I will be out of the country until Labor Day so
it will be pretty quiet here on iPhone J.D. until Tuesday, September 8, 2009. If I come across any iPhone-related items of interest while I am abroad that are worth sharing with you, I may post something on Twitter, if you want to follow me there. @jeffrichardson is my Twitter account. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of August, and I’ll see you in two weeks!
-Jeff
It was another week packed with lots of interesting iPhone news. Here are some of the interesting stories that I ran across.
Last month, I reviewed the Skype app for the iPhone and talked about how it is a great and almost free way to call back to the U.S. when you are traveling abroad, as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection. Earlier this week, Matt Gross, author of the Frugal Traveler column in the New York Times, published an interesting article called “Calling Home for Even Less” which discusses using services like Skype on the iPhone to call home when you are abroad. If you travel internationally for work or pleasure, you should read this article.
Gross notes that one of his current favorites is a service called Voxox, which works well if you are using a cellphone while abroad in which you have inserted a local SIM card. What he likes about Voxox is the SMS callback feature, which he describes as follows:
Say I’m in Buenos Aires, using a local SIM card, and I want to call my wife in New York City. I simply send a text
message with her number to Voxox, and seconds later my phone rings. I
pick up, wait a couple more seconds, and there’s her wonderful voice,
asking when I’m coming home. (Soon, baby, soon.)What’s awesome about this system, which I’ve been testing the last
couple of weeks while traveling in Canada, is that you don’t need a
computer, Internet access or a fancy phone to make international calls.
(O.K., you’ll need to go online to give Voxox your local SIM number,
but that’s a one-time thing.)As long as you’ve got cellular service, you’re set. And it works
well. Only once have I sent the text message and gotten no response
whatsoever. In that case, I just waited a few minutes and tried again.
It worked, which is all I really ask for.
He says that the rates are quite good. For example, he says that an Argentina-to-Brooklyn call costs 9.48 cents a minute using Voxox, versus about 17.2 cents a minute using Skype. I presume that this math assumes that you are using Skype over a cell phone service. When you use Skype on an iPhone using a Wi-Fi connection, you can call any U.S. number for about 2 cents a minute, as noted on this chart on the Skype website. And U.S. toll free numbers (which I used for some conference calls) are free with Skype.
I’m about to travel internationally again, and I definitely plan to once again use the Skype app on the iPhone to call home to the U.S. because it is so cheap and easy to use. It doesn’t work well for receiving calls (you would have to be running the Skype app and be in an area with Wi-Fi at the moment that someone was trying to call you for the service to work), but it works great for scheduled calls where I agree via e-mail that I will call someone at a specified time and then I use the Skype app to do so.
I have many friends—lawyers and non-lawyers—who love NPR. Whether you are a casual listener like me or a dedicated listener of great NPR shows like Morning Edition, Car Talk or Wait Wait..Don’t Tell me, there is a lot to love in the new NPR News app.
Upon launch, the app presents you with a list of news stories. Tap any story to read the text of a story and, for those stories with an audio icon, you can listen to the associated NPR story. I love NPR on the radio when the story is one that interests me, but one of my gripes with NPR is that the stories are so detailed and in-depth that if the topic doesn’t interest me, I need to wait a while for the next story. Because this app lets you pick and choose just the stories that interest you, you get to hear only the good stuff. You can either listen immediately by tapping the “Listen Now” button or you can “Add to Playlist” to build up a list of stories before you start listening.
If you are interested in listening to a particular program, tap the Programs button and you can choose from a list of NPR programs. If one of the programs is playing live on any NPR station in the country, you can even listen to a live stream. For older shows you can listen to an archived version.
When you are listening to a show, you will see a stop button and a progress bar at the bottom. Unfortunately, once you stop a podcast, you cannot resume from the same point. In other words, it is a stop button, not a pause button. You also cannot scrub through a program to fast forward through it, although an NPR representative told TUAW that scrubbing is coming in the next update, version 1.1.
As noted in the picture further up, when you tap the Programs tab you can either list All Programs or see a list of stories organized by topic. For example, here I am looking at the Technology stories and then choosing one to play:
There is also a Stations button at the bottom that allows you to select any NPR station in the country and listen to a live stream or on demand programs. The NPR station here in New Orleans is WWNO, which you can choose by tapping the state and then city, but the app also lets you find a station close to a zip code or use the iPhone’s GPS to quickly find the nearest station. I can even listen to the WWNO HD radio streams, something I cannot do in my car which lacks an HD radio.
If you want to see a video demo of the NPR app, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon prepared this YouTube video:
For a long time now, you have been able to subscribe to NPR shows via iTunes and get the programs on your iPhone that way. But having a dedicated NPR app that is updated throughout the day and which can stream live content makes it so much easier to find something worth listening to when you are out and about with your iPhone.
If you want to learn more about how the app came about, click here for a post on the NPR website called “The Making of the NPR News iPhone App.” The end of that story says that later this week, a new post will go up with the scoop on what is coming in the next update to the app. The NPR app is already great, and will only get better with updates. If you enjoy NPR news, get this app.
Click here to get NPR News (free):
Tekk Innovations is a small technology firm in Mountain View, California. One of the guys there, Kasim Te, worked as an aviation consultant and helicopter instructor which required him to constantly refer to a few titles of the Code of Federal Regulations. There are no iPhone apps containing the text of the CFR, so Te (who is not a lawyer) thought it would be helpful to make them. The result is around 50 different CFR iPhone apps, one for each title of the CFR.
Each of these apps is very bare bones and doesn’t come close to the features of statutory apps by Cliff Maier and The Law Pod. Start the app and you will see a top level index. Tap on a chapter to drill down to subchapters and parts to see the full text of a part.
On the main screen you can scroll up to find a search box, where you can enter a phrase and see sections that contain the word.
Unfortunately, the app does not highlight your search term in the results. Sometimes you happen to find the word easily (such as the above example of the word “passport” in 8 C.F.R. § 211.2, where it is the second word) but other times I found myself wasting a lot of time scrolling to find the word. And in a few cases, I could not find the word at all, and I have no idea why the section came up as a search result.
Another problem is that there is no way to export text from the app. The standard iPhone 3.0 behavior of selecting text does not work at all, nor is there any button that allows you to e-mail text. There is also no way to bookmark a section you use frequently. Each of these apps is just incredibly simple with no frills.
For example, if you compare Cliff Maier’s $7.99 CFR Patents app which contains the text of Title 37 (see here and here for reviews on iPhone J.D.) to Tekk Innovations’s $9.99 37 CFR app, the differences are numerous. Maier’s app has a better search feature, lets you bookmark favorite sections, lets you e-mail sections, allows you to view the layout in different ways, give you the option to browse backwards and forward through sections, and gives you the ability to jump to a specific section—great features that are all missing from Tekk Innovation’s app, which costs more.
But aside from Title 37, if you want the CFR on your iPhone, these Tekk Innovations apps are currently your only options. Kasim Te tells me that an update to the user interface is coming in the “near future,” so hopefully some of these missing features will be added soon. Even now, in their current simple state, these apps may be useful to some of you who frequently want to view a CFR title and don’t mind the limitations. Fortunately, Tekk Innovations has made it easy for you to decide whether these apps are useful to you; you can download Title 1 (general provisions) and Title 3 (The President) for free to give the apps a test spin. Each of the apps works the same way, so if you like what you see with Title 1 and 3, you can then buy the title that you want. Most titles are $9.99, but some are $4.99 and some are $19.99.
Click here to get 1 CFR (free):
Click here to get 3 CFR (free):
Click here to see a list on iTunes of all of the Tekk Innovations apps:
Earlier this month, in my comparison of Documents to Go and Quickoffice, I noted that it is difficult to compare the features of the two apps because it seems that every few weeks, one of the apps is being updated. Yesterday, DataViz updated Documents to Go to add new features.
First, DataViz addressed the one major shortcoming of Documents to Go compared to Quickoffice, the ability to change the font and font size. With this change, Documents to Go now contains all of the text editing features of Quickoffice. (Quickoffice lags behind Documents to Go, lacking the ability to handle underlining and footnotes.)
You can also now add (or remove) an indent to the first line of each paragraph:
Finally, Documents to Go now includes the iPhone 3.0 shake to undo feature, plus you can now send files on your iPhone using accounts other than Exchange accounts (such as Gmail and Yahoo e-mail accounts). If you want to view attachments to e-mails in your inbox, however, you can still only do this with Exchange accounts. (Quickoffice, by comparison, doesn’t let you directly access e-mail attachments from any account, but it does allow you to send an e-mail from any account to a specific e-mail address which sends the attached file to the Quickoffice server, from which you can then download the file into the Quickoffice app.)
Documents to Go still lacks the ability to edit Microsoft Excel files, but DataViz says that this is coming in the next update, which will be free for current users.
Click here to get Documents to Go with Exchange (currently $9.99):
Click here to get Document to Go without Exchange (currently $4.99):
There were lots of interesting iPhone articles and news this week, so lets jump right into it, shall we…
At $49.99, Black’s Law Dictionary (my review is here) is one of the most expensive apps that an attorney would buy for his or her iPhone. Nevertheless, the company tells a reporter for the ABA Journal that West has sold several hundred copies of the app so far. But you have to wonder, how many more would they have sold if they had priced it at $19.99? Or $9.99? 
I have frequently written about date calculator apps for the iPhone (1, 2, 3) but as Rick Georges writes on his FutureLawyer site, you can also just use Wolfram|Alpha to calculate dates. As I wrote a few months ago, that site works well on an iPhone.
There are small but definite signs that Apple is taking steps to improve the iPhone App Store. The first indication of it came during Apple’s 2009 Fiscal Third Quarter earnings call that took place on July 21, 2009. The reference was so vague that I didn’t even include it in my summary of the iPhone news in that call, but I have been thinking about it ever since then and now I do think that Apple revealed something of substance. Apple COO Tim Cook received a question from Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co., about the large number of cheap $0.99 apps making it difficult to find good apps on the App Store. In Cook’s response, he indicates that change is coming. Here is the question and the answer:
Q: Okay, well, let me ask a question about the App Store then. In
terms of application prices, there appears to be a race to the bottom.
I’ve noticed that there’s an increasing number of $0.99 offerings. Do
you regard this as a concern and if so, are you taking any steps to
enable consumers to separate quality apps from the garbage?A: Charlie,
we are always looking for ways to categorize apps differently and we do
have some ideas in this area. As you know, today we do it by type of
App and also have show popular apps and top-selling apps, etc. We realize there’s opportunity there for further improvement and are working on that.In
terms of the price, the developer sets the price and so it’s up to the
developer what to charge and I think what they are doing is they are
doing what any good business person would do, is doing the elasticity
analysis and deciding where to best set their price. I would think as
the installed base grows more and more and more, it makes more and more
sense to have a bit lower prices and, ah—but that’s totally up to the
developers and I am sure each of them may do that in a little different
manner.
The key statement to me was Cook saying that there’s opportunity for further improvement in the ways that the App Store categorizes apps and Apple is “working on that.”
Then came the news about a week later from places like AppleInsider and Macworld that Apple is now asking developers to submit 255 characters worth of keywords, separated by commas, when an app is submitted with the keywords to be used to improve searching for that app. I don’t believe that keywords are being used on the App Store yet—there is no indication of them—but whenever implemented, this should help when you are trying to find an app. Around the same time, Apple released new tools to help developers figure out how long it might take for an app to be approved, along with a way for important app updates to be expedited.
Then about a week later, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller took the very unusual step of writing a prominent blogger, John Gruber, to respond to a post about problems in the app approval process. I wrote about this last Friday.
And then a few days later, suggesting that Schiller’s openness might not be that unusual after all going forward, Schiller wrote to Steven Frank, founder of Panic Software, in response to Frank’s posts on his blog on July 31 and August 8 that he had stopped using his iPhone as a way of boycotting Apple for problems with the way that it reviews and approves apps, even though this meant that he would have to use a Palm Pre or an Android phone, neither of which he liked. (He wrote on July 31: “They are both lousy in comparison to the iPhone. And Sprint’s coverage
sucks in my neighborhood. I’m going to completely hate using it. I am
voluntarily going to make my own life a bit worse because I believe in
certain principles.”) Frank wrote on August 11 about Schiller e-mailing Frank to say that Apple was listening to Frank’s suggestions about ways to improve the App Store and, while not all of them were viable, Apple was planning to improve the app store.
(Note to Phil Schiller: If you want to call me too, feel free to do so. I’m sure that Apple has my iPhone number.)
And then there is the rumor
from a few days ago that Apple is planning to release a new version of
iTunes (version 9) that will let you visually reorganize your iPhone
apps using iTunes on your computer, something that would be very nice.
I usually shy away from reporting on rumors here because they are so
often just made up, but this is one that seems so logical to me that it would only be a surprise if they didn’t do it.
All of this is still very vague, but reading these many different tea leaves, it appears to me that Apple is very serious about addressing the shortcomings with
the App Store to make it a better experience for both customers and for
developers. How long before we see any improvements? Who knows, but I look forward to seeing what Apple shows us next.
Yesterday, I wrote about Jimmy Verner and the first iPhone app that he created, Texas Child Support Calculator. Verner’s second iPhone app is called Texas Litigation Deadlines.
I’ve written frequently about date calculators, both general date calculators and more recently Court Days, a calculator written especially for attorneys that takes into account different legal holidays in different states. Verner created an even more specialized app that calculates pretrial and posttrial deadlines in Texas civil courts, and Verner has done a great job.
I don’t practice law in Texas so I can’t say much about how dates are calculated there, but Verner, who is board certified in civil trial law, tells me that the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure are “bizarre, Byzantine [and] don’t even remotely resemble the federal rules or the rules of any other state.” This app helps you to navigate those rules. To use the app, you simply enter a starting date. It can be either a trial date (if you want to calculate pretrial deadlines) or a judgment date (if you want to calculate posttrial deadlines for either an ordinary or an accelerated appeal).
The app then tells you the date on which each of the significant events occurs. For example, if March 5, 2010 is the trial date, you can tap the “Pretrial deadlines” button and you will see a screen telling you the date of each of the significant dates, such as 120 days before trial, 45 days before trial, etc. You can tap on any date and the app tells you what is due along with a cite to the appropriate rule.
The app works the same way for posttrial deadlines. Enter a judgment date and you will see the appeal deadlines:
Like the Court Days app I previously reviewed, this app automatically excludes weekends and holidays. But unlike Court Days, this app includes a helpful information screen which, among other things, tells you exactly which legal holidays are being excluded:
This looks like a really useful iPhone app that any Texas litigator will frequently find very handy. If a similar app were available for Louisiana where I practice, I would buy it instantly.
Verner tells me that he has other good ideas for iPhone apps and that he even hired another software engineer to help him to bring the ideas to reality. I always love to hear about attorneys creating iPhone apps for other attorneys, and I look forward to seeing what Verner brings us next.
Click here to get Texas Litigation Deadlines ($19.99):
Jimmy Verner
is a board certified family law attorney in Dallas, TX. He has always been interested in streamlining the practice of law, ever since he started practicing law at the tail end of the IBM Selectric era when word processors first came out and he found that typing his own pleadings and letters was much more efficient than dictation. (I’ve always felt the same way, myself.)
Verner has no formal training in programming, but he was one of the early pioneers in using the Internet in the practice of law. In the 1990s, he created a website called WillMakers on which people could make their own simple wills online. Unfortunately, he was a little ahead of his time and the T-1 line he had to lease to handle the internet traffic was too expensive to make the effort worthwhile.
After practicing for 30 years, specializing in family law since 1990,
Verner realized that he acquired enough knowledge to build an online
child support calculator, essentially reverse-engineering the Texas
Family Code’s child support provisions and turning them into algebra.
That website is available here. He was showing the online calculator to his law partners when one of them suggested he turn it into an iPhone app.
Although Verner didn’t own an iPhone, his wife did. He had some extra time, having recently completed a Ph.D. program, so he signed up with Apple as a developer and bought the book Beginning iPhone 3 Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche and then bought an iPhone. He hired a software engineer to help him get started as he was first learning the ropes, but them finished up the app by himself and released Child Support Calculator (which he calls CS Calc for short) for the iPhone last month.
I am a big fan of iPhone apps that make it very simple to do a specific task that would otherwise be complicated or hard to remember, and CS Calc is definitely one such app. CS Calc lets you calculate Texas child support payments simply and easily on the fly without having to drag out the Family Code and extrapolate or estimate. You simply enter five variables—whether self employed, gross annual income, number of children before the court, cost of health insurance for the children, and number of other children supporting—and the app instantly provides the Texas guideline child support.
These two screens are all you need to use the app, but Verner also includes a long information screen that explains to you exactly what the app is doing and why it is doing it. Here are the first two pages:
Although I don’t practice family law, I can definitely see the usefulness of an app like this. Verner tells me that he is considering similar apps for other states, but they would be more complicated. For example, Verner tells me that most states follow the “income shares” child support model which requires financial data about both parents to calculate child support whereas Texas only looks to financial data about the obligor. But even though Verner’s current target market is currently just Texas, he notes that “Texas is a huge state with millions of people paying or receiving child support” so there should be ample interest in this app from both family law practitioners and individuals who owe child support. The reviews so far on iTunes have been positive, with one reviewer calling the app “Simple, efficient and mobile. Great at mediation, courthouse or settlement conference.” If you practice this area of law, this looks like money well spent.
Thanks to Jimmy Verner for telling me about this great app. He has already released a second iPhone app, a Texas litigation deadlines calculator, which I will be take a look at later this week.
Click here to get TX Child Support Calculator ($7.99):