal iOS team worked in a locked down floor in a building on Apple’s campus, complete with security readers and video cameras to monitor activity. The iPhone project was given the code name Purple, so the building was henceforth called the “purple dorm.”

“People were there all the time. It smelled like pizza,” Forstall noted.

And highliting the secretive nature of their work, the team put up a poster of “Fight Club”, because you know, the first rule of Project Purple is that you don’t talk about Project Purple.

Interestingly enough, when asked if he was confident that is core iOS team could pull off what they were aiming for, Forstall said matter-of-factly, “not at all.”

And then we get to how they made the software, Scotty F said that a lot of the work was focused on the iPhone’s new multitouch screen and creating software capable of running on it.

Every single part of the design had to be rethought for touch. We started with a brand new user interface. That’s one. Second, we didn’t want to have a physical keyboard on here. If you look back to even 2005 when the engineering team started on this, smartphones all had a physical keyboard. The most popular one at the time was the BlackBerry. People thought we were crazy.

We wanted to give people the entire web, the entire Internet experience. And the Internet is designed for a much larger screen. When a web designer is building a site, they expect a [large] screen like this. We had a small screen. So we wanted to solve the problem of giving people the entire, Internet experience on this device.

As one would expect, Apple’s iOS guru said that creating and ultimately releasing what would become the iOS interface was an immense and very difficult, and the result of years of blood, sweat, and tears.

Also of note was Forstall’s testimony regarding the ‘163 patent – wherein Forstall is listed as an inventor - which covers “tap to format.”

The patent embodies technology that “makes it real simple for a user to move around, navigate around the web site by double tapping on what you see,”

When asked how he came up with the idea for tap to zoom, Forstall explained that he spent a lot of time using early prototypes and was constantly pinching in and out to get things to look “just right.” After a while it hit him that it would be much more efficient for the OS to take care of this automatically with a simple double tap.

“The team went back and worked really hard” to figure out how to do that..” Forstall said

Forstall was then asked if the feature was a significant one, to which Forstall answered, “ “Absolutely! I remember what it was like before, during development and after. It allowed me to browse the web much more fluently.”

“And we know from our users,” Forstall added, “that browsing the web is one of the things they do on their iPhone. It allows you to have a dramatically better experience.”

Forstall also said it was no coincidence that Apple created an advertisement highlighting the tap to zoom feature of the iPhone.

Some other interesting tidbits include the fact that Forstall has 10 people working with him on the executive side and an astounding 1000 people underneath him who report to him. But the craziness doesn’t end there, Fostall also has 1000 people working on iOS. All told, that’s 2000 people working on iOS under his helm.

As the trial continues on this week, we’ll report back on other fascinating revelations.

Now, thanks to the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Samsung, Network World has unearthed photos of a tablet mockup Apple had designed sometime between 2002 and 2004.

The mockup is referred to as the 035 mockup and was referenced by Jony Ive in his deposition with Samsung attorneys.

Asked if he’d seen the mockup before, Ive responds in the affirmative and adds:

My recollection of first seeing it is very hazy, but it was, I’m guessing, sometime between 2002 and 2004, some but it was I remember seeing this and perhaps models similar to this when we were first exploring tablet designs that ultimately became the iPad.

So interestingly enough, Apple’s work on a tablet form factor may date back as many as 10 years ago. And fascinatingly, despite some obvious size differences apparent below, the overall design isn’t all that different from the modern day iPad.

Here’s a front facing photo below, and you’ll note that there’s no home button.

Also, the thing was huge. Check out how thick it was.

And thanks to buzfeed, there are some color photo comparisons of this old mockup to an iPad 2.

Just about an hour ago, three-time NBA All Star point guard Deron Williams signed a 5-year, $98 million contract extension with the Brooklyn Nets. And believe it or not, he signed it on his iPad. I guess there really is an app for everything.

Notably, Williams, not one to shy away from social media, announced his intention to stay with the Nets via Twitter last week.

And below is the photo, linked to by Williams, showing him electronically signing on the dotted line.

And in the interest of full disclosure, Williams doesn’t appear to be an avowed Apple fan. Just a few days ago he updated his Twitter account using his Samsung Galaxy Attain 4G. Hmm, maybe he’s waiting for the iPhone 5. Though at the same time, there does appear to be an iPhone sitting on the table next to Deron in the photo above. I suppose with millions in the bank, having two smartphones ain’t no thang.

Still, two smartphones isn’t all that impressive when you consider that fellow Brooklyn Net DeShawn Stevenson has an ATM in his house that gets loaded up with $20,000 about once every two months. And if you ever find yourself chilling at Stevenson’s pad and happen to be in need of some cash, keep in mind that he charges a $4.50 transaction fee.

via The Intercom Blog