Month: November 2008

Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday is upon us, so it is time to starting thinking about the prefect present for the lawyer in your life –perhaps even yourself.  Attorney Reid Trautz runs the Reid My Blog! website and recently unveiled the 2008 edition of his annual Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers.  There are lots of fun ideas in here if you are looking to go beyond the standard gifts like a tie, but what caught my attention is that, for the second year in a row, the iPhone makes the list.  He explains:

Faithful readers will recognize the iPhone is a
repeat in The Guide this year. Thanks to my dear wife who read the 2007 Guide,
I received my iPhone for Christmas and have never looked back. This terrific
tech tool may seem like a toy because it is so fun to use, but it is built for
serious business. With Outlook Exchange integration and a growing plethora of
useful web applications, this is the smartphone to have, hands down!

[UPDATE 12/15/08:  The website Patent Baristas also has a list of “Best Gifts for Patent Attorneys” with the iPhone at the top of its list.]

I can’t agree more.  The original version of the iPhone would not have made my 2007 list for any lawyer in a Microsoft Exchange environment, but the 2.0 software and 3G version of the iPhone released earlier this year make the iPhone an easy pick for the lawyer in your life, especially if he or she likes gadgets.

Until recently, it was hard to give an iPhone 3G as a gift.  You can’t buy an actual iPhone without setting up service, transferring the phone number from the prior phone, etc. which eliminates the element of surprise.  But Apple just fixed that problem by releasing the new iPhone 3G Gift Card.  You can buy it either online or in a retail Apple Store, and the amount can be for anything from $25 to $2,500.  Umm, $2,500?  Well you see, it is just a normal gift card that can be used for anything at the Apple Store, but when you put $200 or $300 on it, your lucky recipient can afford an 8GB or 16GB phone.  (I have the 16GB model myself, but unless you have a ton of music and video that you want to keep on the iPhone, the 8GB is perfect for most lawyers’ needs — unless you really want the white model, which only comes in 16GB.)

And if the lawyer in your life already has an iPhone?  Give them an iTunes gift card to let them fill it up with apps, music and videos.

Happy Holidays!

There are a lot of companies out there trying to come out with a smartphone that is better than the iPhone, and it would seem that if anyone can do it, it is R.I.M. with its impressive Blackberry.  E-mail on a Blackberry with a physical keyboard is great, and in my opinion currently a little better than the iPhone, although Apple adds new features to the iPhone every few months and is surely working on improving e-mail. 

R.I.M.’s answer to the iPhone is the Blackberry Storm, the first Blackberry with a large touchscreen and no keyboard. I haven’t had a chance to try one yet myself, but [UPDATE: see below.]  David Pogue, the personal technology columnist for the New York Times, thinks that it is a turkey — and not the delicious kind that those of us in the U.S. are enjoying today.  His review is an entertaining read, as long as you don’t work for R.I.M.  For example:

In short, trying to navigate this thing isn’t just an exercise in frustration — it’s a marathon of frustration.  I haven’t found a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both.  And that’s before they discovered that the Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi. … How did this thing ever reach the market?  Was everyone involved just too terrified to pull the emergency brake on this train?

The folks over at the grand-daddy of all gadget sites, Engadget, were similarly unimpressed in their extensive review:

[I]t’s not as easy, enjoyable, or consistent to use as the iPhone, and
the one place where everyone is sure they have an upper hand — that
wow-inducing clickable screen — just isn’t all that great. For casual
users, the learning curve and complexity of this phone will feel like
an instant turn off, and for power users, the lack of a decent typing
option and considerable lagginess in software will give them pause. RIM
tried to strike some middle ground between form and function, and
unfortunately came up short on both.

I am glad that R.I.M. is trying to innovate and take on the iPhone.  The competition can only serve to make all smartphones better.  And it seems that another, more traditional, Blackberry model, the Blackberry Bold, has a lot to offer any lawyer who is only interested in e-mail and who feels that a physical keyboard is necessary.  But given these initial reviews, the Blackberry Storm doesn’t appear to measure up to the iPhone.

UPDATE 11/27/08:  I had the chance to try out a Blackberry Storm just a few hours after I published the above post, and I have to say that I agree with the above two reviews.  The main thing that I wanted to try was e-mail because that is where a Blackberry should excel.  But typing on a Storm is a disaster.  When your finger touches a key, the key lights up and you think that you have typed the letter, but no — you need to also click down to type.  Well then what is the point of lighting up the key?  And pressing down on the screen to click feels both unnatural and unpleasant, like a button on a very cheap plastic mouse.  It also slows down typing substantially.  Unlike the iPhone where scrolling is very fluid, scrolling on the Storm is jerky.  Beyond e-mail, I tried out the web browser and some of the other applications, and all of them seem to require a few more taps and clicks that seems necessary.  Can a user get used to the quirks over time?  Perhaps, but the Storm stands in sharp contrast to the iPhone, which is intuitive and natural to use from the outset.  My advice for those lawyers who don’t want to or for some reason can’t use an iPhone is to get a more traditional Blackberry with a physical keyboard.

UPDATE 12/4/08:  Click here for an interesting follow up to David Pogue’s New York Times review of the Blackberry Storm.

Justice Hugo Black, known for his literal reading of the U.S. Constitution, used to always keep a well-worn copy in his pocket so that he could take it out and quote from it.  He served on the Supreme Court from 1937 until he died in 1971, so he missed even the early days of the personal computer revolution.  But were he alive today, perhaps he would trade in his paper copy for an iPhone loaded with the Constitution, a free application from Clint Bagwell Consulting. 

All of your favorites are here.  You can sing along to “We the people … in order to form a more perfect union” and wonder why the Schoolhouse Rock version of the Preamble omits the phrase “of the United States.”  You can read the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, which are truly as timely today as they were in 1789 and 1868.  You can read the Eighteenth Amendment’s prohibition of intoxicating liquors and then toast the Twenty-First Amendment’s repeal of prohibition. 

This application is simple, and frankly that is a good thing.  The main page is just a table of contents and you tap to read the full text of a section.  And each section includes notes including, for example, the dates of ratification of each of the amendments.  The application is quick and easy to use.

At the risk of fueling the debate over whether the right to privacy is in there, I do wish that the application had a search function, but otherwise this application is great.  It is free, it takes up virtually no space on your iPhone, and if you are a lawyer — or, for that matter, just a good citizen — you really have no excuse not to download it.

Click this button to download Constitution for iPhone and iPod Touch from the iTunes Store.

   

And finally, because I couldn’t resist, the Schoolhouse Rock video for the Preamble:

Here is a useful tip if you are planning to travel overseas for work or pleasure.  The iPhone’s built-in Stocks application can, of course, be used to track stocks.  But you can also use the application to track currency conversation rates.

In the Stocks application, type on the info button in the bottom right corner, then on the next
screen tap the + in the top left corner.  A search field will come up, and instead of entering a stock symbol in that field, type usdeur=x and then click
the Search button at the bottom right of the screen (or just wait a few seconds).  You will see an
entry come up called USD to EUR, as shown in the below picture.  Tap that entry to add it to
your list of Stocks.  Now, the Stock application will always show you
how many Euros you can get for $1, including a chart to see how the
exchange rates have changed over time (up to the past two years).  I see, for example, that just a few months ago I would get .62 Euros for my dollar, but it has recently gone as high as .80 Euros per dollar and is currently at .78.

You
can do the same thing with other currencies.  For example, usdrub=x
will give you the U.S. dollar to Russian Ruble exchange rate.  Here are a few examples of the three letter abbreviations that you can use:

• USD – US Dollar
• EUR – Euro
• GBP – UK Pound
• JPY – Japanese Yen
• CAD – Canadian Dollar
• AUD – Australian Dollar
• CHF – Swiss Franc

To see a list of all 154 currencies that can be converted — something I also refer to as a list of a whole bunch of currency that I didn’t even know existed — click on the “Continue Reading” link below.  And thanks to Mac OS X Hints for an old post that brought this to my attention.

   

Read more

The iPhone has many hidden (or, at least, not so obvious) shortcuts that can make the iPhone much easier and faster to use.  For example, as noted in my last post, the latest iPhone software update adds the feature to press the Home button to return to the first page of your Home screen.  Here are some other shortcuts that I use all the time.  [UPDATE 12/12/08:  Click here for a more recent post with even more shortcuts.]

1. Comma shortcut.  When you are typing and want to quickly add a comma, press and hold the 123 button and then without lifting your finger, slide your finger over to the comma and then release.  After doing so you will have a comma and will be back in the letter mode and can keep typing your sentence.  You can also use this trick to get a period, although if you are at the end of a sentence the faster way to get a period is to tap the space bar twice.  In fact, the hold 123 and slide method can be used for any symbol, such as the question mark or the parenthesis, although it is a little easier for those keys closer to the 123 key. 
2. Scroll to top.  In Safari and many other applications, you can very quickly scroll back up to the top of the screen by taping on the status bar at the top of the screen (where the time is displayed).  This is useful not only because you can start reading the top of a page, but also because many applications put useful fields at the top of the page, such as the address and search field in Safari or the search field in Contacts.
3. Domain resolution.  When you are typing an address in Safari, you don’t need to type the “www.” part or the “.com” part.  For example, if you go to the URL field and just type iphonejd Safari will automatically change it to www.iphonejd.com and take you to this website.
4. 
   
   Reset.  If something seems to be wrong with your iPhone, you can reset it to start fresh.  To do so, hold down both the Home button and the sleep/wake button (the one at the top) for about 10 seconds. You can also force quit just a specific application that you are using by holding down the Home button for about 6 seconds or so.
5. Hold on.  When you are using the keyboard, you can often hold down a key for a few seconds to see more options.  For example, when you are in Safari and typing a URL, the .com button at the bottom allows you to easily enter .com, but if you hold down the .com button for about two seconds you will see other options pop up (.org, .edu, .net, etc.).  Or if you are typing an e-mail and you want to add an accent to a letter you can just hold down the letter for two seconds.  Hold down the E key for a few seconds and you can enter an é. If you are typing an e-mail address in the TO field of an e-mail, you can hold down the period for two seconds to see a pop up menu that lets you quickly add .com, .org, .net, .edu, etc.
6. Swipe to delete.  The fastest way to delete a single e-mail when you are looking at a list of e-mails is to swipe your finger from left to right across the e-mail, as if you are crossing out an item on a list.  That will cause a red Delete button to appear so that you can confirm that you want to delete.  If you want to delete a bunch of messages, then the fastest way is to tap the Edit button and tap the circles next to the left of each e-mail you want to delete and then tap the Delete button.
7. Tap the bottom corner.  As noted above, you can now quickly get back to your first Home screen by pressing the Home button.  Most people switch between screens by swiping across the screen to the left or the right.  Another way to do it, one that sometimes feels faster, is to tap once near the corner, just to the left or the right of the row of dots that indicate which screen you are on.
8. Contractions.  When you are typing an e-mail, the iPhone suggests some contractions automatically.  Type cant and the iPhone will suggest can’t.  (And of course, to accept a suggestion you just tap the space bar; to reject a suggestion you tap the x next to the suggested word.)  But if you type well the iPhone normally won’t suggest we’ll because, well, well is a word.  But for we’ll and many other words, if you type the last letter an extra time, the iPhone will then suggest the contraction for you.  Type welll and the iPhone will suggest we’ll. Type weree and the iPhone will suggest we’re.  In the past, I used the trick with I’ll and it’s, but now I find that when I type ill and its the iPhone automatically suggests the contraction without needing to add an extra key.  This happens because the iPhone learns your words as you type and adds them to the custom dictionary — which, by the way, you can always reset if necessary by going to Settings –> General –> Reset –> Reset Keyboard Dictionary.
9. Get a 3G signal.  Sometimes I see that blue E at the top telling me that my iPhone is using the slow Edge network when I know that I am in an area that has 3G.  A quick way to get your iPhone to lock in on a 3G signal is to turn on airplane mode for just a second and then turn airplane mode off.  Airplane mode is the first option when you tap Settings.
10. I’m sorry, your Honor!  We all know to flip the switch and put your iPhone in vibrate mode when you are in court, a deposition, etc., right?  But what if you forget and need to QUICKLY stop your iPhone from ringing before you get sanctioned?  Press the sleep/hold button at the top of your iPhone once and it will silence the ringer.  Press that button twice and it will both silence the ringer and send the call to voicemail — and hopefully you already had the New Voicemail alert sound turned off.  (Settings –> Sounds –> New Voicemail).

Hopefully some of these are new to you, and I would love to hear about your favorite tips and tricks.

Early this morning, Apple released iPhone Software Update 2.2.  There are some great new features in this update.  Some of my favorites include:

1. Street View added to Google Maps.  This will make it much easier to find places on the Map and figure out where you are when you are traveling.  Plus, the implementation is very slick.
   
2. Home button.  If you have a lot of pages of apps on your iPhone, when you are on, say, page 4 and want to go back to page 1, you can now just click the home button and it zooms you back.  This is much faster than swiping each screen, one at a time.
3. Podcasts.  Now you can download podcasts from the iPhone itself.  I have wanted this feature for a long time.  I won’t have to plug my iPhone in to my computer to get new podcasts to listen to.
4. Safari stability.  Safari sometimes crashes for me when I am using it, but this new update is supposed to reduce crashes.  We’ll see, but I’m hoping for the best.
5. Wide HTML e-mail formatting improved.  Some of the HTML formatted e-mails that I get are so wide that the text is too tiny to read in the Mail application.  Apple claims that this works better in this update, and while I haven’t received such an e-mail yet to try this out, this would be a very welcome improvement.

There are lots of other new features, plus the usual behind-the-scenes bug fixes.  This looks to be a great update.

UPDATE:  So far, the best description that I have found of all of the new features is this post on iLounge.  Another good one is this post on The iPhone Blog.

 

It astonishes me how many apps are available on the iPhone.  Just a year ago, the iPhone didn’t even support third party apps, and Apple was telling everyone to just make web pages formatted for the iPhone.  Now, even though the iPhone App Store has only been available for a few months, there are thousands of apps and the numerous iPhone commercials that Apple is running in prime time all feature not the iPhone itself, but third party apps.  It is tough to keep up with what is out there, and I will try to point out some of my favorites on this site.

To help you learn about available apps, Apple just recently unveiled a page on their website called “iPhone Your Life” that profiles different applications you might want to use when you are traveling, at home, getting things done, etc.  It is worth checking out.

The iPhone, Therefore, iBlog website recently came up with a list of 100 iPhone apps you have to try.  There are a lot of gems on that list, but there are also a lot of great programs omitted, which has caused the author, Scott Kleinberg, to promise that an update will be published soon.

I often find that there is a document that I want to keep with me to access later when I am away from my computer: on the road, at a deposition, in court, etc.  The iPhone does a nice job of displaying documents such as Microsoft Word files, Microsoft Excel and PDF files, but the iPhone doesn’t have any built-in ability to transfer such files from your computer to the iPhone.  There is an inelegant solution — you can send yourself an e-mail with the files attached and then access the e-mail from your iPhone — but as you get new e-mails, your e-mail with the files attached gets harder to find.

The current solution for me is the app DataCase.  It is a program that holds any kind of file that the iPhone can handle, and even allows you to create folders.  So I can create a folder for the Smith v. Jones case and then toss in PDF scans of court orders, important Word documents such as memoranda, a Word document containing the names of all of the counsel in the case and the court docket numbers, etc.   

Transferring a file to DataCase is very easy from a Mac:  you simply start
DataCase, then open up a window in the Finder and you will see your
iPhone automatically show up in the list on the left of the window.  There are a few more steps on a PC but it is still pretty straightforward:  when you start the app, the screen has information at the bottom on how to access your files using Windows.  You go to My Computer in the Start menu, then you type in the ftp information.  (For example, as shown in the sample screen to the left I would type “ftp://10.0.1.196:2121”)  The DataCase website has videos that walk you through every step of the process on a Mac or a PC.  When you try to access DataCase from your computer, your iPhone will first show an alert to confirm that it is okay to give this computer access, and then once you tap OK the computer is connected and can upload, download or delete files and create folders.

There are other programs out there that do the same thing, such as FileMagnet and Files, and you can click here to read a review of all three programs by Dan Moren of Macworld.  DataCase is my favorite of the three, but they all seem to be good programs.  If you don’t mind keeping your documents on the Internet (which limits your access to those times when you have a WiFi, 3G or Edge signal), you could also consider a website such as Google Docs (which has a very nicely formatted version of its website for the iPhone).  And there is another similar program coming soon that has my attention.  On my previous phone (a Treo 650) I used a program from DataViz called
Documents to Go to move files to and from my phone.  That program even allows you to
edit files, although in the many years I used that program I never once
found a need to do so on my Treo.  There is a teaser page on the DataViz website
announcing that Documents to Go is soon coming to the iPhone.  When it
does, I’ll certainly want to take a look at it and compare it to
DataCase.  (I’ve been a fan of DataViz’s products since I used their MacLinkPlus program when I was in college in the late 1980s to translate documents on a Mac from Word to WordPerfect and vice versa.)

DataCase has lots of other features, although I don’t really need to use them.  For example, you can add photos, audio and video if you want, although I prefer to use iTunes on my computer and the iPhone’s iPod and Photos apps to handle my audio visual needs.  You can also set up public folders and private folders in DataCase, although again that isn’t necessary for my needs.

Viewing documents on your iPhone certainly has its drawbacks.  The iPhone screen is nice, but I wouldn’t want to read a very long pleading on such a small screen.  There is currently no ability to search document contents, so you can’t quickly find that one paragraph in a brief that discusses a case.  But DataCase is still useful when you want to take a quick look at a document but don’t want to have to lug around the paper or your laptop.  And whenever I travel, I print my travel reservations to a PDF file and then toss that in DataCase so that I have easy access to my reservation numbers, addresses, etc. if I need them.

DataCase costs $6.99.  Click this button to download it from iTunes.

I have had the Google Mobile App on my iPhone since Day 1 because, well, we all love Google and it was free.  A winning combination.  But as I added more and more apps to my iPhone, I got to the point where I now have eight screens of applications … and over time, I pushed the Google app to the last page.  I never did understand what it was supposed to do that I couldn’t already do with Safari or Maps or my Address Book.  I kept it, but I never used it.

But now Google has updated the Google Mobile App to add voice recognition, and this app now sets the record for fastest move of an app from my last iPhone page to my first iPhone page.  In terms of usefulness — not to mention the “wow” factor — this app is truly amazing.  You simply tap the app to start it, hold the phone up to your face (without the need to press any additional buttons), say what you are searching for, and then watch as Google translates your speech to text and then does the search for you.  This video does a good job of showing how it works:

One of the things that I have always loved about my iPhone is that it makes it so easy for me to get information.  Google has now made it even faster and easier to do this — not to mention more fun.  This is an application that I will use often, and I suspect one that I will frequently show off when people ask me what an iPhone can do.

Click this button to download the Google Mobile App using iTunes.

My law firm uses PCs running Windows, but I am a Mac user at home.  I have lots of options for working at home on my Mac, but one of the best is to use a Citrix web portal to access a virtual Windows desktop managed by my firm that includes all of the key software that we use at my firm (such as Outlook and our document management system).  Thus, for the past few months I have been reading with interest all of the stories about Citrix developing an iPhone App called XenDesktop that will allow a user to access a law firm’s virtual desktop from an iPhone.  Examples:  this one from ZDNet and this one from InfoWorld.

Here is a YouTube video from a few months ago where someone from Citrix shows an early preview of the product:

And here is a video showing off what looks to be a more recent version:

I have a lot of questions about how this will work in practice, but it is exciting to see Citix working on this product and I hope it is released soon.  In the second article I cited above, the Vice President of Solutions Development at Citrix, Chris Fleck, is quoted as saying:  “We expect to have it sooner rather than later.”  I’ll mark my calendar.  [UPDATE on 12-12-08:  This article in Network World also discusses the upcoming product, and notes only that the product will be available in 2009.]