Do you use Twitter? Twitter is a free website that allows you to post short messages — no more than 140 characters. Other people can follow what you post on Twitter, and you can select a group of people that you want to follow. If this is all new to you, David Pogue of the New York Times recently explained it in this article.
Notwithstanding the buzz on Twitter being the hot tool for attorneys, I don’t consider it all that relevant to my practice. On the other hand, it can be something to break up the monotony of a day — the digital equivalent of someone poking their head in my
office to share a thought, tell a quick story, ask a question, say something silly or pass along
breaking gossip or news. I follow a small group of people on Twitter — a few lawyers, but mostly just people who often post interesting technology-related thoughts. If I find that I have a minute or so of down time, I will sometimes take a quick look at recent Twitter posts. I don’t post to my own Twitter account very often, but sometimes I will announce when I add a substantial post on this site.
You can access the Twitter website on your iPhone using Safari (and the site will give you a specially-formatted page for the iPhone screen) but Twitter works much better if you use one of the many dedicated Twitter apps. And that is the primary reason for my post today: iLounge recently reviewed all 23 of the iPhone Twitter clients, and they found both gems and stinkers. I myself use TwitterFon — it works great, and it is free — but check out the iLounge article if you want to learn more about what is out there.
Is Twitter the next big thing for lawyers? Probably not, but it is fun, and I love that it is so easy to use on the iPhone.
Apparently, Apple doesn’t have much of a sense of humor when it comes to what a developer can say about its iPhone app on iTunes. Click here for more info from Mobile Orchid.
The iPhone gives you the ability to automatically add a signature to your e-mails, but I don’t use this feature because I don’t want to have the same signature on every single one of my e-mails. But every once in a while I want to use my full firm e-mail signature, and it sure is a pain to have to type it out manually on the iPhone.
AL Software has come up with an ingenuous solution with its $0.99 app called iSignature. This app gives you the ability to create six possible signatures. To use one of them in a new e-mail, just launch the iSignature app, and you will see previews of the first seven lines of up to six different signatures. Just tap the one that you want to use:
After you tap the signature that you want to use, the Mail app will open with the signature you selected automatically in the contents portion of the e-mail. You can then just type your e-mail and the signature will be at the bottom. In the first picture below, you can see that Mail has launched with my cursor in the “To” field and you can just barely start to see my signature. In the second screen, I have scrolled down so that you can see my full signature, which in this example has eight lines:
The app also works if you want to reply to (or forward) an e-mail. To do so, just tap the button to reply to an e-mail like you normally do, but as soon as your new reply e-mail screen comes up, tap the Home button on your iPhone to exit Mail and start iSignature. Then tap the signature that you want, and iSignature will return you to your reply e-mail with the signature automatically added.
Before you can use iSignature, you need to set up your different signatures. You do this not in the iSignature app itself, but instead by going to your iPhone Settings and then scroll down to the bottom where application-specific settings are located. Tap on iSignature and you will have a place to enter Line 1, Line 2 and Line 3 for up to six signatures. Of course, with just three lines, how did I manage above to have a signature with eight lines? This is actually quite simple: just add \n to enter a new line. For example, you can see on the below screen that I have the line …Jeffrey E. Richardson\nAdams and Reese LLP … which will cause a line break between my name and my law firm. Using the \n feature you can have a signature with as many lines as you want:
If you want to get fancy with your signatures, you can even use HTML tags. For example, let’s say I want to have a signature with my name and then “iPhone J.D.” in bold. To do this, I just add <b> before to add bold and then </b> to turn off bold. In the left you can see how I do this, and in the right you can see how the Mail app correctly renders the text as bold:
Here is another tip. The way that iSignature works is that it adds two line breaks followed by the text to the top of your e-mail. This is why you normally want to let iSignature do its thing before you type your e-mail, so that you can type at the top and have the automatically entered signature block move down to the bottom of your e-mail. But you can also use iSignature to automatically add any text to the top of an e-mail. For example, let’s type an e-mail to a client that is privileged. I want my signature block at the bottom, and I want to have a confidentiality warning at the top. To do this, I first start up iSignature and top my signature block, which in the below screen is at the top left. Then I type my message. Then, when I am ready to add the confidentiality language at the top of the e-mail, I press the home button to return to iSignature, and this time I will tap a signature block at the bottom left which consists of <b><i>Privileged and Confidential Attorney-Client Communication</b></i> (which will format that text in bold and italics). iSignature will then return me to my e-mail with the confidentiality language at the top. Unfortunately, iSignature always adds two blank lines before it enters the text, so I will want to manually delete those two blank lines, but the result is that I have automatically entered text at both the top and the bottom of my e-mail:
The only HTML codes I have used so far are bold and italics, but if you know how to use more advanced HTML codes, you can get even more complicated. But whether you use complicated signatures or simple ones, it is wonderful to have a choice of six that you can choose to use or not use, instead of the current Apple solution which is to always use the same signature block every time.
Note that you will want to make sure that you don’t already have an e-mail signature on your iPhone. If you do, your message will contain both the iSignature block and the standard signature block. Go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Signature and make sure that it is blank before you start using iSignature.
My only complaint about iSignature is just that I wish we didn’t need the app in the first place. I wish that Apple would add the ability to use macros in an e-mail. That way, whenever I want to add a pre-defined block of text — whether it be the signature at the end of the message, or just some long string of text someplace else — I could do so. But until Apple adds this feature, this simple app is definitely worth $0.99.
Click here to download iSignature from iTunes for $0.99:
(Thanks to Brian Beam at Macworld for his review which made me aware of this app.)
If you are not in New Orleans today celebrating Mardi Gras, then I hope that you have a chance to come here at some point in the future. This city throws a great party for Fat Tuesday, plus New Orleans is a great place to visit year-round if you like food, drinks, music, history, architecture and/or a city where people are comfortable just being themselves, no matter how unique that might be.
To keep this post marginally iPhone-related, it has been nice this Mardi Gras season to get updates on parade locations and status by following @parades on my iPhone using the nice Twitter client TwitterFon.
I have been reading the great, free weekly Macintosh newsletter TidBITS since I was in college. If you use a Mac and don’t subscribe, you are missing out and should do so. The publishers of TidBITS, Adam and Tonya Engst, also publish the “Take Control” series of electronic books. These books are written by professional and talented writers and are the same as any book you would find in any bookstore, except that these books are electronic. This means that when you want to buy the book, you don’t have to drive to the store or wait for Amazon to send it to you; you just pay the (always inexpensive) price and immediately download the PDF file. These e-books are also unique because the authors can actually update them after they are published; each book has a big “Check for Updates” button on the cover.
One of the latest Take Control books to be released is the Second Edition of Take Control of Your iPhone. This $15.00 book was written by Ted Landau, who has been writing about Macintosh and other technology issues since the 1980s. He is most well known for the MacFixIt site that he founded in 1996, which quickly became the premier site for Mac troubleshooting. CNET now runs that site.
This is probably not the book to buy if you are just looking for basic information on how to use the iPhone and its built-in applications. (If you want to learn the basics, I recommend you check out David Pogue‘s excellent book iPhone: The Missing Manual.) Although Ted Landau does cover some of the basics in this book, there is very little discussion of many of the built-in apps on the iPhone, such as Mail and Phone. Instead, Ted appears to have two goals with this book. First, the book focuses on the iPhone features that can be a little harder to understand, especially if one wants to use advanced features. For example, the book includes great, in-depth discussions of syncing, mastering the keyboard, Safari, Maps and Location Services, and the various radios in the iPhone (WiFi, Edge, 3G and Bluetooth).
Second, this book discusses just about everything that might go wrong with your iPhone and walks you through how to fix it. This is perhaps the best part of the book, and the author’s history as an expert troubleshooter who ran MacFixIt really shines through here. Even though my iPhone usually works just fine, after reading this book I now feel well prepared in case a minor issue or even a disaster does strike — and should anything bad happen, the first thing I will do is turn to this book and remind myself what Ted recommends for fixing the issue.
For those of you who use (or plan to use) an iPhone in a law firm that runs Microsoft Exchange, Appendix A to this book gives you an overview of how to do so and links to all of the information you need to set this up from Microsoft and Apple. It is nice to have links to all of this information in a single place.
Even though some of the troubleshooting tips covered are necessarily a bit complicated, the author’s writing style makes this 183 page book easy to read. And while most of the iPhone is simple enough to be figured out by a child, Ted Landau did a great job of picking areas to cover that are not so obvious. As a result, I recommend this book to all iPhone users, regardless of your level of expertise. As is typical for Take Control books, you can even download a free sample version of the book that includes the Table of Contents, Introduction, Quick Start, and section starts. (The link for the sample is at the bottom of the page where you can download the book.) So if you are on the fence about whether you should get this book, take a look at the free sample.
To go to the page where you can download this book, click here. The book only costs $15.00, so for about the cost of a lunch or a few cups of coffee, you can have a much better understanding of how the iPhone works and how you can make it work better for you … especially if anything appears to be going wrong.
[UPDATE 4/22/09: MobileFiles Pro was renamed and is now called Quicksheet. The developer has also introduced Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, which offers all of the functions of Quicksheet / MobileFiles Pro plus the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents. Click here for my review of Quickoffice, which also serves as an update to the rest of this review.]
Earlier this week, I mentioned that I am looking forward to the release of DataViz’s Documents to Go on the iPhone. But there is another product recently released for the iPhone that includes many of the features that Documents to Go is supposed to have. MobileFiles Pro by Quickoffice is an impressive, powerful and professional iPhone app. This $9.99 app brings includes sophisticated file management tools that allow you to upload, view, edit (for Excel files), and send files on your iPhone. (And for only, $3.99, MobileFiles 2.0 gives you the same features except for editing Excel files.)
Uploading files to the iPhone. The app gives you three ways to transfer a file to the iPhone. First, if you use Apple’s MobileMe service, MobileFiles Pro can access any files in your iDisk. Second, if your iPhone is on the same WiFi network as your home computer, you simply tap the WiFi Desktop Connection button on the home screen and then type an address given to you by the app into your browser and you will see a nice webpage displaying all files on the iPhone along with an Upload button that allows you to add more files:
Note that if you are using the Safari web browser on a Mac or PC, it is even easier to use the WiFi Desktop Connect function. First, make sure that in your Safari Preferences, in the tab for Bookmarks, you have a checkmark next to “Include Bonjour” in either your Bookmarks Bar or your Bookmarks Menu. Once you have confirmed that it set correctly, just start up WiFi Connect in MobileFiles Pro, and then instead of having to type in any IP address on your computer, just go to the Bonjour menu in Safari and select the entry for “MobileFiles – iPhone.”
I’ve previously reviewed another app called Datacase that allows you to transfer files to your iPhone. Datacase allows you to connect to your iPhone using a web browser, but MobileFiles Pro does a far better job. Datacase also allows you to mount your iPhone like an external drive on a Mac or PC, something that MobileFiles Pro does not do. But Datacase does not let you use iDisk.
There is also a third way to get a file to MobileFiles Pro, and I discuss it below in my discussion of sending a file.
Viewing Files. Once your files are on the device, you can see a list of what files you have, create folders, move files, etc.
Tap on a filename to view a file. The app can view images, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents, PDF files, web pages, web archives, text and audio files. (The app does not support RTF files.) You can tap once when viewing a document to view it full screen or tap again to see a toolbar superimposed on the document, on which you can tap to go back to your list of documents or tap the folder icon for options on saving or sending the file:
Editing Files. What sets this app apart from other document storage and viewing apps is that you can actually edit Microsoft Excel 2003 files, with over 125 features supported. On the spreadsheets that I tested, this feature worked well. Here are some screen shots from a spreadsheet that I use to calculate legal interest. One minor flaw that I noticed is that if you have text set in Excel to display over multiple cells, the text only displays within the first cell in MobileFiles Pro. For example, you can see below in cell G20 that I wanted to display “Grand Total” stretched across two cells, but only the word “Grand” is displayed on the first cell. But this is just a minor cosmetic annoyance, and it is nice to be able to enter and edit numbers, formulas, add and delete rows, resize columns, etc. — a big step up from apps like Mail that handle Excel files but only show a picture of a spreadsheet, almost as if you had printed it out, without the ability to change anything.
You can pinch to zoom in or out, plus if you turn the iPhone, the spreadsheet turns and removes all toolbars so you can see a lot more of the spreadsheet:
Although the current version of this app edits Excel files, a company representative told me that they are working on adding the ability to edit Word files. Quickoffice (like DataViz) writes products for lots of different smartphones including Palm, Symbian, Blackberry and Android, and many of those products have document editing features, so the company clearly knows what it is doing in this area.
Sending Files. You have several options for getting a file from your iPhone to another location. First, as noted above, you can use a web browser to connect to your iPhone and download any file from the iPhone to any computer. Second, the app can upload to your iDisk, and then you can later download from your iDisk to a Mac or PC.
Third, the app allows you to send any file as an attachment to an e-mail. The way it does this is actually pretty ingenious. You can choose to send any file that MobileFiles Pro has on your iPhone as an attachment to an e-mail, and when the app sends the e-mail there are actually two files attached — the file itself, and a small little HTML file. The recipient of the e-mail can then tap on that HTML file and will see a screen on which the recipient can tap the top button to copy the file to MobileFiles Pro, or the bottom button to learn more about MobileFiles Pro:
It is interesting that Quickoffice found a way to work around Apple’s normal “sandbox” restrictions and get a document out of your e-mail and into a third party app. Normally, third party apps cannot get access to e-mails in the Mail program, let alone the attachments to those e-mails. Quickoffice gets points here for creativity; their solution is a little awkward, but it works, and it isn’t Quickoffice’s fault that Apple is forcing companies to come up with workarounds like this. Note that you can turn this function off and only send the file if you are e-mailing someone who you know doesn’t have MobileFiles Pro or MobileFiles 2.0 (or, for that matter, an iPhone).
MobileFiles and MobileFiles 2.0. If you want to get a feel for MobileFiles Pro without spending $10, you can download a free program by Quickoffice called MobileFiles. It lets you download files from an iDisk, but not upload files, nor can you use a web browser on a computer to transfer files over WiFi to and from the iPhone. It handles Microsoft Office files and image files, but not iWork files, plus it lacks the sophisticated file organization features. It lacks the e-mail functions described above. And it doesn’t allow the editing of spreadsheets. I love it when app developers give you a way to try a limited version of an app for free before you buy the full version, and thus I think it was a great idea for Quickoffice to do this. (And if all you need is a way to view your iDisk files on the iPhone, then MobileFiles is a great little app.)
Quickoffice also sells MobileFiles 2.0. It costs $3.99, and it looks to me like it has every feature in MobileFiles Pro except for the editing of Excel files. [UPDATE on 2/25/09: According to a recent Macworld review, MobileFiles 2.0 has all of the features of MobileFiles Pro except for (1) editing of Excel files, (2) ability to view iWork documents and (3) ability to protect access to the app with a four-digit password.]
Conclusion. MobileFiles Pro is a wonderful app, and it has now become my preferred app for storing files on my iPhone. The ability to edit Excel files is nice, and while I don’t think that I will use that feature very often, I like having it there for when I need it. What really impresses me about this app is the very clean layout and design and the multiple and easy ways to get files to and from the app. If and when Quickoffice adds the ability to edit Word docs, then this will really be a sophisticated app. At $9.99 it is a little on the expensive side for an iPhone app, but I think it is worth it for what it does. Plus, if you don’t need to edit Excel files, MobileFiles 2.0 is a great value at only $3.99.
I love to play the piano, and maybe that has something to do with why I like the iPhone. This never occurred to me until I read an interesting post about Wayne Westerman by Arnold Kim of MacRumors.com. Westerman co-founded a company called FingerWorks in 1998 that developed a number of multi-touch input devices. Apple acquired FingerWorks and all of its intellectual property in 2005, Westerman now works at Apple as a Senior Engineer, and Westerman played an important role in the creation of the iPhone (and the acquisition of his company appears to be a basis for Apple’s claim that it owns the patents on multi-touch).
FingerWorks sold a product called the TouchStream. It was a touch-sensitive, flat membrane keyboard on which you could both type and use gestures with your fingers to do things like move and click the mouse pointer, copy and paste, open and save, etc. Here is a review of the keyboard from back in 2003 that contains lots of information on how it worked, and here is a New York Times article from 2002. You can also read more information on Westerman and his multi-touch inventions from the University of Delaware website, where Westerman got his Ph.D. and did post-doctoral work.
Kim’s MacRumors article links to this news story from a few months ago in UDaily, a publication of the University of Delaware’s communications and marketing department. In the article, Westerman describes how he came up with the idea for multi-touch in TouchStream keyboard, inspired in part by the piano:
Westerman talked about the role serendipity played in the invention,
from his stubborn bout with tendonitis, which hobbled his progress
until he devised the touch-sensitive technology, to his experience as a
pianist, in which his interaction with the keyboard was graceful and
natural.
“I had an ergonomic problem and I paired it with a motivation,”
Westerman said of the early inspiration. “I’d always felt that playing
the piano was so much more graceful and expressive than using a
computer keyboard, and I thought how great it would be if I pulled some
of that expression from the piano to the computer experience.”
The iPhone wouldn’t be the iPhone without multi-touch, and multi-touch might not be multi-touch without the piano. So a big thanks goes to piano player Wayne Westerman for his role in the development of the iPhone. Based on the picture on his Facebook page, he looks like a pretty fun guy:
Following up on my post from last week, I had hoped that DataViz would be announcing the availability of Documents to Go for the iPhone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. After all, DataViz did start working on this app a year ago. Unfortunately, according to the Italian website Macitynet.it, DataViz is only showing off a very early prototype.
The app is supposed to eventually allow you to edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on an iPhone, but the beta version shown this week could only handle Word files. It apparently does have copy-and-paste, plus you can e-mail an edited Word file to someone. The post on Macitynet has a number of photos of the current beta version of the app, and for those of you who (like me) don’t read Italian, you can click here for a Google translated version of that website.
I haven’t seen any update on when this product might be available, nor have I seen any other coverage of what DataViz is showing off right now other than the post on that Italian website.
UPDATE on 2/19/09: More information is starting to appear on the Internet. The iPhone Blog has more information on and pictures of the beta version of this app, including information on how the app accomplishes copy-and-paste — a feature that many of us are waiting for Apple to implement on the iPhone. And iPhone Alley has a few more details, including news that when the app is first released, it will be able to edit Word documents but probably not Excel spreadsheets. That site also says that the app is due to be released sometime between April and June of this year.
The ABA’s Law Practice Management Section recently asked me to write the “iPhone” half of an iPhone v. Blackberry series posted on their website. If you are interested, you can read my article here, and the Blackberry article by Lee Rosen is here. Lee writes about his personal experiences with both the iPhone and the Blackberry Bold; he ultimately decided that he didn’t like either one and returned to his older model Blackberry.
These articles prompted attorney Midland, TX attorney Dale Strauss to respond by writing a defense of the Blackberry Bold, featured as a guest post on the great The Mac Lawyer website. Dale believes that the Blackberry Bold outshines the iPhone 3G on battery life, e-mail, file storage, notes and tasks and he prefers using a keyboard over a multi-touch interface. Dale makes some good points, and especially for those people who think they really need a physical keyboard and for whom e-mail is really all they need to do with their smartphone, the Bold is a great choice.
Of course, it will not come as a surprise that for others, I think that the iPhone is the right choice. For those who want to take advantage of a virtually unlimited app store that lets one do almost anything one can imagine with a smartphone, use a far superior web browser, use a smartphone to easily sync and play songs, photos or videos, take advantage of a larger screen (which is only possible when a keyboard doesn’t always take up half of the face of the device), and do all of this in a device that is small and sleak with a best-in-class user interface design, then the iPhone is the clear winner. Nevertheless, I am glad to see that the iPhone prompted RIM to improve the Blackberry, prompted Microsoft to improve Windows Mobile, prompted Palm to change the direction of the company with the upcoming Pre, and prompted Google to further refine its new Android operating system. As the competition improves, Apple will have all the more reason to improve the iPhone.
[UPDATE on 3/1/09: Mike Elgan at Computerworld has an interesting post on why he switched from the Blackberry Pearl to the iPhone, and there is one overwhelming reason: third party apps.]
By the way, the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA presents the annual ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago. This year’s show is only six weeks away, and as I have previously written, if you are an attorney interested in technology, this is a great way to get your CLE hours. The “early bird” discounted registration deadline is right around the corner (February 28th).
The law library at Georgetown, where I attended law school, is named after the famous D.C. attorney Edward Bennett Williams. He was known for representing people no matter how distasteful (to some) their causes — mobster Frank Costello, Jimmy Hoffa, Hugh Hefner, spy Igore Melekh, Senator Joseph McCarthy, etc. As Williams told Mike Wallace during an interview in 1957:
Let me say this to you, no matter how socially
or politically obnoxious the ideas of an individual may be, no matter
how unorthodox his conduct or his thinking may be, no matter how
unpopular he may be, he has the right to the assistance of counsel.
I share this philosophy, and for that reason I will try to refrain from making jokes about which side you would rather represent in the lawsuit filed by Pull My Finger developer Air-O-Matic against InfoMedia’s iFart Mobile for using the phrase “pull my finger” in connection with their fart sounds app and the lawsuit in response filed by the iFart Mobile guys. iFart Mobile insists
that “pull my finger” is a generic and well-known phrase so they should
be able to use it in connection with the iFart Mobile app. The Pull My
Finger guys argue
that the use of the phrase is but a part of a long campaign by the iFart author to unfairly
capitalize on success that should have gone to Pull My Finger — including spam campaigns, fake reviews, and search optimization schemes.
The humor in fart apps may be low brow, but the dollars are high finance. iFart Mobile only costs $0.99, but it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times — 38,927 on December 25th alone, netting its author a $27,249 Christmas present that day — and it has been discussed in venues ranging from minor blogs to the prestigious New York Times Magazine.
Putting aside the merits of who deserves the credit for a farting iPhone, I find it interesting that Air-O-Matic is asking for $50,000 in its lawsuit against InfoMedia because that is apparently what an iPhone app developer can make in a single week if his app reaches the #1 paid download spot. With around 20,000 apps in iTunes right now it is very difficult to reach the top, but for developers who do so, there is a lot of money to be made. Ethan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, quit his day job after his app hit the #1 spot and he made $600,000 in a single month.
We’ll see what legal precedent, if any, comes out of the Fart v. Fart lawsuits, but their existence reveals that developing iPhone apps can be a lucrative but cutthroat business. If you want more details, you can learn what the big stink is all about at these websites:
.) Although Ted Landau does cover some of the basics in this book, there is very little discussion of many of the built-in apps on the iPhone, such as Mail and Phone. Instead, Ted appears to have two goals with this book. First, the book focuses on the iPhone features that can be a little harder to understand, especially if one wants to use advanced features. For example, the book includes great, in-depth discussions of syncing, mastering the keyboard, Safari, Maps and Location Services, and the various radios in the iPhone (WiFi, Edge, 3G and Bluetooth).
