Month: May 2009

If you are a tax attorney who would like to have the Internal Revenue Code on your iPhone, you now have two choices.  I’ve frequently discussed Cliff Maier’s apps, and Cliff recently added IRC (Tax Code) ($14.99) to his growing reference app library.  But a great alternative is an app from LawToGo.net called Internal Revenue Code (Tax Code) 2009 that sells for $13.99.

I’m not a tax attorney so I haven’t given this a real world trial nor can I comment on the content.  The app’s website says that this app is up to date as of December 31, 2008, and says that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will be included in the next (free) update.  Nevertheless, from what I can tell, the app seems quite solid.  You can use the app many different ways.  First, you can just browse through sections, tapping to drill down to a specific section.

Additionally, you can search for a particular section.  You can search for words, including AND search, OR search, and /n (within a certain number of words) search.  Search terms are clearly highlighted in yellow in the search results.

If you know the particular section that you are looking for, you can also use the Search by Section No. feature.  For example, like many Americans, I’ve recently been thinking quite a bit about my dwindling 401K.  If I want to read Section 401(k) itself while I drown my sorrows, I can jump right to Section 401 and then scroll down to (k).

The app includes lots of additional features.  You can use the arrows to browse back and forth through sections.  You can e-mail a section of the tax code, you can add a section that you use frequently to your Bookmarks, and you can turn your iPhone screen on its side to view everything a little bit larger in landscape mode.

If you want to see this app in action before you buy it, there is a video overview on the LawToGo website.  The developer has done a nice job with this app.  I am sure that any tax attorney would find it very useful, and for the rest of us, it may serve as a useful sleep aid.

Click here to get LawToGo.net’s Internal Revenue Code ($13.99): 

Back in January, I discussed an upcoming Sling app for the iPhone.  Sling Media makes products
that allow you to watch your home TV or DVR in another location by
streaming the audio and video over the Internet.  Connect a Slingbox
(different models range from $180 to $300) to your home entertainment
system (Cable, Tivo, DVR, etc.) and then you can watch live or recorded
TV using a laptop anyplace else in the world as long as you have an
Internet connection.  You can sit in your hotel room in the West Coast
and watch your local news or sports being shown on your TV on the East
Coast.  At the beginning of this year, Sling was previewing an iPhone app that allows you to use a Sling device to take anything on your TV and watch it anyplace else in the world on your iPhone screen.  It is a neat idea, and I wondered why it took so long for the app to appear in iTunes.

Apparently part of the answer has to do with negotiations with AT&T.  The app was finally released today for $30, but there is an important restriction imposed by AT&T:  you can only use it to stream your TV signal over Wi-Fi.  No use over 3G.  I suppose I can understand AT&T’s concern about the Sling app using a lot of bandwidth, but is this really a unique concern?  After all, only a small number of people own a Sling device whereas tons of people stream video to an iPhone from YouTube and hundreds of other websites throughout the day.  Why single out Sling?  AT&T’s answer is that the Sling app violates its data plan Terms and Conditions.

Well let’s read the contract.  The Terms and Conditions, available here, include this language (emphasis added):

While most common
uses for Intranet browsing, email and intranet access are permitted by your data plan, there
are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and interference with the network
and are therefore prohibited.  Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation,
the following … (vii) software or other devices that maintain continuous active Internet connections when a
computer’s connection would otherwise be idle or any “keep alive” functions, unless
they adhere to AT&T’s data retry requirements, which may be changed from time to time. This
means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally
acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using
P2P file sharing services, redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers,
web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition devices is prohibited.

So AT&T says that you can’t use the 3G service to redirect a TV signal to a PC.  Okay, but that has nothing to do with the iPhone, right?

Wrong, says AT&T.  In a statement reprinted at Engadget, AT&T says:  “Applications like [the Sling app], which redirect a TV signal to a personal
computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service. We
consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that
they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.”  Note that you can use other smartphones from AT&T to watch Sling TV such as the Blackberry Bold, the Pantech Duo, the HTC Fuse and the Palm Treo 700p.  It’s just the iPhone — unlike all of those other devices — that AT&T considers to be a PC because of its hardware and software. [UPDATE:  There is an excellent CNET article with more information on this story, and AppleInsider has an in depth review of the app.]

I’ll be the first to agree with AT&T that the iPhone is in a class by itself and is far more powerful than those other smartphones.  But I find it curious that AT&T sees the need to equate an iPhone with a PC to justify restrictions.  It should be said, however, that AT&T’s decision to limit the Sling app to Wi-Fi might make sense on a practical level.  Jason Snell at Macworld has used a prerelease version of the Sling app on an iPhone which had no restrictions, and he says that when using 3G the “quality was severely degraded and there were numerous hiccups in the connection, requiring long pauses for rebuffering.”  

To avoid any speculation, let me say this loud and clear:  this site will never, ever, be renamed PC J.D.

Click here to get SlingPlayer Mobile ($29.99): 

There are already several great news apps on the iPhone — the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, to name a few.  But there is always room for another good app, and Thomson Reuters has just released a great one, News Pro.

Reuters has always provided top notch news content, especially for business and international news, and of course that great content is available in this app.  There are a large number of news categories from which you can choose:  Top News, U.S. News, Politics, World News, Business, Markets, Deals, Science, Technology, Internet News, Health, Sports, Entertainment, Film, Television, Music, People and the always amusing Oddly Enough.

The content alone would make this a nice app.  But what makes the app really stand out are the extras.  Many news stories come with small pictures which you can tap to enlarge and there are a number of short video stories.  You can also browse the news by looking at picture thumbnails.  You can also get up to date information on the market equity indexes and 18 different currency exchange rates.  And you can look up information on individual stocks, including not just the share price information but also the latest news about the company, background on the company including address, officers and directors (including salaries), phone numbers (which you can tap to call), etc.  And the interactive stock chart works well and is interesting to use.  The stocks portion of this app is a compelling alternative to the Stocks app that comes with the iPhone.

There is room for improvement in this 1.0 app.  For example, there is no way to search the current news, change the font size, or e-mail a news story.  Nevertheless, Thomson Reuters has done a great job with this app, and if you ever use your iPhone to keep up with the news — especially international or business news — you will want to download this free app.

Click here to get Thomson Reuters News Pro (free): 

Attogear has created a series of apps that it calls the QuickQuotes series.  Each app costs $0.99 (although there are some free ones) and features quotes either relating to a topic (love, motivational, wisdom, computer geek), from a famous person (Lincoln, Einstein, Leno, Obama) or by people in a profession (cartoonist, dancer, coach, comedian, photographer).  The Attogear website lists almost 70 QuckQuotes apps, although a good number of those are not yet in iTunes and are said to be coming soon.  One of the profession versions of the QuickQuotes apps is Lawyer QuickQuotes.

The QuickQuotes app design is very nice.  Each quote appears on a single screen.  (The font size adjusts to accommodate the length of the quote.)  You can browse through quotes, bookmark your favorites, search, shake for a random quote, e-mail a quote, change the background wallpaper, and change the font.  The app does a great job of handling the content.

My problem with this app is the content.  I’m sure that in the history of lawyers, there are many who have said something interesting.  At least, I hope so.  And many of the lawyers quoted in this app are fascinating people.  Examples include Lloyd Cutler, Edward Hall, Samuel Dash, Ralph Nader, Kenneth Starr, Peter Benenson, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Stephen Carter and Elliot Richardson.  Unfortunately, as I went through many (but not all) of the almost 700 lawyer quotes in this app, I didn’t find myself all that inspired or, in most cases, even all that interested.  There were also quite a few that sounded like they could be interesting, but only if one understands the context — which this app doesn’t provide.  For example, here are two (of a huge number) that left me baffled:

What research is Newdow talking about?  A quick Wikipedia search reminded me that Newdow is the attorney and minister who filed lawsuits to seek to have “under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” removed from coins and currency.  The quote relates to his motivation to file the “In God We Trust” lawsuit.  As for the quote from the famous First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, it appears to come from this interview in which Abrams revealed his motivation for including a discussion of Supreme Court practitioner strategy in his book Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment.  I’ve worked with Floyd Abrams in the past and he has a lot of fascinating things to say, but this particular quote, even after I knew the context, didn’t strike me as one of them.

I don’t mean to imply that there was nothing interesting.  These two were intriguing enough:

But it actually took me a while to find those two when I was looking for interesting quotes to note in this review.

So should you get this app?  Perhaps some of you will find these 700 quotes a lot more interesting that I did, but I won’t be keeping this app on my iPhone.  Having said that, the app design is very nice and I am interested to try others with different content.  For example, from the preview on the website, I might enjoy this one with Steve Jobs quotes once it becomes available in iTunes.

Click here to get Attogear’s Lawyer QuickQuotes ($0.99): 

Here are some of the iPhone news stories that I have been reading this week.

• Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviews Quickoffice for iPhone.  His impression is similar to mine; he likes it, but thinks it needs a little more polish.
• Ars Technica reports (as do many others) that the FTC is investigating whether Apple and Google are breaking antitrust laws because two people serve on the boards of both companies (Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Genentech’s CEO Arthur Levinson).  As an attorney, I understand why FTC is doing this.  But as an iPhone user, I’m happy for Apple and Google to be very buddy-buddy.  Frankly, in today’s tech world, so many companies are competitors in some areas and partners in other areas that it is difficult to draw the antitrust lines.
• Apple says that you can get 5 hours of talk time or Internet use with an iPhone.  Want to really increase that battery life?  Then check out the new HyperMac external batteries.  They were designed for the Apple MacBook family of laptop computers, but they also can provide power for an iPhone via a USB port.  The MBP-060 model can provide you with over 70 hours of non-stop talk or Internet use on your iPhone, for only $200.  Or you can splurge and get the MBP-222 with over 260 iPhone hours for only $500.  Just think, never again will you have to worry about running out of battery power while you watch a movie or play a game on your iPhone during a transatlantic flight — even if you have 25 of them in a row.
• iPhone Central reveals the ultimate doormat for an iPhone fan.  Good luck getting your spouse to agree to this one.
• And finally, Planet-iPhones reports that Apple is telling developers of apps previously rejected for having inappropriate content that they should resubmit the apps once iPhone Software 3.0 is released, which will reportedly include parental control settings for app downloads so that mature content can be downloaded.  The iPhone Blog has a screen shot of what the parental controls will look like in the 3.0 software.  So if all of the current iPhone fart apps aren’t enough to satisfy you, just wait until you see what you can download this summer.

AT&T just released a free app called AT&T myWireless Mobile that allows you to view information about your AT&T account and manage your account from your iPhone.  It is a very useful app, and frankly I’m surprised that it has taken AT&T this long to release something like this.

Before you can use the app, you must first establish a myWireless account on the AT&T website if you don’t already have one.  The same password that you setup on the website provides account
access on your iPhone.  From the main screen of the app, you can choose to see information on your phone bill, see information about your monthly usage, and manage features on the iPhone.  When you are using the app, those three options appear at the bottom of each screen.

From the Bill Summary screen, you can find out how much you last paid, how much is due, and even view a PDF of your full bill.  There is also a button (not shown on the below screen picture) that allows you to pay your bill by credit card or by a withdrawal from your checking or savings account:

On the Usage screen, you can view the number of minutes used in your current cycle, either for any individual phone on your plan for for the “Group” (all phones on your plan).  You can also view individual data usage (text messages and MB of Internet use) for each phone.  Looking at this screen, I am reminded that one of these days I need to tell AT&T that I spell my first name “Jeffrey”:

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Bento
is the little brother of FileMaker Pro, a lightweight but easy to use
$50 database program for the Mac with a design clearly inspired by iTunes.  The relationship between FileMaker Pro and Bento is not unlike Final
Cut Pro for professional movie makers versus iMovie for consumers.

Bento has just released Bento for iPhone, a $4.99 iPhone app that brings an easy to use database program to the iPhone.  It comes with 25 pre-designed database templates, or you can make your own.  The app works with the built-in iPhone apps including Contacts, Mail, Google Maps and Safari.  For example, this video from Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker’s VP Marketing & Services, shows you how you can use Bento on the iPhone to track additional information about your contacts, integrating with the information in the Contacts app:

I suspect that Bento on the iPhone would be most useful if you are also using Bento 2 on a Mac because you can sync databases between the two.  I wasn’t sure how many attorneys use Bento 2 in a law practice; it would really work best for a solo attorney, or at least an attorney who wants to work on his or her own, because Bento doesn’t allow multiple users to access the same database (unlike sophisticated databases such as FileMaker Pro or Microsoft Access).  But then New Orleans attorney Kris Wilson alerted me to the ElectricLawyer blog run by San Francisco attorney Grace Suarez.  Grace has been interviewed about her use of Bento 2 in her law practice, and her blog includes lots of posts about using Bento in a law practice such as this post on using Bento to manage clients and this general aricle on using Bento in a law firm.

If I get chance to spend some time with Bento for iPhone, I’ll post a review.  In the meantime, if you are an attorney who already uses Bento 2 on your Mac, then I suspect you will want to get Bento for iPhone immediately to keep your databases with you at all times.

Click here to get Bento for iPhone ($4.99): 

About two weeks ago, I reviewed Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, an app that allows you to edit Word and Excel files on your iPhone.  My review focused on the Word capabilities of the app, not only because I had already reviewed the previously-available spreadsheet abilities, but also because I know that while attorneys do use spreadsheets on occasion, we spend most of our time working with Word documents. 

If you don’t want to spend $19.99 for both the Word and Excel features of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, the company has now released Quickword, an app that contains the Word capabilities of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite for only $12.99.  I really like the way that Quickoffice, and now Quickword, handles Word files on an iPhone, so I encourage you to check out this app if you want to go beyond the iPhone’s built in ability to only read Word files or if you want a good app for storing documents on your iPhone and easily transferring documents between your computer and an iPhone.

Quickword has some shortcomings right now.  As I noted before, it doesn’t currently handle footnotes or underlining, although it handles italics.  When I first tested the app, it had some quirks with the CAP LOCK key, but as I noted a few days ago, that has already been fixed in an update.  Another current shortcoming is the absence of the iPhone’s built-in text correction abilities — the key feature that makes a virtual keyboard on the iPhone work well.  However, the company informs me that autocorrect will be added in the next update to Quickoffice and Quickword, due perhaps as soon as later this month. 

Another upcoming feature is support for more Word file formats.  The app can currently view and edit Word 97 through 2003 files, but only view Word 2007 (.docx) files.  An upcoming update will handle editing of .docx files.  As an aside, is anyone out there even using the .docx format?  We are well into 2009 and I think only a single attorney has ever e-mailed me a file in that 2007 format.

If you can’t decide whether to buy Quickword or spring for the full Quickoffice app, you could buy Quickword now and update later.  The company tells me that they will offer an upgrade option once the iPhone 3.0 Software is released this summer.  As I have previously discussed, the next version of the iPhone OS will allow you to make purchases from within an app.  The company plans to use that upcoming feature to include the ability to pay an upgrade fee within the Quickword app to upgrade the app to all of the features of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite.

Now that it is May, I want to remind readers that Quickoffice will soon have some competition in this space.  Any day now,
DataViz will be releasing Documents to Go for the iPhone.  There are preview screenshots on DataViz’s Facebook page, and I can already see that the DocsToGo iPhone app will have some advantages over the current version of Quickword such as, for example, the ability to handle underline. 

But right now, Quickoffice is the only game in town.  As Quickword currently exists, it is a wonderful and easy
way to get Word files on and off of your iPhone, view the files on your iPhone and, in a pinch, edit
Word files and then send them to someone
else.  With the planned updates, the app will become even more useful.

Click here to get Quickoffice ($12.99): 

If you are a law student reading this website, final exams have likely just started for you (and I’m glad to be a part of your study break).  If you are looking for a last minute study aid, you might want to check out the Law in a Flash apps for the iPhone.  Study cards from Law in a Flash have been around for a long time.  I remember using them in law school in the early 1990s.  With these apps, you get all of the information on the cards in an iPhone app.

To give you an idea of what they look like, here are some screenshots from the Civil Procedure I set.

You can work with cards from a specific category or from all categories at once.  You can go through the cards in order or shuffle them.  For each card you have a question (such as a fact pattern) on one side, and an answer on the other.

You can add your own notes to a card or bookmark a card if you want to return to it later.  The app also includes Quick Review cards which contain the key information that you most need to know for your exam.  Here is an example on what to look for in jurisdiction fact patterns:

The Law in a Flash iPhone apps typically cost $39.99 (which is about the same cost as the physical cards), but the apps are 25% off through May 17, 2009, which for just about all of them is $29.99.  (The one exception is the Professional Responsibility app which now costs $44.99.)  The currently available subjects are:

• Civil Procedure I
• Civil Procedure II
• Constitutional Law I (National and State Powers)
• Constitutional Law II (Individual Rights)
• Contracts
• Corporations
• Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Evidence
• Future Interests
• Professional Responsibility
• Real Property
• Torts
• Wills & Trusts

Good luck on your exams!

One of the biggest items of “news” this week in the world of iPhones has been gossip about Apple talking to Verizon about the iPhone.  I don’t think that there is much real news here.  Verizon has a motive to leak a story that it is talking to Apple just so that current Verizon customers have a reason to stick with Verizon in the hopes that the iPhone is coming soon.  Apple has a motive to leak a story that the iPhone might go to Verizon to try to gain leverage in its negotiations with AT&T.  And Apple would be silly to not always consider its options and talk to other carriers.  So perhaps Apple really is talking to Verizon about the iPhone, but that doesn’t mean that it is going to happen.  It may well just be posturing.  Ultimately, I predict that the iPhone will stay exclusive to AT&T for at least another year or two.  But this is just my guess, and nobody really knows what is going on. 

Here are some other iPhone news stories that caught my attention this week:

• iPodNN notes that The Missing Sync 2.0 for iPhone is out and it allows two-way sync of notes, tasks and various documents between your iPhone and your computer.  Sounds useful. 
• Macworld reports (as do many others) that Amazon has purchased the makers of Stanza, a great iPhone e-book reader.   Amazon is certainly doing its part to keep the e-book space interesting, and it is nice to know that even though you can now buy everything from groceries to electronics to clothes on Amazon, they are still thinking of what started it all — books.
• RIM copied Apple and created an app store for the Blackberry.  I’m happy that my Blackberry-using friends can experience an app store, but how does it compare to Apple’s app store?  Not too well, according to this report by Kelly Talcott in the New York Law Journal, who calls it “cumbersome to use.”  But hey, at least they finally have something.
• If you want to watch video on your iPhone, you may want to find a way to prop it up.  I’ve previously noted a virtually free way to do this using a paperclip or a dollar bill, but if you want to shell out the big bucks and spend $5, Macworld reviews Crabble, an iPhone stand that fits in your wallet.
• Do you love your iPhone?  Yes, apparently, you do.  TechCrunch reports that J.D. Power — not to be confused with the powerful website iPhone J.D. — has released the results of its Consumer Smartphone Satisfaction Study, and the clear winner is the iPhone.  
• And finally, the New York Times says that people use iPhones primarily for personal use, not business.  TechCrunch says that this is rubbish, and I agree.  Sure, iPhone users spend a lot of time using their iPhones for personal use such as music, video and games, but that is just because there are so many fun things you can do with your iPhone in addition to business.  If I had to use a Blackberry, I’m sure that 90% to 100% of my use would be for business because, well, what else am I supposed to do with it besides check e-mail?  Please don’t make me use that horrible web browser.  But with an iPhone, you can get all of your work done with it just like you would on another smart phone, plus you can spend additional time with it for personal enjoyment.  Frankly, I think that this is the reason that many iPhone users wish for more iPhone battery life.  It’s not that the iPhone battery is worse than other smartphones; it’s that you use the iPhone so much more than you would other smartphones.