Here are some news stories and other items of interest that have caught my attention this week.
- Here is what happens if your iPhone gets too hot.
- Lifehacker points out that the NBC website does a great job of streaming TV shows to your iPhone. It’s nice to be able to watch shows like The Office and 30 Rock for free.
- Adam Alexander is the author of the powerful DateCalcPro, which I reviewed here. He has a new $1.99 app called TextMinder which you can use to send yourself text reminders. Just enter some text and let the app know what time and date you want the reminder, and the app sends you a text message at the right time. I do something similar just using the Calendar app and alarms, but if you find it more useful to get text messages as reminders, you’ll want to check out this app. Click here to get TextMinder ($1.99):
The online Kindle Store is now formatted for the iPhone. Thus, you can access the store using Safari on your iPhone, buy a book (or get one of the many free selections), and then read it on your iPhone using the free Kindle app. iLounge makes the interesting observation that once the iPhone 3.0 software comes out, an app such as Amazon’s Kindle app could allow in-app purchases, but then Apple would get 30% of the cut. By using an iPhone-formatted website, Amazon doesn’t have to share with Apple.- AppleInsider reports
that Apple now allows you to buy an iPhone 3G directly through the
online Apple Store. It would appear that they are clearing out
inventory in anticipation of the next version of the iPhone, which I
expect will be announced in June.] - Ralph Koster has a cute post (that I saw mentioned on Boing Boing) on why being born in 1971 was the perfect time to be born a geek. I was born just slightly before that, in 1969, and I have to agree with a lot of what Ralph says. We saw Star Wars in the theater (and at a great age to see it), we “got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about
details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings
from magazines and learning how computers actually worked,” we learned how to use libraries for research, we saw the dawn of the Internet, etc. It’s a fun read. I remember that when I started law school in 1991, Georgetown made the Internet available for students, but I decided not to sign up because I thought that this “Internet” thing might be too much of a distraction from studying. Today, I can’t imagine a law student *NOT* using the Internet as an essential part of his or her studies, although of course the Internet back then was nothing like what it is now.
And finally, on a personal note, last night I had a great dinner at the fabulous New Orleans restaurant Dick and Jenny’s with two of my favorite legal technology bloggers, Ben Stevens of The Mac Lawyer and Ernest Svenson of Ernie the Attorney. If you don’t already have their blogs in your bookmarks or your RSS news reader, I recommend that you do so. Along with many other great topics, they both occasionally discuss using iPhones in their law practices.