What a week! First, indie App Store developers get , then Mac users get attacked by the Mac Defender malware,  Mac straw men get attacked by ZDNet and PCWorld! And as if that weren't enough, today's . Phew! The Macalope's going to need a nap after all this Apocalypse is over.

The big story earlier this week revolved around several independent app developers who from Lodsys, a company who claimed that the use of in-app purchasing violated its patent.

The Macalope read much of ( an hour of his life he won't get back) and, to his admittedly untrained and very, very bored eye, it appears to describe a system for manufacturers to get feedback from users on the usability of embedded software.

If that doesn't sound like "in-app purchases" to you, well, you're not alone. One of the diagrams is even of a fax machine. Which, when you think about it, is charmingly naive. As if fax-machine, printer, and copy-machine manufacturers care about usability!