This morning, Phil Schiller (Apple’s VP of Worldwide Product Marketing) gave the keynote address at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Most of his announcements concerned Macs, but there were a few announcements of interest for attorneys using iPhones.
First, for any attorneys who use Apple’s Keynote software to do your slideshow presentations instead of Microsoft’s PowerPoint, you can now use your iPhone as a very slick remote control for your Keynote presentation if you are using the new Keynote ’09, part of iWork ’09. If you hold your iPhone in the normal portrait/vertical mode, you see your slide at the top of the iPhone screen and your speaker notes at the bottom of the screen. Or, you can turn your iPhone on its side in landscape/horizontal mode, and then you can see both the current slide that the audience is seeing and the next slide. The iPhone communicates with the Mac running the keynote presentation by using WiFi, and you can simply swipe your finger across the screen to advance to the next slide. Apple is charging $0.99 for the app. Just like Apple’s Remote app is a fantastic remote for an AppleTV or a computer running iTunes, the Keynote Remote app looks like it will be a must-have for any attorney giving a Keynote presentation.
The remaining iPhone announcements are essentially unrelated to the practice of law but will make your iPhone more fun. Apple’s second iPhone announcement has to do with displaying photos on your iPhone. The latest version of Apple’s iPhoto program for the Mac, part of iLife ’09 which will be released at the end of January, has a very slick Themed Slideshow feature. You can either let iPhoto ’09 create a slideshow for you automatically using any of six themes, or you can take the time to customize a slideshow. Once created, iPhoto has an Export feature that saves the slideshow as a movie and sends it to iTunes so that you can view the professional-looking slideshow on your iPhone.
Third, if you take pictures using the Camera app on the iPhone, the new iPhoto ’09 will pay attention to the GPS location tags that your iPhone adds to every photo and allow you to group your photos by where they were taken. This feature is commonly called geotagging. The quality of the photographs taken by the iPhone varies from horrible in low light conditions to reasonably good when you are outside or in a brightly-lit area, but it is nice to have more options for using the location data stored in each iPhone picture. And even if you are using a nicer camera to take pictures, if your camera doesn’t have GPS, you can use your iPhone’s camera to take one sample photograph in the same location where you are using your nicer camera, and then on your Mac in iPhoto ’09, apply the location from your iPhone’s sample photograph to all of the photographs you took with your nicer camera.
Fourth, if you use your iPhone to listen to music, Apple has improved buying music from iTunes. To begin with, you now have more flexibility when buying music directly on the iPhone. In the past, you could only use the iTunes app on the iPhone to buy music if you were on WiFi. Now, you can also use the iTunes app when you are using a 3G connection. [UPDATE: iPTIB reports that you can also buy songs over Edge, but it is so slow that you probably won’t want to. Also, there is a 10 MB file limit, the same limit we already had for podcasts — for larger files you must use WiFi.] I’ve tried this feature and it works as expected, so it is now even easier to buy a song when you are on the go and the mood strikes you. And when you do so, the price of that song may now be different. For the past six years, every song on iTunes was $0.99. Starting April 1, 2009, music companies can charge either $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29. I imagine that new releases will have the higher prices while older tracks might be cheaper. Fortunately, all iTunes music will soon be available with no DRM (digital rights management) and at a high-quality 256-Kbps AAC encoding. Until now, only some music on iTunes (songs identified as iTunes Plus) had this feature — specifically, songs from EMI and a few independent labels. If you want to upgrade a song that you previously purchased on iTunes to the higher-quality, DRM-free version, it appears that you can do this for $0.30 a song, but I haven’t tried this yet. [UPDATE: And to do so, you need to upgrade all previously-purchased songs at once. You cannot just select a specific song to upgrade for $0.30. UPDATE 1-31-09: Apple now allows you to select a specific song to upgrade for $0.30.]
I’m sure that there will be many more iPhone-related announcements at the Macworld Expo, and I will be discussing the best of them over the rest of this week. But these new iPhone announcements from Apple are great, especially considering that the focus of today’s Keynote was the Mac, not the iPhone.
The problem with the Keynote Remote (and I’ve tried and confirmed this) is that it relies on WiFi to communicate with the computer. So your venue will have to have WiFi (preferably free) and the connection will have to be reliable throughout the presentation. Slow loading web pages or an occasional hiccup while browsing are one thing. Waiting an extra 10 seconds for your transition to happen during a fast paced presentation is another thing altogether. This is not a good tool to rely on in a serious presentation. You will experience problems. I did when testing it in my house.