Last year Nokia aquired the Norwegian company ‘Trolltech’ in order to gain access to their very popular cross plattform framework ‘Qt’. Qt builds the foundation for the KDE desktop and has been able to gain a lot of very attractive developer features over the years. Just recently they added a strong graphical framework which comes in many ways very close to CoreAnimation (or rather the CALayer technology sans the animation features). One strong argument for Qt are the cross plattform possibilities. Qt works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and several mobile devices which makes it very, very interesting for developers toying with the idea of cross plattform development.

One severe problem has always been the restrictive Qt license. One could develop for free, as long as the resulting application was going to be released as open source. As soon as one would develop a commercial application, one had to buy a rather expensive (especially for indy developers) license.

Long story short: Nokia just released Qt under the LGPL license which means that one can build commercial applications using Qt, without having to buy said expensive licenses.
This would allow many a developer to start developing his new application cross plattform instead of focusing on just one plattform. All in all, this could result in a greater variety of new Mac OS X compatible applications, as the usage of Qt for a Windows application would automatically result in Mac and Linux versions as well.

TUAW has a small article mentioning at additional leakage and rumours hinting at a possible iPhone Nano. As I wrote just some days ago, I doubt this due to the fact that Steve won’t be at MacWorld Expo. There’s something I’d not thought about though. Maybe the rumours regarding Steve’s pancreatic cancer really are closer to the truth than we fear. So my take is, that if there’ll actually be an iPhone Nano, it could be considered as a solid point hinting at a worsened situation regarding Steve Jobs health.
A new Mac Mini, a new iMac, sure, that could be a Phillnote just as well – but the iPhone, Steve’s Wunderkind?

So, there’re new rumours regarding an alleged iPhone Nano. This time there’s even a picture illustrating the new device. I think that this is once again fake. For one, Apple just axed Steve’s speech at this MacWorld. If there really was an iPhone Nano, wouldn’t Steve Jobs want to disclose it to the public himself, instead of letting Phil Schiller do it?

Another doubt comes with the sole idea of a minimized version of the iPhone. A large deal of the iPhone experience comes from the App Store. These applications have been written for the specific display resolution of the current iPhone / iPod Touch hardware. A new device with a smaller screen wouldn’t be able to sufficiently run these applications. I highly doubt that Apple would want a differentiated device landscape, where every developer has to include countless special cases in his code to account for all the quirks of the different devices available (much like with web development). 

So, given that there’s not Steve Jobs at MacWorld, and that an iPhone Nano presumably wouldn’t be able to run App Store applications, I highly doubt the existence of an iPhone Nano. I hope I am wrong though, as a cheap iPhone would expand the App Store audience even further.

The Copyright Royalty Board is deliberating right now as to whether the royalties paid to music publishers and writers would be increased to 15 cent.

Currently, Apple pays 9 cent per song to the publishers.

Apple states that an increase in price for royalties will end iTunes’ profitability.

Apple threatens to close iTunes

Most big newspaper organizations have obituaries written in advance for almost every celebrity, whether or not that person is close to death. This is done so that if a celebrity does die unexpectedly, they can rush in, fill in a few details, and publish the obituary within minutes.

Of course, when people are involved, accidents do happen. Yesterday around 4:30PM EST, Bloomberg accidentally published their most recent obituary for Steve Jobs. Presumably, the obituary went live accidentally while the writer did touch-ups.

Steve Jobs, who had been battling pancreatic cancer over the past several years, is not dead yet.