The row between Google and Apple over the strict iPhone analytics information sharing policies, which Google and its AdMob subsidiary claim in favor of Apple's iAd, may face antitrust scrutiny. According to the Financial Times, US regulators are , though it's not yet clear if a formal investigation will happen.

Apple expressed concern about the information that third parties were gathering about its devices and users, and is implementing major changes to the iPhone Developer Agreement for iOS 4 to limit what information could be shared with third parties. Over concerns that the changes could eliminate all third-party advertisers form the platform, Apple to allow third-party advertisers not affiliated with a competing mobile platform.

AdMob founder Omar Hamoui called Apple's changes unfair, claiming that "the terms hurt both large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to make money." He further suggested that the changes "are bad for consumers as well," since many free apps are funded by ads.

The potential probe into Apple's actions comes after the Federal Trade Commission recently concluded an investigation into Google's acquisition of AdMob, which suggested that competition from Apple was an important factor in its decision . According to FT's sources, it's not clear if an investigation, if it happens, would fall under the purview of the FTC or the Department of Justice.

Apple is also facing possible antitrust scrutiny over its policy of discouraging music labels from , as well as changes to its developer agreement which and nonnative frameworks to write code for iOS apps. No formal investigations have yet begun over those issues.

In all three cases, whether or not Apple's actions are deemed worthy of a formal antitrust complaint hinges on whether the policies can be proven to harm consumers. "It has to affect consumers, not just rival suppliers," William Comaner, a University of California professor and former US Federal Trade Commission chief economist, told FT. In the case of the analytics policy, he said it's not certain that Apple is breaking any laws, especially since the policy doesn't single out Google, but Microsoft as well, since it also owns its own mobile ad firm.

Apple released the latest major version of its Web browser, Safari 5, . Along with several new features—one of them —the update was said to pack a number of performance improvements, including DNS pre-fetching and optimizations to Safari's Nitro JavaScript engine. "Safari continues to lead the pack in performance," Apple SVP of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, said in a statement. We decided to put those claims to the test, pitting Safari against leading browsers on both Mac OS X and Windows 7.

Included in our tests are a number of JavaScript benchmarks, including the WebKit team's , Google's , and Mozilla's . We also took a look at graphics acceleration performance using Microsoft's HTML5 "" speed demo. The tests were run on the latest stable versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on Mac OS X 10.6.3 running on a 3.0GHz, 8-core Mac Pro with 10GB RAM and two ATI Radeon 2600XT GPUs. The tests were also run on Windows 7 on a 2.67 GHz Core 2 Duo PC with 4 GB of RAM and an ATI 4830 GPU. On our Windows 7 rig we had a recent development build of Chrome (as opposed to the latest stable version), and we also ran the tests using IE8 and a developer preview of IE9.

When college student Logan Collins started work on his Mac OS X app , he did it out of his own need. Since then, the app has grown into a fairly popular application among students—popular enough that Collins won our for Best Student-created Mac OS X App.

Schoolhouse wasn't Collins' first foray into Objective-C and Cocoa; he has developed other Mac software, "but nothing I've officially released or anything," he told Ars this week at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. He created Schoolhouse because he found himself bouncing back and forth between iCal and writing notes on what needed to get done—and that project has morphed into an iTunes-like manager for tasks, exams, grades, and more.

Unlike many of the other apps we gave awards for, there is currently no iPhone version of Schoolhouse. "I would definitely love to do iPhone development, but my current schedule may not allow it," Collins said. His current schedule involves an impending internship at Apple, which may or may not influence the future of his own independent application. "I'd love to work at Apple post-college, so we'll see."

So if Collins isn't very iPhone- or iPad-focused right now, what is he doing at WWDC with its heavy emphasis on the iOS? "I'm just trying to get as broad a spectrum as I can. I'm getting a little bit of iPhone and iPad stuff, but the foundation—the frameworks—that carry across everything interest me," Collins said. 

As for the $1,000 prize that he received from iStockphoto as a result of our award, he said he plans to give back and show iStockphoto some support. "I love iStock—I use them all the time for my college classes," Collins said.

With the upcoming update to iOS 4 (née iPhone OS), Apple modified the developer agreement to eliminate collection of analytics information by third parties. The latest revision of those terms will allow some data to be shared, as long as the third party has Apple approval, but still blocks mobile advertising firms owned or affiliated with competing mobile operating systems——from getting such data. AdMob founder Omar Hamoui is , but we're not so sure that's the case.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the D8 conference the reasoning behind the changes: one, to help protect user privacy; and two, to keep information about Apple's unreleased products out of the hands of its competitors. Jobs singled out third-party analytics firm Flurry, which had very nearly just two days before Apple's official announcement. But he stated emphatically that the move was not about banning rivals from Apple's iAd service.

won our for Best Mac OS X User Experience, and for good reason. Despite development house Atebits recently being , developer Loren Brichter swore up and down that the popular Twitter client would not die. "It's not gonna die—I refuse to let it die. Everyone at Twitter loves the Mac version," Brichter told Ars at WWDC this week.

Tweetie for Mac has had somewhat of a tumultuous (recent) past—Brichter had promised a major 2.0 update to MacHeist users while in the process of sorting out the then-secret acquisition by Twitter. Many Mac users expressed distress at the news of the acquisition once it came out, as Tweetie has quickly become one of the most-loved Twitter clients on the Mac desktop. Although Tweetie 2.0 for Mac has been put off for a while thanks to the acquisition and the re-release of Tweetie for iPhone (now known as Twitter for iPhone), Brichter says he'll be back to working on Tweetie for Mac within weeks.

That, of course, isn't the only thing Brichter is working on. As many iPad users know, Tweetie/Twitter has yet to arrive on the iPad in native resolution, but Brichter says it's coming soon and, in fact, it's so great that he wishes he could share some of the iPad code back to the Mac. "The goal is to exceed the Twitter iPhone app in the iPad," he said. "I swear the reunification is coming between iPhone, Mac, and iPad."

As for which platform is his favorite, that's a hard question to answer. Brichter stated up front that Tweetie 2 and even Tweetie 3 will definitely show up for the Mac, as "the iPad isn't there yet... If I thought the Mac was dead, I would have stopped developing."

He did say, however, that that he looks forward to the day he can develop code on the iPad and ditch his Mac for creating software. "If you break the idea that we have to use software keyboards the traditional way, there's so much potential for insanely fast programming," Brichter said. "Think about keyboard buttons becoming whole variable names. You could become so efficient while programming!"

We asked Brichter about his thoughts on a potential from Apple, and he met the idea with a cautiously positive attitude. "I think that would be really sexy," Brichter told us. "But does it fix the fundamental problem that the Mac is too complicated for some users? I don't know."

It's impossible not to get a contact high just from talking to Panic's Cabel Sasser. Panic's won the Ars Design Award for Best New Mac OS X App this year, and if Sasser's enthusiasm is to be taken literally, the entire company is just exploding with excitement. 

We sat down to talk with Sasser at WWDC about Panic and its perspective on Mac development, as well as whether the company plans to dip its toes into the iPad pool in the future.

"We like the challenge of a big, meaty problem to solve," Sasser said of sticking to the Mac for the bulk of Panic's software. (Transmit is, of course, a wildly popular FTP client for the Mac. Panic also makes Coda for web development, and Unison for Usenet browsing.) 

He said that sales of Panic's Mac OS X apps have been great and the Mac seems to keep growing despite the industry's focus on mobile.  "People are still buying Macs," Sasser said. "The Mac is still definitely an active thing, although you wouldn't know it sometimes because all the fun and attention is elsewhere."

We have been making a big deal this week about the that we launched in lieu of any Mac recognition from Apple at WWDC, but that doesn't mean the are . Apple recognized a number of notable apps in the iPhone and iPad space this year based on "technical excellence, innovation, technology adoption, and quality."

The winners for the 2010 Apple Design awards were (with iTunes links):

We have to say that we agree with many of the winners. Articles and Brushes are both a favorite among many of us at Infinite Loop, and the demo I saw of Star Walk at the 2010 Macworld Expo was very impressive. Congratulations to all who developed such great apps for the various iOS devices. What do you think of the list of winners?

As Ars' Infinite Loop readers know, we for six categories of notable Mac OS X software this week. The winner of our Best Mac OS X App for Education category was by Mekentosj, and we sat down with (most of) the Papers team for a quick chat about their future on the Mac and where the mobile space is going.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Papers is largely targeted at the scientific and education community (read our for more details, as well as ). Our own science writers here at Ars are big fans of Papers, as are a number of their peers in the scientific community.

Mekentosj's Mark Bate and Charles Parnot—and Alex Griekspoor in spirit—told Ars that they plan to continue focusing on the Mac for as long as their target audience remains there, which they expect to be for quite a while. "The Mac side of Papers is still going strong," the team said. "Apple wants to focus on iOS, but there will still be space for the Mac. Our audience is scientists—it's a more professional kind of user who will likely use computers for a lot longer than the average consumer."

Parnot and Bate did say that the reason Alex didn't come to WWDC with the rest of the team was because of Apple's heavy focus on the iOS, but that the company believes the Mac and mobile space will come back together at some point. "There will be a middle ground between the Mac and iOS," said Parnot.

And, after all, despite the team's commitment to continuing development on Mac OS X, they're not doing too shabby on iOS. Not only does Mekentosj offer an iPhone version of Papers, there's also a popular version available for iPad. "The iPhone app was pretty successful," Parnot told Ars, "but the iPad app is huge. It's definitely more popular, as the iPad is a much better fit for reading scientific papers."

The team didn't want to make any serious announcements today, but did indicate that Papers 2 for the Mac is coming along well and would be available "soon."

There were two awkward moments yesterday at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference. A few sites have already made much of Steve Jobs' wireless networking difficulties during his demonstration. But the real awkward moment was when Jobs launched into his defense of Apple's app approval process, which was a kind of "take it or leave it" apologia that, for the most part, didn't answer any of the tough questions about why some apps get turned down. 

Jobs' point was to say, in effect, that those who want on Apple's mobile devices can embrace the open world of HTML 5 on the Web, and/or play by Apple's rules to get on the App Store. If you're a company looking for revenue, you've got two options: the big open Web, and the App Store, with its own mysterious brand of capriciousness (and a ton of money exchanging hands). 

Apple has announced that it will begin rolling out its iAd service on July 1, a little over one week after iOS 4 becomes available to the general public. The iOS 4 update allows developers to incorporate the service into their applications using the API that Apple offered in beta form in April. According to Apple, deals have already been inked with numerous major brands, including JCPenny, Nissan, Best Buy, and AT&T. The Cupertino company claims the deals are worth more than $60 million, which accounts for nearly 50 percent of the mobile ad expenditures for the second half of 2010 as predicted by JP Morgan earlier this year.

Paul Alexander, Senior Vice President of Communications for , was kind enough to sit down with us and discuss his company's participation in Apple’s mobile ad service. Alexander told Ars that the company was first approached about one month ago when Liberty Mutual appeared as an advertiser in Time’s iPad application. While Alexander wouldn’t offer financial details, he did tell us that Liberty Mutual is paying per click-through in iAd, but the length and size of the campaign was still being discussed.

, Liberty Mutual’s advertising firm, is currently working with Apple to develop the campaign. All parties involved had creative say in the final product; it's unclear as to whether Apple will veto advertisements it considers aesthetically unpleasing, or what guidelines Apple is dictating as far as content is concerned.

We asked whether or not the iOS 4.0 requirement for iAd was a concern, since the majority of the iPhone user base would be using something other than OS 4.0 for some period of time. Alexander told us that Apple’s past growth with iOS devices and adoption rates made it a nonfactor. Liberty Mutual was not made aware whether other insurance companies would be part of the original rollout, but there was no exclusivity deal with Apple, so it wasn’t much of a concern. Similarly there is no exclusivity deal in the other direction; the company is free to advertise through other firms, on Android, or any other mobile platform. 

The companies being featured in the pilot lend a sort of higher-end exclusivity to the service. Whether Apple will start signing up smaller companies with smaller advertising budgets remains to be seen, but if the company can continue to rake in big money, we’re not sure why it would bother.