Movies, created by French developer, Olivier Bernal, went live at the App Store on December 19. The app, retailing at $2.99, allows users to grab essential information on the latest box-office releases.

The icon for Movies clearly features a watermark from iStockphoto, a royalty free image library, implying that rather than purchase the master image, Bernal has pilfered the preview sample.

This particular iStockphoto license (including the ‘Electronic Items for Resale’ addendum) is available for 115 credits. At 95 cents per iStockphoto credit, this would be a one-off cost of $109.25. Bernal would therefore need to generate only 37 sales of Movies to cover the cost of the image license.

Achieving just 37 sales is hardly a difficult objective when you also consider that, in order to maximize the potential customer-base for his app, Bernal has created several iterations using the same icon, including Cinema and Cinema UK.

It seems that this may not be the first time Bernal has pilfered from iStockphoto. There are two more highly suspect app icons – TV Shows and Week Number of the Year. The TV Shows icon features a white diagonal line, quite possibly from an iStock Photo watermark. The latter of the pair, clearly uses an iStock Photo sample, titled Calendar – icon idea.

It’s not as immediately obvious as our prime suspect, but enlarging the app icon and then comparing it to the iStockphoto sample image, the original watermark is easily visible.

Sites such as iStockphoto provide a valuable service to organizations with limited design resources, allowing independent creatives to distribute royalty-free visual assets at reasonable rates. It’s therefore somewhat disappointing to see independent developers effectively stealing — surely they should understand the value of content generated by fellow independents?

Furthermore, setting aside development time and cost, distributing via the App Store is hardly prohibitive in terms of initial outlay: Apple charges a one-off fee to developers of $99. It seems that either saving a few bucks or just downright laziness on Bernal’s part led him to grab the sample imagery from iStockphoto.

The question is, now that Bernal has been called out on his immoral icon antics, what will his next move be? It’ll be most interesting to see how he handles the designers whose creations he has illicitly profited from; ideally, after a hasty apology, Bernal will be compensating them for their contribution to his App Store products.

Note that we’ve tried to reach Bernal for comment on the story but have yet to hear back. We assume he was too busy shoveling a mountain of coal from his stocking, stealing bonbons from children and kicking puppies.

UPDATE: We heard back from Mr. Bernal:

For [your] information, I bought the right to use the pictures this morning. You were right, at the beginning I first started with nothing and can’t afford to pay for the pictures, it’s perfectly normal to pay if I intend to continue to use it.

He says the updated, non-watermarked icons will be implemented with the next updates to the applications sometime in January.

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It’s likely you’ve heard mention of the Axiotron Modbook, the third party (and only) Apple tablet computing solution, but I like talking about it anyway. Axiotron, a small company operating out of El Segundo, California, won high acclaim for their Modbook, taking best in show at 2007′s Macworld convention.

The Modbook is a converted Macbook, equipped with a Wacom-penabled touchscreen display. It’s a drool-worthy piece of tech, especially for graphic designers who do a lot of field work. And now you can drool even more, because the Modbook now comes complete with Sketchbook Express 2009, an exclusive version of Autodesk’s graphics software.

If you work with Wacom tablets in any kind of graphic design/illustration capacity, then you’ve probably also heard of Sketchbook Pro, formerly of Alias, until it was acquired by Autodesk. Sketchbook Pro 2009 was released earlier this year, finally bringing Intel compatibility to the versatile graphics editing software. I’d previously been a huge fan of Sketchbook Pro, but switched to Corel Painter when the program wouldn’t work on my black MacBook. Getting Sketchbook Pro 2009 was like hooking up with an old friend after a lengthy absence. The Express edition that bundles with the Modbook features much of the functionality of the full version, but users are limited to three layers, whereas the full version supports unlimited stacking.

Currently, Axiotron only offers their service for pre-aluminum MacBooks (no MacBook Pros, either), but they’ve recently committed to supporting new models in the new year. You can get a Modbook either by ordering one directly from Axiotron, or by buying Modservice, which uses your existing MacBook for the conversion. Existing Modbook owners can pick up SketchBook Express free by clicking the download link on the application overview page.

Modbooks start at $2,199, while Modservice using your existing notebook starts at $1,299. Not a bad idea if you have oodles of cash lying around and you’ve just upgraded to a new MacBook and haven’t found a use for your last gen model.

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Welcome To Aqua

The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece. Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface, OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts working (mostly – hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.

Writer

Whether it be your latest manuscript, research paper or basic flyer Writer definitely has the tools you need to get the job done. Complex header/footer arrangements, full table of contents manipulation, floating frames and more make this a very sophisticated word & document processor.

I do a great deal of legal document markup and the new notes feature keeps OO 3.0 on track with Pages and Word:

I also especially liked the font preview option for the font menu:

The multi-page layout view mode makes it very easy to see if the visual flow of your document is to your liking:

And, it was refreshing to see a “preview” mode that wasn’t just a export-view to Preview.app:

However, this is also where my first beta bug reared its ugly head with a half-dup of the menubar:

Writer also has basic support for VBA macros, something which neither Pages nor Word 2008 can claim and a feature which came in extremely handy this past weekend for a document I absolutely needed to work with (I could have VMware’d or Boot Camp’d into XP, but OO 3.0 made it so I didn’t have to). That same document also had many form-fields which all worked flawlessly in Writer.

When saving my document, doing so in Microsoft Office compatibility mode produced documents that worked flawlessly on Word 2008 and Word 2003/2007 (on Windows). Importing Microsoft’s new XML-format documents also worked well, though mine aren’t complex by any stretch of the imagination.

Writer is a fine tool, but there are still multi-platform quirks, like the button rendering in some dialogs:

and a less-than Mac-like preferences system:

Calc

I’ll state up-front that I hate spreadsheets. I hate them mostly due to the fact that people use spreadsheet programs as page-layout tools rather then as number crunchers. Numbers understood this and makes no attempt to hide that it is first-and-foremost a way to make pretty, numerical pages. But, getting back to the topic at hand…

Calc is a clear mimic of Excel 2003 for Windows, complete with charting and “solving” capabilities (which the developers are quick to point out do not exist in Excel 2008). Not being a non-work spreadsheet geek (and, I can’t use work examples) I Googled for filetype:xls and pulled a pseudo-random document to work with (the one pictured above). You can see what that Excel document looks like in Excel 2008 just for comparison:

The formatting is pretty much identical and, as a result, I decided to extend my test by checking out Calc’s new charting capabilities:

and then saving in compatibility mode and re-opening in Excel 2008:

I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together, making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.

Impress & Draw

With Keynote I have little need for alternate presentation software, but Impress worked as well as previous versions and I did create and preview a quick presentation with no issues:

Similarly, while I have no real need for Draw, it was trivial to create basic line-art documents with this tool:

Database

While it may not have a catchy name like FileMaker (although one could argue that is equally as utilitarian a name) or Bento (I promised myself I would not take this review as an opportunity to trash Bento), OO 3.0′s “Database” application fills a void that exists in Microsoft Office on the Mac and that has been missing in general from the open source world.

The built-in field sets and templates in Database made it trivial to setup a quick recipe database with entry form. And, best of all, I just used the defaults. If I wanted to make it more attractive, I could have spent as much time as necessary crafting primary keys, adjusting field sizes, adding font labels and customizing each feature of the forms. It may be worth it just to keep OpenOffice.org 3.0 around just for the Database program.

The true power of Database comes with full integration into the OO 3.0 suite. I can use the recipe database (if I populate it) to have Writer make a nice recipe file (Database reports could do this as well). Database also allows for data export as well, so you are definitely not locked into the program.

Odds & Ends

Some features spread across the individual components and others were just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based on the spreadsheet tab names.

OO 3.0 also provides a decent number of templates to choose from when starting a new document, some of which aren’t obvious from the flashy “welcome” dialog or just casual interaction with the program (like the full XML document editor).

The help system is very robust and can assist you in pinpointing where to find the functionality you just know is there (like how to mimic Word’s “different first page” feature).

OO 3.0 provides no AppleScript dictionary, so scripters are once again relegated to GUI scripting and the UI – while integrated well with Aqua and with decent Universal Access support – is definitely showing its age. The beta outright crashed on me several times as well, but it confirmed the rock solid document recovery capabilities of the program.

I can say, honestly, that the final version of the software will take its rightful place in my Applications folder, if only to have the ability to deal with the occasional VBA-based document that comes my way and to make use of the Database program.

If you’ve tried OO 3.0 beta or are one of the developers for it, drop a note in the comments with your take on the software and any tips or advice on using the various components. Remember to submit bug reports if you do test the beta and find some quirks. You can also grab a slew of test cases which will cover more of the functionality than I have in this post.

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