iPhone J.D.

TUAW: iPhone travel tips

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) recently added a post listing a few ways that your iPhone can come in handy when you are traveling. Click here to read it. They discuss using an iPhone as an electronic boarding pass (a topic I recently discussed), getting movies on your iPhone using Handbrake so that you have something to watch on the plane, using Google maps to get travel directions and public transportation information, etc.

I recently traveled to New York over the holidays and my iPhone was incredibly helpful and fun while traveling. I kept up with e-mail. I took a few pictures of interesting sights with the iPhone camera. I used the recently added public transportation information in the Maps app to figure out which New Jersey Transit trains to take to get to and from Newark airport. While I was riding a train, I used the Wikipanion app to quickly access information from Wikipedia (even with a slow Edge connection) and learn a lot of interesting historical facts about the route I was taking. I listened to music and podcasts and played a few games to pass the time on the plane (and I finally got far enough in the game to unlock all of the songs on Guitar Rock Tour, a fun Guitar Hero type game for the iPhone). I kept my three year old son entertained during down time at the airport with games like Preschool Pals and videos he likes on YouTube such as the Maurice Sendak classics Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. And my RichardSolo external battery was essential to keep my iPhone running from early in the morning when my travels started until 10pm when I landed in New Orleans.

I have traveled with various smartphones and PDAs for over 15 years, but the iPhone far surpasses any other device I have previously used. It is amazing to have something almost as powerful as a laptop that weighs practically nothing and slips into a pocket. The iPhone is a great travel companion.

$99 iPhone from AT&T

If you are willing to buy a refurbished phone -- which AT&T says is a previously owned phone that was returned during the 30 day trial period and has been tested -- AT&T will sell you an 8 GB iPhone for only $99 and a 16 GB iPhone for only $199.

Click here for more details.

UPDATE on 1/6/08: The AT&T promotion is now over, but Best Buy will now sell you a refurbished iPhone for $50 off ($149 for 8GB and $249 for 16 GB).

Citrix on the iPhone - more info

Those of you who have read iPhone J.D. from the beginning (thanks!) know that I am a big fan of Citrix and I am eagerly looking forward to the app that they are writing for the iPhone. In fact, I was using Citrix earlier today. Even though I am currently with my wife's family in New York for the holidays, I was able to fire up the Citrix client on a Mac and connect to my office to revise an appellate brief.

Yesterday there was an article on Infinite Loop -- the portion of the great site Ars Technica that is devoted to all things Apple -- discussing Citrix on the iPhone. The app will come out the first half of 2009 and apparently will be called Citrix Receiver. That article links to this earlier post on a Citrix blog, containing additional details such as this:

The Citrix Receiver for iPhone will not only look and feel native to this platform but it will leverage many of the software and hardware advancements incorporated into this ingenious device. Expect a rich combination of multi-touch gestures, great usage of the iPhone's accelerometer and many more.

If you are looking forward to Citrix on the iPhone like I am, you should check out the Infinite Loop article. Also, you should click here to read all of the posts on the Citrix blog about the iPhone.

Apple Evolution: 30 years of products

This video shows pictures of 30 years of Apple products in just over 3 minutes. It's not complete -- where is the Apple Hi-Fi? the Apple iPod socks? -- but it is a fun trip down memory lane. Perhaps many of you, like me, have actually used a large number of these products. I remember using an Apple ][+ to program in BASIC in middle school, using my summer job earnings in college to buy a Mac Plus, my first exposure to digital photography with the Apple QuickTake 100 camera, etc. I never owned a Newton, but I was always intrigued by it, and today's iPhone is clearly what the Newton always wanted to be. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this video. Thanks to BuzzNewsRoom for posting it and to iPhone Savior for pointing it out.

Continue reading "Cliff Maier: Lawyer, Ph.D., iPhone app author" »

Cliff Maier: Lawyer, Ph.D., iPhone app author

There are not many lawyer-specific iPhone apps available, and many of the most useful -- for example, the great FRCP app recently reviewed on this site -- have been written by attorney Cliff Maier of WaffleTurtle Software. Cliff is an Intellectual Property attorney in the Palo Alto office of the prestigious Mayer Brown law firm. Click this button to see all of the current iPhone apps by Cliff Maier:

I recently caught up with Cliff to talk to him about his double-identity as an IP lawyer by day and an iPhone app programmer by night. Cliff has some interesting thoughts and the road that led him to developing apps for the iPhone is fascinating. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed talking to Cliff.

iPJD: What kind of law do you practice?

Maier: My practice is now almost entirely intellectual property litigation, and, of that, almost all of the litigation is patent-related. I do a little licensing work, a little of what patent folks call "clearance" work, and a little bit of "opinion of counsel" work, as well. Although I don't do much now, I've also done a fair amount of patent prosecution work (I am a registered patent attorney).

iPJD: Can you tell us a little bit more about the patent law work do you do?

Maier: My practice has specialized in the technical areas associated with patent and copyright cases. My practice is probably not the sort of practice that would be very familiar to most attorneys, even most patent attorneys. I do my best to become an expert in the underlying technology, whether it be cryptographic algorithms, memory circuit designs, or software user interfaces. I try to get to the point where I could go get a job in that industry. This helps me make our expert witnesses more efficient, helps me locate potentially invalidating prior art, helps me communicate with our clients' engineers, helps me figure out reasons our client doesn't actually infringe, etc. It also enables me to easily punch holes in opposing experts' testimony and reports. In one big recent case, I actually got to use a couple of my own engineering journal publications as prior art in our patent invalidity case. That was great fun.

iPJD: What type of work did you do before you went to law school? I know that you obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1996.

Maier: After I got my Ph.D. in New York, I came out to Silicon Valley and worked at a start-up. It was the most fun I've ever had, but we went out of business eight months later. I was a chip designer, working on super-high-end microprocessors for Apple's Macintosh computers. I had a ton of responsibility because, despite being a youngster, I had spent four years working on exactly the same technology for my Ph.D. (and no one else in Silicon Valley other than the folks I was working with really understood the technology).

iPJD: Many readers of iPhone J.D. are Macintosh users and are familiar with the different microprocessors that Apple has considered using over the years. Which one did you work on?

Maier: The name of the company was Exponential Technology. We were working on a 500MHz PowerPC back in the days of the PowerPC 601. Apple was an investor, back in the days when Gil Amelio was the CEO of Apple. We had working silicon and a big coming-out party at the Fairmont in San Jose with all the tech press. Apple fans used to send us mail offering to be janitors just so they could work for us. Then Steve Jobs came back to Apple and sort of put the kibosh on the whole thing.

iPJD: Where did you go after Exponential Technology?

Permalink | Comments (6)

The iPhone as a boarding pass

Over the last several months, I've read with interest articles about airlines such as Continental and Delta starting to allow digital boarding passes on your iPhone or other cell phone. (The photo on the right is from this post on Engadget.) One of the things that I love about my iPhone it that it allows me to keep all of the information that is important to me in one place, replacing the countless pieces of paper that I am likely to misplace. So moving my boarding pass from a piece of paper to my iPhone is just another step in my attempt to reduce the paper in my life.

While I have seen a few articles about digital boarding passes, I haven't come across many first-hand accounts about how it works in practice, with the exception of this one post by Grant Martin a few weeks ago on the Gadling travel website. Martin describes how he was able to use his iPhone as his boarding pass. It is worth reading his entire post to get the full story, but he ends it as follows:

In summary, the system is works fairly well and I can see it being fairly useful some day when I'm in a hurry on the way to the airport. The small drawbacks I can foresee, which largely have to do with phone battery life, can be planned around, and in the worst scenario you can always get a paper copy. Once the TSA and airline staff are all up to speed on procedure, I think that the technology will really gain traction.

The reason for my post is that I am curious to hear from others who have used a digital boarding pass on their iPhone at one of the few airports that allows them to learn about how the process has worked in practice. Except for that one post from Grant Martin, I haven't come across much more on the Internet, even on FlyerTalk which is usually one of the best places to get advice and stories from frequent flyers. Here is a story about someone using a PDF version of his boarding pass on his iPhone with success, which is not the same thing but is certainly related.

A lot of you will, like me, be traveling over the next few weeks for the holidays. If you have the opportunity to use your iPhone as your boarding pass, I would love for you to share your experiences. Post a comment or send me an e-mail.

Macworld Expo: the end of an era

On July 19, 2000, I had a chance to attend a Steve Jobs keynote address at the Macworld Expo in New York. It was a memorable presentation. Jobs gave an early sneak peek at the first version of Mac OS X, replaced the infamous round "hockey puck" mouse with an optical mouse, and for his "one more thing" introduced the G4 Cube -- a computer that was not a financial success, but was a design marvel and had devoted fans. Plus, Steve Jobs surprised all of us in the audience by telling us to look under our chairs to find a certificate we could use to get one of the new mice for free. Ever since that Macworld, I'm told that attendees always look under their chairs before a keynote address just to see if that stunt is repeated.

And while that show was memorable, the award for best Steve Jobs keynote ever has to go to the keynote address at Macworld San Francisco in January of 2007. That was when Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was Steve Jobs bravado at its finest:

This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And Apple has been, well, first of all, one is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate. It has been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple, it changed the whole computer industry. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. And it didn't just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.

Well, today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. [Crowd cheers] The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. [Crowd cheers even louder] And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. So, three things. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. [Crowd goes wild] Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

Given the history of great Steve Jobs keynotes at Macworld conventions, it was a little sad to hear Apple announce this week that after the Macworld Expo being held in San Francisco in a few weeks, Apple will no longer participate in Macworld conventions. And to underscore that Apple would no longer be using the Macworld Expo to make great product introductions, Apple also announced that Steve Jobs will not give the keynote in a few weeks -- instead, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, will give the address.

A lot has been written about Apple's decision. While I understand why so many people are disappointed, Apple's decision makes sense for the future. First, now that Apple has Apple Stores in malls across the country, a customer no longer needs to attend a big Macworld Expo to get the full Apple experience. Also, I'm sure that Apple was frustrated with having to introduce new exciting products every January. That timing is horrible -- it is just days after the holiday buying season ends -- plus Apple would prefer to make big product announcements whenever big products are ready to announce.

There are dozens of articles analyzing Apple's decision, but these are some of the best:

(My views are closest to those of John Siracusa.)

While many are now thinking about what Apple's decision means for the future, this seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the past. Apple still has a page on their website on which you can watch the January 2007 iPhone introduction (or, if you want, the entire keynote). Even two years later, it is still a good show and I encourage you to watch it. I would love it if, just once in my life, I could channel that famous Steve Jobs charisma and enthusiasm as I am making a jury closing argument or giving a CLE presentation.

[UPDATE on 1/23/09: John Gruber has an excellent, poignant post reflecting on Macworld Expo.]

Lyons: Profitability of iPhone apps

From August 2006 to July 2008, Dan Lyons published the amusing blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs writing as "Fake Steve Jobs" or just "FSJ". After over a year of people incorrectly guessing the identity of Fake Steve Jobs, Brad Stone of the New York Times finally figured out that FSJ was Lyons, who at the time was a writer Forbes. Lyons wrote a humorous book under his Fake Steve Jobs name called Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody. This fictional story talks of Fake Steve Jobs dealing with the very real stock options backdating scandal that ended the careers of corporate executives and in-house counsel at many companies, including Apple. (By the way, if you are reading this and you are inside counsel for a corporation, consider taking a look at the white paper that I co-authored last year for the Association of Corporate Counsel describing liability risks faced by corporate counsel including options backdating issues.)

A few months ago, and as a result of his FSJ fame, Lyons was offered the position of chief technology correspondent for Newsweek. That position had previously been held by Steven Levy, who left to become a full time writer for Wired magazine. Levy is one of my all-time favorite technology writers, and I love the book he wrote about the history of the iPod called The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. It would be great if someone who is as good a researcher and writer as Levy wrote a similar insider's tale on the history of the iPhone. Given the success of the iPhone, I suspect that someone will.

That is a lot of background for today's post, but with Christmas around the corner I thought this would be a good time to recommend both of these books as gifts for the Apple enthusiast in your life. They are both short but very enjoyable reads, especially Levy's book on the making of the iPod. And they are inexpensive enough that they also make great gifts for yourself. (Full disclosure: if you buy something from Amazon using the links to Amazon that I sometimes place on iPhone J.D., Amazon gives me a very small referral fee, which helps to defray the costs of running this site.)

But the real reason for my post today is to point out that the current issue of Newsweek includes an interesting article by Dan Lyons about how some iPhone programmers are making a lot of money, even though most iPhone apps are really cheap, virtually all in the $1 to $10 range (if not free). This is great because it only serves to encourage more smart people to create more great iPhone apps, something that benefits us all. The Newsweek article is a good, quick read, and if you enjoy reading iPhone J.D., I think you will enjoy the latest article from Lyons as well.

Review: Manual for the United States of America

I previously reviewed an app from Clint Bagwell Consulting called Constitution for iPhone. That company has a few more reference texts for the iPhone, including one that the author calls Manual for the United States of America. I have a better name for it: Civics for a Buck.

This $0.99 app collects some of the great texts in U.S. History and related information, including:

Declaration of Independence
Articles of Confederation
Articles of Confederation
U.S. Constitution
Federalist Papers
Washington's Farewell Address
Emancipation Proclamation
Gettysburg Address
United Nations Charter
Censure of Joseph McCarthy
1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Indian Bill of Rights
2001 Patriot Act
List of U.S. Presidents
List of U.S. States
U.S. Flag Code

My law partner Katherine Mize recommended this one to me, pointing out that it is sometimes nice to have these texts at your fingertips to quote in a brief or in court. Time will tell how useful this is for me; the only document I see myself frequently using is the Constitution, and I already have the free version of Constitution for iPhone noted above. But the other documents included are undeniably important documents that play an important role in U.S. history, and I enjoyed looking at them. Also, the information contained in the lists of Presidents and States is quite comprehensive and may prove useful for solving a crossword puzzle or settling a bar bet. For example, for each President you get a picture, signature, dates in office, vice president, party, spouse, dates of birth and death, other offices held, nicknames and published works -- all stuff you could probably find in Wikipedia or elsewhere on the Ineternet, but now you have it in one easy to find place.

The application design is very nice and easy to use, and very similar to the Constitution for iPhone app. Some of the documents include scans of the original documents in two resolutions, which is a very nice touch.

If you are a U.S. citizen, you will probably enjoy this app, and it is well worth the price. Download Manual for the United States of America for $0.99 from iTunes by clicking this button:

Copy and Paste - where are you?

The iPhone lacks copy and paste. I have previously used a Treo and a Blackberry, and copy and paste were features that I did use from time to time -- certainly not every day or even every week, but definitely every month. Sometimes I would copy text from one e-mail and paste it into another one. Sometimes I would copy information from a website, such as local rule from a court's website, and then paste it into an e-mail to a client. But on the iPhone, I can't do this yet.

It seems obvious to me that Apple will add this feature soon, but why isn't it here yet? On July 11, 2008, the day that the iPhone 3G was released, Sascha Segan from the site AppScout asked Greg Joswiak (Apple's VP of worldwide iPod and iPhone product marketing) about the missing feature and reported:

Why isn't there cut and paste? Apple has a priority list of features, and they got as far as they could down that list with this model, Joswiak said. In other words, they don't have anything against cut and paste. They just judged other things to be more important.

While we wait for this feature to move up Apple's priority list, some thoughtful programmers have tried to fill the gap. The first program to do so was MagicPad by Proximi. For $3.99, this app was similar to the built-in Notes app except that you could cut, copy and paste within the app. The company also released an impressive video giving Apple a proposal for how to implement these features throughout all apps on the iPhone. For a limited time during the holidays, Proximi is letting everyone download MagicPad for free. You might want to check out MagicPad while you can do so for free to get a feel for how copy and paste might work; click here to do so:

Reader Dan Convington recently wrote to me about another attempt to fill the gap. Pastebud from programmer Jed Schmidt is not an app but instead a Javascript-powered applet that you add to your bookmarks in Safari. Once you do that and follow a few more instructions, when you are looking at a website, you can select a bookmark, causing another version of the page to open up on which you can select text to copy it, and then you can have the text pasted into a new e-mail or you can even paste the text into another webpage. It is very clever, and this YouTube video shows you how it works:

While I applaud these efforts for their ingenuity, in many ways they remind me of the first year of the iPhone when Apple did not allow third parties to develop apps but a lot of smart folks figured out how to jailbreak the iPhone and install apps anyway. It was neat that it could be done, but was really just a stopgap until Apple added the feature themselves. Now that Apple allows third party apps and developers have responded by opening up the floodgates, I just don't see any good reason for me to risk having problems on my iPhone by jailbreaking it (although, to be be fair, others disagree with me.)

You might want to try out MagicPad and Pastebud while they are free, but my hope is that it is not long before they are mere historical footnotes to the story of how Apple continuously improved the capabilities of the iPhone through software updates.

More iPhone Shortcuts

Last month I posted a list of my 10 favorite iPhone shortcuts and asked readers to tell me about others. Many of you e-mailed or commented with great ones, especially after my original post got a lot of traffic due to links on Daring Fireball (one of my favorite blogs -- thanks John Gruber!) and TechnoLawyer (their free e-mail newsletters are essential reading for any attorney interested in technology). So here is a list of more great iPhone shortcuts submitted by readers, some of which were new to me:

Ringer silence. If you want to quickly stop your iPhone from ringing, I pointed out that you can press the sleep/wake button at the top of the iPhone. Christian Eager reminded me that you can also push the volume button.
Alarm silence. Your iPhone will not ring if you flip the switch and put it in vibrate mode. But Paul points out that even when you are in vibrate mode, if you have an alarm set using the built-in Clock app, that alarm will make noise regardless of the vibrate setting. I should add that the alarm can be dangerous if you are in court or someplace that you need to stay quiet -- you can quickly shut up the alarm by pressing the sleep/wake or volume button, but that will just act as a "snooze" button unless you turned off that default when you set the alarm and thus the alarm will go off again 9 minutes later. You need to actually turn off the alarm to end it.
Calendar silence. A related note: An alarm triggered by your Calendar will remain silent when you are in vibrate mode. It is just the Clock app's alarm that ignores the vibrate switch. Thanks BJ Nemeth.
iPod controls. I should have mentioned this because I use it all the time when I listen to music or a podcast on my iPhone. When the screen is off press the home button once to wake the screen, then quickly press it twice to bring up iPod controls (RW, Play, FF) to control what is currently playing on your iPhone. If you are not already playing music, your iPhone will start to play whatever audio you were listening to last (which is useful if you were listening to a podcast because it will resume where you left off) or if it can't do that it will play in Suffle Songs mode. Note that this will work even if you have already set a double-click of the home button to do something else when the iPhone is being used. (Settings --> General --> Home Button). Thanks to Daniel Sandler and Steve Hyde.
Audio of video. if you want to listen to just the audio portion of a video (movie, podcast, etc.) on the iPhone, start up the video, then press the sleep/wake button which will turn off the screen and stop the video from playing, then press the home button once followed by a double-click of the home button. This will play only the audio of the video you were watching. Thanks to Ben Coombs.
Headphone button 1, 2, 3. And don't forget these headphone button tips -- one click on the microphone button will answer a phone call or hang up, two clicks will skip to the next track (just like the FF button), and three clicks will bring you to the start of the track or the last track (just like the RW button).
Screenshot. You can take a picture of whatever is on your iPhone's screen by holding down the sleep/wake button and then pressing your Home button. The picture will be added to your Camera Roll.
Picture save. In Safari or Mail, hold your finger down on an image for a few seconds and you will have the option to save the picture to your Camera Roll.
Better zoom. In Safari, if you want to zoom, instead of doing a reverse-pinch with both fingers, hold one finger down on the page and then just move the other finger back and forth to zoom in and out. This tip was new to me and it allows you to be much more precise when you zoom. Thanks bg!
Frame scroll. If you are looking at a webpage in Safari that has a frame and you are only seeing the top of of the frame, use two fingers to scroll instead of one. That will scroll just the frame, not the whole page.
Shut down. If your iPhone starts acting wacky, I pointed out that you can do a full shutdown by holding down both the Home button and the sleep/wake button for about 10 seconds. But llahsram clarifies that while that is a last resort way of resetting the iPhone, you should first try to hold down just the sleep/wake button for a few seconds to do a clean shut down. llahsram explains: "Holding down the sleep/wake button by itself for several seconds will allow you to shut down the iPhone cleanly. This is the equivalent of shutting down a computer: it closes any running programs, saves data, and turns off. You can then press the sleep/wake button again to turn it back on. Holding down both the sleep/wake button and the Home button, on the other hand, is like yanking the power cord from the computer and plugging it back in: it does an immediate hardware reset, with no cleanup. If the iPhone has gone unresponsive and can't be shut down normally, it's a useful way to break out of it, but it's not something you want to do all the time."
Scientific calculator. Ever since the iPhone 2.0 software update on July 10, 2008, if you are using the built-in Calculator app and turn your iPhone, it switches to a scientific calculator.
Remaining minutes. To see how many minutes you have remaining in a month, in the Phone app press the Keypad and then type *646# and then Call. In a few seconds you will get a text message reporting your minutes remaining. [UPDATE: As noted by Timmie in the comments, this tip only works in the U.S., although there are similar codes for other carriers.] [UPDATE 5/11/09: An even easier way to check your minutes is to download the free AT&T myWireless Mobile app.]
Steadicam. It is difficult to take a non-fuzzy picture with the iPhone's so-so camera, but this makes it easier. Just before you are ready to take the picture, press but do not release the button at the bottom of the touch screen. Then hold your hand as steady as possible and when the on-screen image looks as good as you think it will get, let go of the button.

These tips and shortcuts are great, and thanks to everyone for sending them in. I would love to hear about more!

Permalink | Comments (11)

Tom Goldstein's iPhone

Tom Goldstein is an attorney with Akin Gump who has argued 18 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and who co-founded the great SCOTUSblog, the definitive U.S. Supreme Court blog. [UPDATE: It may now be 19 cases since Goldstein argued the Cone v. Bell case on 12/9/08.] Last year for Christmas, SCOTUSblog released a fun video of Tom Goldstein's iPhone -- a spoof of the Apple iPhone commercials.

The video is now a year old, but those original iPhone commercials are so memorable that last year's Christmas gift from SCOTUSblog still holds up this holiday season. If you missed this one last year, it is worth checking out now. I love how the contents of this iPhone consists entirely of pictures, contacts and audio from Supreme Court justices and practitioners.

Click here for the original post on SCOTUSblog, and you can view the YouTube video below:

A few months after that video was posted, Goldstein followed up with another funny one. If you enjoy The Colbert Report, you'll probably enjoy this one too:

Time's Top 10 iPhone Apps

It's the end of the year, so it must be time for top 10 lists. Time magazine recently published 50 top 10 lists for 2008. There are lots of fun and interesting lists, including what Time considers to be the top 10 iPhone apps of the year. Time's website has comments on each app; my comments are noted below along with prices and iTunes links:

Pandora Radio -- a great app and a fun way to discover music. Free.
AroundMe -- Very handy when you are traveling. Free.
AP Mobile News -- AP news on the go. Free.
Ocarina -- blow into your iPhone to play the flute. My three year old loves this one, and I have to admit it is strangely fun. $0.99.
Wikipanion -- read my review here. Free.
Adrenaline Pool Lite -- A fun pool game, and unlike most iPhone games which are solitary, you play against an online opponent. (There is also a $4.99 version that lets you play against the computer.) Free.
Instapaper Free -- neat idea and I have had it on my iPhone for a while, but I find that I don't really use it. Free.
NetNewsWire -- awesome and I use it every day. Free.
iTalk Recorder -- works well, although I rarely find a need to record so I don't use it often. Free.
FakeCall -- a funny idea, but I haven't tried it yet. $0.99.

Apple has also added a section on the iTunes Store that lists the top free and paid apps of the year, both overall and in categories (Games, Entertainment, Utilities, Social Networking and Music). Browsing Apple's list is a great way to discover new apps.

I've linked to it before, but remember that iPhone, Therefore, I Blog also has a good list of 100 iPhone apps you should try.

Review: RichardSolo iPhone batteries

Battery_2 GPS, 3G, push e-mail, bright screen -- no matter what smartphone you use, these are great features but they will eat up your battery if you use them a lot. Apple has improved the battery management of the iPhone substantially through software updates, but you can still easily use up your battery by the afternoon if you make heavy use of the iPhone all morning without plugging it in. Thus, it is helpful to have an external battery with you to get a recharge.

Richard|Solo -- a company started by Richard Thalheimer, the founder of the famous but now defunct The Sharper Image -- is one of the companies that provides an external battery for the iPhone. Several months ago, I purchased their $50 backup battery and I have been very happy with it. I recently received a review copy of a $70, larger version of the battery so I had a chance to compare the two. Both are excellent, and you will have to consider your needs and preferences to decide which is right for you.

Richard|Solo Backup battery; Richard|Solo 1800; iPhone 3G (click for larger picture)

Richard|Solo Backup Battery for iPhone / iPod

The $50 version is the original iPhone battery released by Richard|Solo and it is called the Richard|Solo Backup Battery. It is very small, about 3" by almost 2" and half an inch thick, and at under two ounces is very light. If you slip it in your pocket, you will hardly notice it is there. It is durable and scratch-proof with an aluminum case. It feels good in the hand and well constructed. If I let my iPhone 3G discharge until the point where I get the 10% battery life left warning and then plug in the external battery, it will bring me back to about an 80% charge before the battery runs out of power. It takes about an hour to charge the iPhone to that 80% point.

You can use the iPhone with the battery attached. It is only a little awkward to have the battery hanging off the end while you do so, and I have done it many times.

I find that charging to 80% is more than enough to get me through the rest of even a busy day of use. It even passes the ultimate test -- the CLE test. (That's "Continuing Legal Education" for those non-lawyers who read this site.) When you are sitting through a day-long CLE, you often find yourself spending a lot of time talking on your iPhone during breaks and using e-mail and the Internet during the presentation. And you never seem to have a good WiFi connection, so you have to rely on the power-hungry 3G radio for a fast connection. All of this puts a lot of demand on a battery, and by the early afternoon I often find my iPhone almost dead. Plugging in this battery gives me more than enough power to make it through the end of the day.

The battery comes with a power adapter that consists of a USB outlet plug plus a retractable cord with a USB connector on one side and a small mini-USB connector that plugs into the battery on the other side. A great feature is that you can charge both the iPhone and the battery at the same time. Just plug them all in and first the iPhone is fully charged, and then the battery is fully charged. Because the cord is retractable, it packs up very small. When I travel, I don't take the power cord that came with my iPhone; I just take this compact one along with my Richard|Solo battery. At night, I plug everything in, and by the morning I have a fully charged iPhone and a fully charged battery.

Richard|Solo 1800 Battery

The Richard|Solo 1800 Battery is the $70 version. The extra $20 gets you about 50% more battery life. In my tests, if I run my iPhone down to 10% power, then plug in the 1800, I can get a full 100% charge in about 90 minutes or so, plus I have enough power left in the 1800 to give me about another 25% of power. So if you want to more than double the length of time that you can go before plugging your iPhone into the wall, the 1800 really delivers.

The 1800 is larger than the original battery, about 4" by 2", and the same half-inch thickness. It weighs just over two ounces, so just slightly more than the original battery. The difference in the numbers seems small, but the 1800 really feels bigger. You can drop the original battery in your pocket and you may forget it is there, but put the 1800 in your pocket and you will definitely notice it. It also doesn't feel quite as good in your hand; instead of the smooth and solid aluminum of the original model, the 1800 is made of plastic and as a result feels like a "cheaper" product.

The 1800 latches when it connects to the iPhone, and you need to press two buttons on each side of the 1800 to release the connection. Also, the 1800 comes with an optional plastic support brace that holds a snug connection between the 1800 and your iPhone. You don't need to use it if your iPhone is just sitting on a table charging, but if you pick up your iPhone with the 1800 attached you will definitely want to use the brace to keep a snug connection. The latch and the brace act together to give you a much more sturdy connection to the iPhone than the original $50 battery. On the other hand, because the 1800 is so much longer, you feel the need for a sturdy connection much more with the 1800 than you do with the original battery.

Left: 1800 with plastic connector; right: 1800 without plastic connector (click for larger picture)

The 1800 comes with two extra features of dubious usefulness: a white LED light and a red laser pointer. You press a button on top to turn on either light, and there is an on-off switch for both on the bottom so that you can be sure that neither goes on accidentally in your pocket. I don't find either the light or the laser all that useful, but maybe you will. (Here are two other opinions. The Boston Herald reviewed the 1800 and said that "the extremely bright LED flashlight is invaluable." John Gruber of Daring Fireball described them this way: "To top it off, the 1800 adds two features that are clearly intended for the Sky Mall audience: an LED flashlight and a laser pointer. Seriously, a frickin’ laser. Well, why not?" Reasonable minds can differ on whether these are features or gimmicks.)

The 1800 comes with the same useful power adapter as the $50 version, but with the 1800 you also get a car cigarette lighter plug. It even has two USB ports so your car can charge the 1800 (and an iPhone) at the same time that you charge something else. I can see that being useful, although I haven't had a reason to try it yet.

Recommendation

Both of these external batteries are great and I recommend them to every lawyer with an iPhone. So which should you get? Before I used the 1800, I thought that it would be the clear winner. For an extra $20 you can fully charge your iPhone to 100% and still have some of the battery left over, plus you get the car adapter and, as a bonus, the silly light and laser. (By the way, Richard|Solo also sells a third model called the 1200 for $55 that looks virtually identical to the original battery but the extra $5 gets you an LED light.)

But after using both for several weeks, I find myself using the original model much more. The original model cannot charge the iPhone quite as much, but it charges it enough to get me through the rest of the day, which is all that I need. Plus, it is so small and unobtrusive that I can toss it in a pocket and barely notice it is there. With the 1800 in my pocket, it is certainly light but I can't help but notice it. If I use my iPhone with the smaller, original battery attached, it doesn't really get in the way. With the 1800 attached, you feel like your iPhone is twice as long and it really is much more awkward. So for these reasons, I recommend just spending the $50 for the original battery. On the other hand, John Gruber concludes his review of the 1800: "I’d strongly recommend this one over the original 1200 mAh Richard Solo model because of the higher capacity and the latching connector." So you just need to decide what is more important to you. Smaller size or more battery power? Better feel in the hand or lights and lasers?

Whichever you choose, these batteries are good investments. I wouldn't think about going to court, a deposition, a plane ride or a CLE without carrying one with me.

Permalink | Comments (4)

Review: Fed. R. Civ. Pro. and others

Frcp Cliff Maier of WaffleTurtle Software has written several iPhone apps that give you the text of commonly used parts of the U.S. Code. As a litigator, the one I find the most useful is FRCP, a $1.99 $2.99 app that gives you the full text of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, so I will discuss it first. I list below several other apps from Cliff Maier including "Bankruptcy" -- an app that iPhone J.D. reader John Rogers told me is indispensable to his bankruptcy law practice.

The interface of FRCP is simple. Start the app and you are presented with Titles I through XI (plus a link to the Hague Conventions on service abroad, taking evidence abroad and civil procedure). Tap on a title and you see a list of all of the rules under that title. Tap on a rule to see the full text of the rule (for shorter rules) or a list of the subsections that you can tap for the full text of a subsection.

The app has a useful search feature. For example, if you search for the term "summary judgment" you see a list that includes not only subparts of Rule 56 (the summary judgment rule) but also Rule 41(a)(i)'s provision that a plaintiff may voluntarily dismiss an action without a court order by filing a notice of dismissal before the opposing party serves either an answer or an MSJ. The app starts to search as you type each letter of your search terms. This is good because you don't even have to type a complete word to find something, but the downside is that the app does become unresponsive for a second or two while it is searching and you are trying to type. [UPDATE 12-11-2008: Version 1.7 of FRCP substantially improves this, as the developer notes below in his comment.]

When you are looking at a rule, you can also tap a button at the bottom left to e-mail the text of the rule to someone. It is handy to e-mail a rule to yourself so that you can cut-and-paste it into a brief that you are drafting on your computer.

The layout of this app -- a list of rules, click an item to read the rule -- is similar to Constitution for iPhone, an app that I recently reviewed. I prefer the fonts and graphical layout of Constitution for iPhone, although the design of FRCP is certainly functional. Also, Constitution for iPhone includes notes on each article whereas FRCP does not include any commentary with the text of the rules, although that omission is largely irrelevant as you won't be using your iPhone for in-depth procedural research; you will just use it to quickly find the text of a rule. For only $2, the app is well worth it and is a useful tool on the iPhone of any litigator.

Click this button to download FRCP from the iTunes app store for $1.99. [UPDATE 12/29/08: The app was updated to add more features, such as admiralty and maritime rules, and the price is now $2.99.]

Using the exact same design as FRCP, Cliff Maier developed the following apps:

Bankruptcy gives you Title 11 of the U.S. Code. $2.99.
FDCA gives you the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act as codified in Title 21 of the U.S. Code. $3.99.
FRAP gives you the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. $1.99.
FRCrimPro gives you the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. $1.99.
FRE gives you the Federal Rules of Evidence. $1.99.
Lanham contains the Lanham Act, the portion of 15 U.S.C. that defines federal trademark law. $1.99.
Patent Rules contains the local patent rules from five federal district courts (N.D. Cal., S.D. Cal., N.D. Ga., W.D. Pa. and E.D. Tex.) $1.99.
Sarbanes Oxley gives you Title 15, Chapter 98 of the U.S. Code. $1.99
Securities gives you Sarbanes Oxley plus the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. $4.99.
Title 17 gives you the federal copyright code. $1.99.
Title 35 gives you the federal patent laws. $1.99.

Cliff Maier also has a version of the Constitution for $0.99. As noted above, I prefer the design of Constitution for iPhone, which also has the advantage of being free. But Cliff Maier's version lets you search the full text, and for that feature alone you might want to pay the dollar and keep both versions on your iPhone.

Also, if you are a California lawyer, Cliff Maier has versions of the California Evidence Code ($1.99) and the local patent rules for the N.D. Cal. ($0.99) .

Permalink | Comments (9)

10,000 and 300 million

Apple_billions_3 Apple ran a full page ad on the back-page of the business section of the Friday, December 5, 2008 New York Times. The ad is called "Solving life's dilemmas one app at a time" and it gives examples of helpful apps. But what I find most interesting is the announcement at the bottom that there are now 10,000 apps on the App Store -- recall that there were only around 500 when the store launched just five months ago -- and that iPhone users have already downloaded over 300 million apps. Wow.

The 200 millionth app was downloaded on October 22, 2008, so it only took about six weeks to "sell" (many apps are free) the last 100 million. That's about 2 million apps downloaded every day, and the momentum is gaining. Scott Kleinberg at the iPhone, Therefore, I Blog site predicts that at this rate, there will be one billion downloads by some point in 2009.

Assuming that 20 million iPhones have been sold to date (just a wild guess by me that is probably a little high; Apple sold about 13 million iPhones as of the end of September of 2008) that means that the average iPhone user has downloaded 15 apps.

As they should. There are so many well-designed, useful, inexpensive (and often free) apps available. And with so many iPhones out there, software developers have a lot of incentive to make even better apps.

Here is the ad as it ran yesterday in the New York Times. I understand that it also ran in the Wall Street Journal. Sorry that the scan is just so-so; it is impossible to scan a full page of the NYT on my scanner so I let Photoshop try to stitch together partial scans. Click to enlarge.

Review: Apple iPhone 3G Dock

Apple_logo The Apple iPhone 3G Dock is a $30 dock sold by Apple. I use it at my office every day, throughout the day, and there is a lot to love about this simple little dock. First, it gives me a specific place to keep my iPhone when I am working at my desk so that it is always in that same convenient location when I need to reach for it. Second, it keeps my iPhone charged while it is sitting in the dock. You can connect the dock to your computer to charge and sync, but I don't actually use that feature because I don't sync my iPhone with my work computer; I sync with my home iMac where I keep my music, photos and videos. To send a charge to the dock, I connect an iPhone connector cord from the back of the dock to a USB power plug. The dock does not come with a connector cord or a power plug, so you'll either need to use the ones that came with your iPhone or buy an extra dock connector cable for $20 and an extra USB power adapter for $30 if you want to buy from Apple. (Amazon sells some cheaper alternatives.) I also found that the cable was not long enough to reach a power supply on the floor next to my desk, so I added a USB extension cable which you can buy at places like Amazon for just a few dollars.

Third, I like the dock because it keeps my iPhone upright and visible. A quick tap on one of the iPhone's buttons shows you the time, date and a battery indicator showing how charged it is. Or you can keep the iPhone turned on and display a photograph (a single one or a slideshow), an iPhone app, or whatever else you want. Note that your iPhone will auto-lock after a short amount of time unless you turn that feature off in Settings --> General --> Auto-Lock. The dock itself is weighted just the right amount so that it will not fall over when your iPhone is in it, and rubber on the bottom gives you good traction so that it does not slip on your desk.

If you want to be more creative, there are lots of sites with tips for other ways to create a dock for your iPhone. For example, click here for a YouTube video showing you how to turn a simple paper clip into a stand for your iPhone, and there is even a PDF file you can download so that you know exactly where to bend the paperclip to make the stand. This sounds like a joke, but I tried it and it actually works quite well. While the Apple iPhone 3G Dock keeps my iPhone in a portrait position, I sometimes put my iPhone on the paperclip stand to put the iPhone in a landscape position to display a video or just show a slideshow of pictures on my iPhone (the vast majority of which are wider than they are tall so landscape mode works better).

Going from the strangely useful to the increasingly absurd, this site shows you how to make an iPhone dock out of cardboard, and this video shows you how to create an iPhone stand out of a $100 bill. I suppose you could do the same thing with a $1 bill to show your clients your frugality. Ahem.

There are also some other companies that sell iPhone docks that might work for you on your desk. Amazon sells quite a few of them and they differ from the Apple dock in different ways: some are cheaper, some come with a connector cable, some add extra features such as a media card reader. One interesting choice is the Griffin Powerdock Dual-Position Charging Station for iPod and iPhone which lets you charge two iPhones (or an iPhone and an iPod) at the same time. Another interesting choice is the PED3 Rotating Dock Stand that makes your iPhone look like a little computer monitor:

But back to the Apple dock, it is simple, sleek and works very well and I can recommend it. It is somewhat overpriced, especially considering that it doesn't come with a dock connector cable or a USB power plug, but it works well. If you use it every day like I do, it is worth it. Here are a few pictures, and you can click to view larger versions:

SnapTell Explorer and Amazon Mobile

Snaptellamazonmobile Lawyers read all day long as a part of our jobs, and yet many of us also love to read during our increasingly rare free time. Sometimes we see a book and think "hmm, I might want to read that one day." Of course, a few days later, you often forget about it.

There are now two free iPhone apps that perform a neat trick. You can take a picture of a book using your iPhone, and then the app will figure out what the book is and give you information on the book, including links to buy it.

The first such app is called SnapTell Explorer. It is very easy to use. You start the app, take a picture of a book (or a CD, DVD or a video game), and then click one button to use your picture. The app sends the picture off to a server, and within seconds it identifies the book and gives you links to buy the book various places on the web, look up info on the book on Wikipedia, etc. And even after you quit the app, it saves your prior entries. Thus, you can snap a picture of a book when you see it, and then a few days later start the app and you'll think "oh yeah, I wanted to remind myself to get that book" and you will have the resources at your fingertips to do so.

Another app that does a similar trick is the free Amazon Mobile app. The primary function of the app is to be a great Amazon client on the iPhone. Search for items on Amazon, read reviews, purchase items, check the status of your previous orders, etc. Although this app is new, those functions are not; Amazon has long had a great version of its website formatted for the iPhone. Just access the normal Amazon website on your iPhone at www.amazon.com and the Amazon website will sense that you are using Safari on an iPhone and automatically show you a full-featured version of the website that looks great on your screen. But the new feature added by the Amazon Mobile app is a feature called "Amazon Remembers." Just like SnapTell Explorer, you take a picture of a book (or any other item) with the iPhone. But instead of a computer analyzing the picture to determine what the book is, a real person will look at the picture, try to figure out what it is, and then send information to your Amazon Mobile app (and send you an e-mail) so that you can view the item on Amazon, read reviews, and if you want, buy it. (It appears that Amazon is using people who participate in its Mechanical Turk program do the work; Amazon reportedly pays them 10 cents for each one they do.) Amazon says it can take up to two days for an item to be analyzed, but in my tests it took only about a minute -- longer than SnapTell Explorer, but still very fast.

On both SnapTell Explorer and Amazon Mobile, the feature doesn't always work. Indeed, Amazon explicitly warns that the Amazon Remembers feature is still experimental. But most of the time it works well, and frankly the fact that it works at all seems like magic, especially on SnapTell Explorer when you consider that a computer is successfully deciphering a book cover in just a few seconds. Apparently, you can tell a lot about a book from its cover.

Click this button to download SnapTell Explorer for free from iTunes.

Click this button to download Amazon Mobile for free from iTunes.

Alltop

Alltop For the first year that the original iPhone was around, Apple did not let other companies make applications for the iPhone -- something hard to imagine now that there are approximately 10,000 apps available in iTunes. (Click here for icons of all of them on a single page put together by the site 148apps.com, and click here for a fun mosaic image of an iPhone made up of apps icons created by the folks at TapTapTap.com. By the way, the name "148 apps" refers to the fact that the iPhone can hold 9 pages of apps, 16 icons a page, plus 4 more at the bottom, which is a total of 148 apps.) But during that first year of the iPhone, where there were no apps, Apple encouraged others to instead make web pages specially formatted for the iPhone to add additional functionality to the iPhone.

Even today, some of the most-used icons on my iPhone's Home Screen are not apps but instead are links to web pages specially formatted for the iPhone. (When you are on a web page in Safari, tape the plus icon at the bottom to create a bookmark, then click the button that says "Add to Home Screen," and then there will be an icon on your Home Screen that looks just like an application icon but that links to the web page.) One such website with a great iPhone interface is Alltop.

You can access Alltop from your computer at http://alltop.com. It is a great website started by three people, one of whom is Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple employees who became famous for being the chief evangelist for the company in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. When you go to Alltop, you select one of hundreds of topics such as Agriculture, Extreme Sports, Kids, Macintosh, Photography, Wine or Zoology. Alltop then shows you what it considers to be the top blogs devoted to the subject and the last few posts from each of those blogs, all on a single, easy to skim page. One of the largest pages is the Alltop page for Law which lists over 150 great law blogs. Just to pick one example: SCOTUSblog is the best source for U.S. Supreme Court news, with everything that you need to know on cases being considered, live blogging the second that new opinions are released, etc. If you are following a case before the Supreme Court, you need to read SCOTUSblog. By just skimming the Law page, you get a survey of the top legal stories being discussed by all of the top law blogs, including SCOTUSblog, and you can click on links to jump to specific blogs and read more.

Alltop looks great on a web browser on your computer, and the mobile version of Alltop looks fantastic on an iPhone screen. I encourage you to keep on your iPhone a bookmark to either the main Alltop mobile page, http://alltop.com/m/, or a link to the specific Alltop page that is of particular interest to you. The Law one, for example, is http://law.alltop.com/m/. The next time you have a few minutes of downtime, such as standing in line at the grocery, you can look at Alltop on your iPhone and instantly get up-to-date on law or whatever other topic strikes your fancy.

Those of you who currently use an RSS reader might be wondering, isn't Alltop the same thing? In a way it is because Alltop relies on RSS feeds. But the great thing about Alltop is that they have already done the work and found the best sites for you. If you wake up one morning and find yourself interested in reading about bacon, the Alltop Bacon page has already picked out the top 17 sources of Bacon news. That's right, 17 sites on bacon. I kid you not.

I had long ago planned to write about Alltop on iPhone J.D. because I use it all the time to scan the top blogs that cover Law, Macintosh and the iPhone. But just a few days ago I was honored to learn that Alltop has added iPhone J.D. to its iPhone page. As the most recent addition, it is all the way at the bottom of the Alltop iPhone page, but we all have to start somewhere!

So add a bookmark to Alltop to your iPhone. Alltop is efficient, effective, and best of all, free. Free as in Beer.