Month: July 2009

Another week, another gazillion articles, blog posts, etc. about the iPhone.  Here are some of the interesting iPhone-related articles that I ran across this week that I want to highlight in case they might interest you:

• Nicole Black lists some of her favorite iPhone apps that she uses in the practice of law in her post Practicing Law:  There’s an iPhone App for that.
• David Pogue of the New York Times offers his top 10 tips for the iPhone 3GS, an excerpt from his updated version of iPhone: The Missing Manual.
• Macworld reviews PDF Reader Pro for iPhone, an app that lets you store and view PDF files.  I understand the usefulness of storing PDF files on an iPhone, something that I can already do with many other apps such as Quickoffice, Documents to Go and Apple’s new MobileMe iDisk app.  It is unclear to me from this review whether this app offers any advanced features for viewing PDF files.
• Macworld also reviews Twitterena, a new Twitter client for the iPhone.  Looks nice, but I think I’ll still stick with Twitterific (which I briefly discussed here).
• Yesterday’s TechnoLawyer newsletter linked to an interesting series of articles by analyst Henry Blodget about his switch from the Blackberry to the iPhone.  There are still things he misses from the Blackberry, such as some e-mail features, but the iPhone is growing on him every day and he feels that the iPhone’s other advantages outweigh the Blackberry’s e-mail advantages.  And he hasn’t even started downloading apps yet, one of the best features of the iPhone.  The four articles are:  Decision
  
  Time: Should I Stick With BlackBerry or Switch to iPhone?; How
  
  I Ended My Affair With BlackBerry and Eloped With the iPhone; The
  
  Truth About the iPhone; and The
  
  Truth About the iPhone, Week 2.
• iLounge reviews Sygic Mobile Maps US, a a $60 GPS navigation app for the iPhone.  They previously reviewed Navigon MobileNavigator, a similar app that costs $70 to $100.  I might decide to get one of these apps one day, but because they are expensive, I’m waiting for a couple more companies to release other versions first so that I can see which one is the best before investing that much money.
• Daniel Eran Dilger has an interesting article on multitasking on the iPhone (and the Pre) on his RoughlyDrafted website.  He points out, for example, that while the Pre gets a lot of press for being able to run multiple apps at once, few people point out that because of the limitations of the Sprint (and Verizon) network, you cannot use data and the phone at the same time.  I frequently find myself talking on my iPhone while at the same time I am looking up an e-mail, finding something on the Internet, search Google maps, etc., so this limitation must be very frustrating for Pre owners.
• Like many others, I often find myself saying that I wish they would
  
  just add this one feature to an iPhone app, as if that is easy to do.  This post by Brent Simmons, developer of my favorite iPhone newsreader NetNewsWire, explains why what seems like a simple addition for a software developer is really not.  (Thanks to Daring Fireball for the link.)
• This isn’t directly related to the iPhone, but Jason Calacanis makes an interesting argument that the proposed search agreement between Yahoo and Microsoft makes no sense for Yahoo.
• And finally, Art of the iPhone has a collection of some of the funniest iPhone videos ever.  Several of these are rather cute.

Subscribers to Apple’s $99 a year MobileMe service (even cheaper from Amazon) get 20GB of space on iDisk, a server on the Internet that can be accessed from any Mac or a PC.  Yesterday, Apple released a free iDisk app that allows MobileMe subscribers to view and share files on an iDisk.

Launch the app and you will be prompted to provide your MobileMe username and password.  You will then see a list of all of your MobileMe folders.

Tap on a folder and you will see a list of the files in the folder.  Tap on a file supported by the iPhone such as a Word or Excel document, an iWork document, a picture, a video or a song, and the file will be downloaded from your iDisk to your iPhone so that you can view the file.  You can quickly see a list of files that you have recently viewed by tapping on the Recents icon at the bottom.  In the Settings, you can decide how much space to devote to iDisk files that you download (the default is 100MB) so that when you return to a file that you recently viewed, the file pops up instantly without having to download it again.  In addition to viewing files on your own iDisk, you can tap on the Public Folders icon to view the public files of other MobileMe users.

Viewing files works great, and while there are other apps that currently allow you to do the same thing (such as Quickoffice) it is nice to have a free app from Apple.  But what makes the iDisk app really powerful is the ability to share files on your iDisk, especially larger files that would be a hassle to attach to an e-mail.  I’ll walk you through an example to show you how it works.

In my Music folder I have two songs that my father (an architect by day and amateur musician by night) wrote.  Let’s say I am out and about and I want to send the song to a friend of mine.  I have the song on my iPod, but of course you cannot e-mail files from the iPod.  However, because I have a copy of the song on my iDisk, I can load up this app and tap on the share icon to the right of the song.  This creates an e-mail from my MobileMe e-mail account.  I choose a recipient by tapping the plus sign to choose from my address book (or just type in any e-mail address).

I now have access to the advanced MobileMe file sharing options.  By default, the recipient will have one month to download the file and will not need to enter a password, but you can change those options if you want.  Enter any message that you want and then hit send.

The recipient then gets an e-mail that doesn’t have the file attached but instead has a button that can be clicked to download the file to their computer.  It looks much like this:

Again, this is great for large files because you avoid dealing with the problems of big attachments such as slow e-mail.  Once you are sharing a file, you will see an indication in the form of a green icon that the file is being shared.  You can also tap on the Shared Files icon at the bottom of the screen to see all files that you are sharing.  At any time, you can change the sharing status for any file by tapping the sharing icon, so you can make the file available for a longer time, or you can stop sharing the file completely.

Apple has also posted this video to show you more about the app, but I don’t think you really need to read any further; if you use MobileMe, then you will want to get this free app.  Not only does it give you an easy way to view your iDisk files, but it also gives you a great solution for sharing larger files, even when you are on the go and only have access to your iPhone but not your computer.

By the way, if you want to download the song I am using in my example titled “The New New Orleans,” click here to download it (for free!) from my iDisk.  It’s a fun, toe-tapping song recorded in late 2005 which, as I mentioned in my sample e-mail, captures the positive spirit of post-Katrina New Orleans.  My father Bob Richardson (who wrote the song) is on guitar, and the other great New Orleans musicians who recorded the song are Dave Carboni as lead vocal and on bass, Jason Lohmeyer on keyboard and Buzzy Beano on guitar and banjo.  I’d love to hear from you if you like the song; my Dad will get a kick out of knowing that others are enjoying it.

Click here to download MobileMe iDisk (free): 

Google Voice is a service that provides you with a single phone number that people can call and the call will automatically be routed to multiple phones at the same time, such as office, cell and home.  The service used to be called GrandCentral, before Google bought it in 2007.  The service has other neat features such free transcriptions of your voice mails so that you can view them like e-mails and cheap international calls (just like Skype).

You can already use Google Voice with any cell phone, but Google has recently released mobile apps for phones like the Blackberry and the Android.  The advantage of using these apps to make calls is that the person you are calling sees your Google phone number on caller ID, not your cell phone number, plus these apps include nice features for managing voice mail, sending and receiving free text messages, etc.

Several developers had created Google Voice client apps for the iPhone, and Google itself created the definitive app—only to see Apple reject it.  A Google spokesperson revealed to the New York Times and other media outlets that Apple rejected the app several weeks ago, and Apple has now removed from the App Store all of the other Google Voice client apps, such as GV Mobile.

John Gruber writes on his site Daring Fireball that sources have told him that it was AT&T that pressured Apple to remove the apps because it was a threat to AT&T’s business model.  You would still use AT&T minutes on a Google Voice app, but you could avoid text messaging fees, surcharges on international calls, and certain other AT&T sources of revenue. 

Of course, as I recently wrote in my review of the Skype iPhone app, you can also use Skype to make essentially free international calls.  But the New York Times says that the Skype app is different because it only works over Wi-Fi and doesn’t use AT&T’s network.  Google Voice would use the AT&T network, so presumably AT&T has the final say on whether the app is allowed.  It is strange, though, that AT&T hasn’t blocked a Google Voice
client for the Blackberry, which also runs on the AT&T network.

The internet is full of posts from people complaining about the rejection of Google’s Google Voice app.  I understand their point; in a perfect world, every app would be loved by all and approved by Apple.  As Harry McCracken writes, the iPhone seems like a computer, and we are used to being able to install whatever we want on our own computers.  But the reality is that AT&T subsidizes the iPhone so that you can pay only $200 for it instead of $600, and as a result they get to decide what you can do with it on their network.  Hopefully the restrictions imposed by Apple or AT&T will never get so severe that people will decide that the restrictions outweigh the advantages of the iPhone, but it is unrealistic to expect no restrictions.  (Having said that, I do hope that Apple continues to let the Skype app work on the iPhone because it is great when you are traveling internationally.)  In the meantime, you can still use Google Voice with an iPhone or any other cell phone.  You don’t get all of the fancy features like a caller ID that displays your Google Voice number, but you can still use the mobile web interface to access many Google Voice features using the Safari web browser.

[UPDATE:  I should add that I do feel bad for developers who it would seem are not getting sufficient information from Apple.  It would be a shame to see good developers walk away from the iPhone because of fiascoes like this.  For example, see here and here, both links via Daring Fireball which has been all over this story.]

Macworld has been publishing “Superguide” guides for the iPhone since September 2007.  A few weeks ago, they updated the Macworld iPhone & iPod Touch Superguide to the Third Edition to account for iPhone Software 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS.  iPhone experts won’t find much in here that they don’t know, but for anyone who is new to the iPhone and is looking for an easy to use guide to the iPhone, the Macworld Superguide is great. 

This is a 170 page long PDF file with full color, easy to understand text and lots of pictures.  Topics covered include four chapters on getting started on the iPhone, four chapters on staying in touch including managing contacts and checking e-mail, five chapters on using multimedia on the iPhone including navigating videos and music and converting video into files that the iPhone can use, four chapters on maximizing productivity, two chapters on troubleshooting tips, four chapters on recommended third party apps and four chapters on the best accessories.  Questions answered include:

• What are the biggest differences among the various iPhone models?
• How do iPod touch and iPhone features compare?
• How do I conserve battery power while still receiving calls and messages?
• How do I turn on Vibrate mode?
• How do I “favorite” a contact and access her phone number quickly?
• How do I assign a custom ringtone to a contact?
• How do I set my iPhone phone number to do Caller ID?
• How do I save an email-attached photo to my Camera Roll?
• How do I do text messaging and what charges apply?
• How do I create an On-The-Go playlist?
• How do I add and delete bookmarks from Safari?
• How do I access RSS feeds?
• Which third-party instant-messaging apps are worth a look?
• How do I customize the controls in the iPod app?
• How do I “scrub” (fast forward or rewind) more precisely in the iPod app?
• Can you give me some examples of smart playlists?

If you are looking for a great beginner guide to the iPhone, this $12.95 electronic book is a great read.  Click here to get the book via Take Control.

Earlier this year, I reviewed three date calculator apps for the iPhone.  Lawyers might find any of those useful, but they were not specifically created by lawyers for lawyers.  Dan Friedlander, a land use attorney and litigator practicing in the Los Angeles area, decided to come up with a date calculator that lawyers would appreciate, and in my opinion he has succeeded with his new $0.99 app Court Days sold through his company Law on my Phone.  (And a special thanks to Joanne Frasca, a litigator in Southern California, for first making me aware of this app.)

Most of the activity in this app takes place in a single, main screen that you see after a short splash screen.  Tap on the Start Date area of the screen and a wheel comes up for you to select a date.

With a date selected, you can tap to indicate whether you are looking for dates BEFORE the target date or AFTER the target date, and then you tap on the three white buttons on the bottom left of the screen and indicate the number of days you want to count.  What makes the app particularly useful for lawyers is that you can indicate for each computation whether you want the app to skip court holidays.  So in these two screens, the first screen does not count holidays and just counts days on the calendar, but the second screen excludes legal holidays, only counting “court days.”

Unlike the previous apps that I reviewed that allow you to exclude weekends or major U.S. holidays, this app aims to exclude the legal holidays in your specific jurisdiction.  You do this by tapping the jurisdiction button at the top and selecting a specific state or federal court (62 are included in the current version, with five years worth of holidays in it for each jurisdiction).  For example, if I choose the jurisdiction of Louisiana and make my start date Friday, February 12, 2010, and tell the app to count three court days forward, the app knows not to count Saturday and Sunday, knows that Monday, February 15 is President’s Day and Tuesday, February 16 is Mardi Gras, so the first day counted is Wednesday February 17 and the third and final day is Friday, February 19.  (For all of you who live in a part of the country that doesn’t celebrate Mardi Gras, you should take advantage of the President’s Day holiday in 2010 and come down and join us next year.)

I love that this app is trying to be jurisdiction-specific, and it was a lot of work for Friedlander to figure out all of the holidays, although even he acknowledges that the app is not complete.  For example, the application description on iTunes notes that Wisconsin and Massachusetts are not included in the database because
each individual courthouse has its own
holiday schedule which varies from year to year. Friedlander
also inserted a disclaimer in the jurisdiction page (tap the “info” button) noting that
the calculator should be used as a guide and dates should be verified:

Unique holidays are difficult to handle.  For example, although this app has one set of holidays for the whole of Louisiana, attorneys practicing in Crowley, Louisiana know that one of the official court holidays in Acadia Parish is Friday, October 16, 2009, a state-sanctioned holiday in that parish only (La. R.S. § 1:55(A)(3)) for the International Rice Festival.  If would be a useful addition to this app to tell you exactly which days are being counted as holidays in the particular jurisdiction so that you can be sure whether a specific holiday is being counted or not.

Although the ability to handle specific court holidays is one reason that attorneys will like this app, another useful feature is the ability to make sequential date calculations.  These are date calculations that build upon a prior calculation.  For example, here in Louisiana, I know that once an appeal record is lodged, an appellant’s brief is due 25 calendar days later, the appellee’s brief is due 45 days after the lodging date, and the appellant’s reply brief is due 10 days after the appellee’s brief is filed.  Let’s say that I have a record lodged on September 10, 2009.  This app can compute each of these three deadlines:

Unfortunately, the app isn’t perfect on making these calculations because of Louisiana court rules on counting dates.  As you can see above, the app tells me that the appellee’s brief is due on October 25 and calculates the reply date deadline from that, but because October 25 is a Sunday, I know that the brief is not actually due until Monday, October 26, and that pushes back the reply due date one more day.  But at least this app is helpful enough to give you not just the date but also the day of the week so that you can (hopefully) see these sorts of issues yourself.

Every attorney knows that calculating dates can be a little complicated, and doing so correctly is very important; missing a deadline can potentially result in a waiver of a client’s rights and a large malpractice suit.  Date calculator apps can be very helpful, but attorneys need to make sure that they do not blindly rely on these apps without taking into account the issues that an app might not factor in, whether it be the rule for what happens when the due date for a brief falls on a holiday or the International Rice Festival holiday in the heart of cajun country.  Having said that, many attorneys will find that Court Days is the best of the date calculator apps, and it has now become my personal favorite.

Now all this talk of rice is getting me hungry, and since today is Monday in New Orleans, perhaps I should look into getting some red beans and rice for lunch.  Yum.

Click here to get Court Days ($0.99): 

It’s Friday (TGIF!) so that means it is time to share some of the interesting iPhone-related news items that I ran across this week.

• Ars Technica reports
  
  on AT&T’s latest financial quarter.  With the release of the iPhone
  
  3GS and the cheaper iPhone 3G, AT&T activated 2.4 million new
  
  iPhones during the last quarter, which means over 10.4 million iPhones
  
  have been activated by AT&T since the iPhone was introduced.  I
  
  wonder how many of the 10 million iPhone users in the U.S. are
  
  attorneys?  The
  
  iPhone remains a key reason that AT&T has been able to increase its
  
  number of subscribers, although AT&T’s CEO Randall Stevenson
  
  acknowledged yesterday that, at some point, there will be a day when
  
  the iPhone is not exclusive to AT&T.
• Kensington announced an interesting nightstand charging dock, available for pre-order for $40.  It plugs in to your iPhone to charge it overnight, and also places your iPhone in a landscape position so that you can run the Rise&Shine app to act as a bedside clock.  Whether you buy the charging dock or not, you can get the Rise&Shine app for free here:

  

• Immigration attorney (and internet marketing pioneer) Greg Siskind writes about why he likes his iPhone on the ABA TECHSHOW blog.
• I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I have previously discussed the legal wranglings between the makers of two of the most popular iPhone fart apps.  The Daily Show did a funny piece on the lawsuit if you want to learn (and laugh) more.
• Google Latitude is a product that allows you to see where your friends are located on a map and for them to see where you are located.  If you want to share this information with your friends, the iPhone would seem like a natural client because it is always with you and it knows where you are.  Thus, Google developed a Google Latitude iPhone app.  But as this post from the Google Mobile Blog reveals, Apple wouldn’t add it because users might get confused between this app and the built-in Maps app.  Perhaps Apple will be adding Latitude functions to the iPhone Maps app?  Google then changed it to a web app, so it only works when your Safari web browser is on the Google Latitude webpage.  I could still see this being useful under the right conditions, and to see how it works just go to www.google.com/latitude on your iPhone.  But Latitude would be even more useful if it could run in the background—which is possible if Apple decides to add Latitude support to the Map app.  (Google provides the maps for the Maps app, but Apple develops the app.)  We’ll see.
• What did you use as a cell phone before your iPhone?  According to Silicon Valley Insider, about a third of you were using Motorola phones.  Click here for an interesting pie chart showing the prior phones of iPhone users.  (Thanks to Ernie Svenson for the link.)
• According to this Wall Street Journal article, quoting data from Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, Apple and RIM (which makes the Blackberry) accounted for 3% of all cell phones sold in the world, but account for 35% of all cell phone profits.  The analyst predicts that in 2009, they will sell 5% of all cell phones but reap 58% of total operating profits.  There are also recent reports that Apple, which sells about 9% of all computers in the U.S., is selling about 91% of all of the computers that cost more than $1,000.  There is a lesson for all of us lawyers:  It doesn’t matter how many clients you have, what matters is that you have good clients and that you provide them quality services.
• Sebastian Page of the iPhone Download Blog writes about the features that are missing from the iPhone 3GS, even though he concludes that “the iPhone 3GS is still my favorite phone ever.”
• Jeremy Horowitz of the great site iLounge wrote an interesting article about updates to iPhone apps, noting that some developers use the ability to deliver updates as a crutch, shipping apps before they are really ready, whereas other developers delight users with very useful updates.
• And finally, the GeekDad column in Wired has a fun list of 100 mostly tech-related items that your kids may never know about. The list will both bring back happy memories and make you feel old.

One feature that I have often heard people request for the iPhone is the ability to have a unified Mail inbox so that your iPhone can sync with multiple e-mail accounts but have all of the new messages show up in one location.  I actually prefer the current system; I have both my work e-mail and my iPhone J.D. e-mail on my iPhone, and I prefer to choose whether I am focusing on work or focusing on this website.  Nevertheless, even I agree that it would be nice for Apple would add a unified inbox as an option for those who want it.

In the meantime, San Jose, CA attorney Greg Charles tells me that he has come up with a reasonable workaround.  Greg has three POP e-mail accounts, so normally he would have to check each one manually.  But instead, he has configured his Gmail account (click Settings at the top of the Gmail screen and then click the Accounts tab) to get mail from all three of his POP accounts.  Now, all three of his POP e-mail accounts can be checked in a single Gmail inbox, plus, he gets the benefit of the Gmail spam filters.  On his iPhone, he set up a Gmail IMAP account to be handled by the Mail app which lets him use the folders that he set up in Gmail to organize the mail with filters.  Greg also tells me that when he responds to an e-mail, the iPhone responds using the e-mail account that received the mail.  Kudos to Greg for coming up with the very creative solution, and I hope it gives others some ideas for managing e-mail.

By the way, if you use Gmail with your iPhone, you can certainly set up the Mail app to handle it, but I prefer to just access the Gmail website using Safari on the iPhone.  Gmail is formatted for the iPhone screen, and I put a shortcut icon on my Home screen so I can just tap that as if it is a dedicated app to launch into Gmail.

Yesterday, Apple announced its 2009 Fiscal Third Quarter results.  As in the past, I have reviewed the transcript of this earnings call (provided by Seeking Alpha and available here) to report on the significant news from an iPhone perspective.  Here is the significant iPhone news from Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook:

• Revenue for the quarter was $8.34 billion, 12% growth over this same quarter in 2008.  While sales of Macs increased 4% year over year, and sales of iPods declined 4% year over year, iPhone sales were huge for Apple.  Apple sold over 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, thanks to the new iPhone 3GS and the discounted iPhone 3G.  It only took three days of the iPhone 3GS being on the market for the company to sell over 1 million of them.
• Apple said that the App Store has over 65,000 apps.  To put this in context, Cook pointed out that RIM’s Blackberry app store and Nokia’s app store are between 1,000 to 2,000 apps, and there are around 5,000 apps for Android.
• When Tim Cook was asked whether Apple had anything to announce on U.S. carriers besides AT&T, Cook simply said that Apple and AT&T have an “excellent relationship and we are very happy with it” and that he had “nothing to announce today in terms of other things with the carriers.”
• Two different analysts asked Cook to provide details on how the iPhone 3G was selling at its newly reduced price of $99 compared to the iPhone 3GS.  Both times, Cook avoided answering the question, just saying that when looking at both the 3G and the 3GS there was a “significant acceleration in total unit sales.”
• Cook was asked about the use of iPhones by enterprise customers.  (I consider law firms to be enterprise customers.)  Cook responded:

• When asked about Apple’s iPhone inventory, Cook said that the company is essentially selling them as fast as they are making them, and there have been some stock outages with the iPhone 3GS, so the demand has been exceeding the supply.
• Cook refused to answer a question on the percentage of iPhone sales that were in the U.S. versus international, saying that this is competitive information.  However, in answering a different question, Cook did say that most countries now selling the 3G would have the 3GS in a few months.

I’m glad to see that Apple had another great quarter and that the iPhone was a big reason for that.

We all love music, and because the iPhone is also an iPod, it is a great way to listen to music.  If you are like me, you often find yourself singing along with music.  If you are like me, you also often find yourself not knowing all of the words (although I can do a mighty fine job of mumbling along as if I do know what I am singing).  Wouldn’t it be great if the iPhone could automatically give you the lyrics?  One of my law partners in my firm’s Birmingham office, Bob Eckinger, recently told me about a new, free iPhone app called TuneWiki that shows you the lyrics of a song while it is playing.  I’ve just started to play with this app, and I cannot believe how powerful it is.

The marquee feature is the ability to show you lyrics.  Launch the app and it will show you whatever song you are playing on your iPhone.  Or, if you are not already listening to a song, start a song from within the app.  You will then see a screen that shows the song information at the top and the album art in the middle, and superimposed on top of the album are the lyrics which, for most songs, scroll along with the music just as if you were watching a karaoke screen.

If that were the only feature, it would be enough for me to love this app.  But that is just the beginning.  You can also tap a single button to find YouTube videos of the song that you are listening to.  I was listening to the Barenaked Ladies song “If I Had $1,000,000” the other day and I tapped on the video tab and suddenly saw tons of different versions, even a live performance with “Weird Al” Yankovic playing along.  Here is an example of the music screen (showing synced, scrolling lyrics) and the video screen while I was listening to a fun but silly song from the great Jonathan Coulton—and yes, for the other fans out there, I realize that “fun but silly” accurately describes most of his songs:

The app also includes a directory to thousands of streaming internet radio stations, one for almost every possible genre, so you can easily listen to something beyond the music synced to your iPhone.  While you are listening to streamed music, you also can see the lyrics.  And even if you don’t have a particular song on your iPhone (or it is not playing on an internet radio station), you can also search for lyrics for a song.

There are also some community features that I have just started to explore.  For example, you can see what other people are listening to around the world, or just around the corner from you, on an interactive map.  The app also includes lists of the top TuneWiki songs and artists, etc.

Did I mention that this app is free?  Run, do not walk, to your nearest App Store and download this one now.

Click here to get TuneWiki (free): 

It’s nice that the iPhone has two great options for storing and editing Word files: Documents to Go (DTG) and Quickoffice.  As one of those products is updated and temporarily takes the lead in features, it isn’t long before the other is updated to match or surpass the features.  The competition means better apps for us users.  For example, Friday night, Quickoffice was updated to version 1.3, and there were some pretty major improvements.  By the way, when I say “Quickoffice” I referring to Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, the most full-featured version of the app, but the company also sells
Quickword if you just want to edit Word documents, Quicksheet if you
just want to edit Excel documents, and Quickoffice Files if you don’t want to edit files
at all but just access them.  Here are the new features in Quickoffice:

Download e-mail attachments.  DTG can access your e-mail attachments if your firm uses a Microsoft Exchange Server.  The DTG app essentially works as an e-mail client, connecting with your firm’s Exchange server and directly downloading the attachment to your iPhone.  Quickoffice takes a different approach: you forward an e-mail containing an attachment to files@quickofficeconnect.com, and then you can access those attachments on your iPhone. 

Before you first use this feature, you must set it up.  To do so, start the Quickoffice app and provide it with your e-mail address.  The Quickoffice server will then send an e-mail to that address and once you receive the e-mail on your iPhone, you simply tap a link to validate the e-mail address.  From then on, you simply forward any e-mail with an attachment to
files@quickofficeconnect.com.  (To make this even easier, I recommend
that you set up a new entry in your Contacts that you call something
like “Quickoffice” and assign the e-mail address as
files@quickofficeconnect.com.  That way, in the future you can just
forward your e-mails to “Quickoffice” or whatever you called that entry.)  Once you do so, the files are sent to the Quickoffice
server, a server which the Quickoffice app on the iPhone can access. 
The next time you start Quickoffice on your iPhone, just select
Attachments from the main screen (the file manager screen) and you will
see a list of attachments that you have forwarded.  Click any one and
the attachment will be downloaded from the server to your iPhone and
deleted on the server.  You can store up to 50MB worth of attachments
on the server.  (Once you download an attachment to your iPhone,
because the attachments are removed from the server, they no longer
count against the 50MB file limit.)

Quickoffice points out the attachment feature works with any e-mail account.  Unlike DTG, it doesn’t have to be an Exchange account.  This is definitely an advantage.  At the same time, I have questions about security.  When you use DTG, the app directly connects to your firm’s Exchange server and downloads the attachment to your iPhone.  No third parties are involved.  But with Quickoffice, your attachment is forwarded to the Quickoffice server, where it lives until you download it to your iPhone.  I have asked Quickoffice to provide me with information on the security and privacy of these attachments during the time that they live on the server and after they are downloaded to your device and Quickoffice says that they are deleted from the server.  Any time that a lawyer provides confidential attorney-client or attorney work product information to a third party vendor such as a copy service or a commercial carrier, the lawyer must consider whether doing so could constitute a waiver of a privilege or could violate any specifically confidentiality requirements of a client.  I don’t provide legal opinions on this website so I’m not going to analyze the risk associated with your forwarding attachments to Quickoffice, but I will tell you that this is an issue that I am thinking about, and for now I will probably stick with DTG to handle attachments.

Copy and paste.  Quickoffice was released long before Apple released iPhone Software 3.0, so Quickoffice originally implemented its own version of copy and paste.  Quickoffice, like DTG, has now abandoned its proprietary system to adopt the standard iPhone 3.0 copy and paste system, which means that you can now copy from a Quickoffice file and paste elsewhere or vice versa.  It was obvious that this change was coming, but it is still quite welcome.

Undo/redo.  Quickoffice now supports the full iPhone 3.0 undo/redo functions, which includes shaking your iPhone to undo and up to 10 levels of undo.

Paragraph alignment.  In addition to left, right and center alignment, you can now control the indentation of the first line of each paragraph (a feature missing from DTG).  Quickoffice still does not allow you to fully justify text (both left and right margin justification).  I’m not a fan of full justification in my Word documents such as briefs—long live the ragged right!—but others might miss this feature.

Find in spreadsheets.  You can now find text in spreadsheets and search for next or previous occurrences.

Cell text overflow.  Previously, if you had text in one cell of a spreadsheet that did not completely fit within the cell, the text would just end at the end of the cell.  This was a real pain because spreadsheets designed in Excel are made to have text overflow into the next cell if that cell is empty.  Quickoffice has now fixed this problem, so now cell text overflows and is correctly alligned.  For example, in my February 20, 2009 review of an earlier version of Quickoffice, I showed an example of a legal interest spreadsheet that I use.  Notice that in cells G19 and G20, you cannot see all of the text:

Now here is the same spreadsheet in Quickoffice 1.3, which now displays all of the text that I have in those two cells, and it also correctly understands that the text is formatted to flow to the left:

What is still missing?  Quickoffice is still missing some features that are in DTG.  The biggest omission for me is the ability to view and add underlining.  Case names are frequently underlined in my briefs, but I don’t see that in Quickoffice.  [UPDATE 10/23/09:  Quickoffice 1.5 now includes underlining.  Finally!]  DTG also includes the ability to view (although not edit) footnotes, and this is another critical omission as many of my briefs have footnotes.  DTG and Quickoffice both allow you to create a bulleted list, but only DTG gives you the option to create a numbered list. 

On the other hand, Quickoffice has long had support for spreadsheets, while this is still a “coming soon” feature for DTG.  [UPDATE 10/1/09:  Documents to Go 2.0 adds support for Excel spreadsheets.  Finally!]  And if you don’t use Exchange for your e-mail, Quickoffice is the only option for editing attachments to an e-mail on the iPhone.

Thumbs up to Quickoffice for adding these latest improvements.  I look forward to even more, both from Quickoffice and DTG, and I continue to believe that any attorney who wants the most sophisticated ability to edit and view Word documents on an iPhone will want to have the flexibility that comes with owning both apps.

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