Apple has been running its “there’s an app for that” television commercial campaign for some time now. (You can see all of them on Apple’s website.) Apple now has a section of its website titled Apps for Everything which includes nicely designed pages showing you the apps that are useful for Cooks, Keeping Current, the Great Outdoors, Music, Work, Students, Moms and Dads, Working Out, Going Out, Managing Money, Traveling and Fun and Games.
What, no page for lawyers? Actually, the Work page identifies many apps that lawyers would find useful, such as Quickoffice, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, Nexonia Expenses and others.
Like everything that Apple does, these pages have generated discussion and even controversy. For example, Roy Furchgott, who covers smartphones for the New York Times and writes a weekly column that recommends iPhone apps, wrote an article titled “Is that a recommendation, or an ad?” in which he wonders whether developers paid Apple to be listed on this new page. I actually doubt that these are ads. I have seen developers write in the past that they were surprised to see their apps featured in a TV commercial or the icon for their app displayed at an Apple Store. Apparently, Apple has the right to use any images that it wants from an iPhone app without seeking prior permission from a developer, not that most developers would object to the free publicity. For this reason, I suspect that these developers were surprised, albeit tickled, to see their apps featured on these pages.
With over 85,000 apps, it is increasingly difficult to find the good ones. Even though relatively few apps are identified, it is always helpful to have some good apps pointed out. So if you consider yourself a person who likes to work, cook, go out, travel, etc., take a look at Apple’s new page. You just might find an app that you like.
Yesterday, Apple announced that there are now 85,000 apps in the app store
and over two billion iPhone apps have been sold (although, of course, many apps are free). Apple said that more than half
a billion apps were downloaded in the last three months alone. Indeed, it has
been less than three weeks since Apple announced
that there were over 75,000 apps and 1.8 billion downloads. A little history to put this in perspective:
7/10/08: App Store opens
7/14/08: 10 million apps sold; 800 apps available (Apple PR)
9/9/08: 100 million apps sold; 3,000 apps available. (Apple PR)
10/22/08: 200 million apps sold; 5,550 apps available (Macworld)
12/5/08: 300 million apps sold; 10,000 apps available (iPhone J.D.)
1/16/09: 500 million apps sold; 15,000 apps available (iPhone J.D.)
3/17/09: 800 million apps sold; 25,000 apps available (Macworld)
4/24/09: 1 billion apps sold; 35,000 apps available (Apple PR)
7/14/09: 1.5 billion apps sold; 65,000 apps available (Apple PR)
9/28/09: 2 billion apps sold; 85,000 apps available (Apple PR)
And because a picture is worth 1,000 words:
The growth in apps is nothing short of astonishing. When the App Store opened in July of 2008, I don’t think that anyone honestly thought that there would be 2 billion apps sold barely more than a year later. And we still have a few months left in 2009, including the holiday buying season. How long will it take to hit 3 billion apps downloaded?
The iPhone includes a passcode lock feature. About a year ago, when iPhone Software 2.0 was out, Apple received bad publicity because there was an easy way to bypass the passcode just by double-clicking the home button. That flaw was fixed last year and there have been other updates to the iPhone passcode lock feature in iPhone Software 3.1, so I thought this would be a good time to take a close look at this feature.
You enable the feature by going to Settings –> General –> Passcode Lock. The default is to have a four character passcode, all numbers (although as noted below, this can be changed to something more complicated). When the passcode lock is turned on, a person who picks up your iPhone cannot use it (except for emergency calls) without entering the four digit password. The passcode lock is a nice first level of security for your iPhone just in case it is picked up by a “bad guy” or, for that matter, a child.
A person who picks up an iPhone with the passcode lock enabled has 10 chances to enter the correct code, but that doesn’t mean that he can just try 10 different codes in a row. After six incorrect attempts, the person must wait one minute before trying again. If the seventh attempt is wrong, the person must wait 5 minutes before trying again. If the eighth attempt is wrong, the person must wait 15 minutes before trying again. If the ninth attempt is wrong, the person must wait 60 minutes before trying again. After 10 incorrect attempts, what happens next depends upon your settings. By default, after 10 incorrect attempts the iPhone tells you that you must connect the iPhone to iTunes to unlock it and does not allow you to try to guess the password again. Alternatively, in Settings –> General –> Passcode Lock you can turn on the “Erase Data” after 10 failed passcode attempts feature. With this on, after 10 incorrect attempts, the iPhone will erase all data. On an iPhone 3GS, this happens instantly because the 3GS simply removes the encryption key to all data on the device. On the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G, the iPhone erases all data by writing over the data, a process that can take two hours or more. (You can’t use the iPhone while this is taking place.) Note that one danger of telling your iPhone to erase all data after 10 incorrect attempts is that you will no longer be able to use MobileMe to track your iPhone’s location, send messages to the iPhone, etc. If you accidentally erase all data on your iPhone, you can still restore the data by using iTunes to apply your latest backup.
You can set how long it takes for the iPhone’s passcode lock to be enabled. The choices are immediately (every time you wake the iPhone), after 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour or 4 hours. However, starting with iPhone Software 3.1, if you are syncing with a Microsoft Exchange server for e-mail, contacts or calendar, you may find that you have fewer options. For example, here are two screen shots of the Require Passcode setting. The one on the left is from my iPhone; the one on the right is from another lawyer’s iPhone who does not work at my law firm. Both of us are using Exchange and both of us are running iPhone 3.1, but you can see that I have fewer options:
I am more limited because my law firm’s Exchange server imposes a “maximum inactivity time lock” on mobile devices. (I believe that ours is set to 20 minutes, and when you combine the up to 5 minutes before an iPhone auto-locks plus up to 15 minutes for a passcode lock, that is a maximum of 20 minutes of inactivity to lock the iPhone.) Before iPhone Software 3.1, the iPhone did not pay attention to an Exchange Server’s maximum inactivity time lock. This was a security flaw, one that was pointed out to Apple by iPhone users at PepsiCo, Intel Corporation, Edward Jones and Agilent Technologies. When Apple fixed this issue in 3.1, it explained what it had done on this page and gave credit to the individuals at those companies who pointed out the flaw. So if you, too, are looking to become famous on an Apple security page, let them know if you find another security flaw.
Speaking of iPhones and Exchange servers, the following Exchange ActiveSync password policies are supported in iPhone Software 3.1:
Require a password
Minimum password length
Maximum failed password attempts
Require both numbers and letters in the password
Inactivity time in minutes
Allow or prohibit simple password
Password expiration
Password history
Minimum number of complex characters in password
Even if a company doesn’t use Exchange, a company can set these settings by using device profiles. The following comes from the Apple Enterprise Deployment Guide (PDF link), which explains what the different passcode settings mean:
Require passcode on device: Requires users to enter a passcode before using the device. Otherwise, anyone who has the device can access all of its functions and data.
Allow simple value: Permits users to use sequential or repeated characters in their passcodes. For example, this would allow the passcodes “3333” or “DEFG.”
Require alphanumeric value: Requires that the passcode contain at least one letter character.
Minimum passcode length: Specifies the smallest number of characters a psscode can contain
Minimum number of complex characters: The number of non-alphanumeric characters (such as $, &, and !) that the passcode must contain.
Minimum passcode age (in days): Requires users to change their passcode at the interval you specify
Auto-Lock (in minutes): If the device isn’t used for this period of time, it automatically locks. Entering the passcode unlocks it.
Passcode History: A new passcode won’t be accepted if it matches a previously used passcode. You can specify how many previous passcodes are remembered for comparison.
Grace period for device lock: Specifies how soon the device can be unlocked gain after use, without re-prompting for the passcode.
Maximum number of failed attempts: Determines how many failed passcode attempts can be made before the device is wiped. If you don’t change this setting, after six failed passcode attempts, the device imposes a time delay before a passcode can be entered again. The time delay increases with each failed attempt. After the eleventh failed attempt, all data and settings are security erased from the device. The passcode time delays always begin after the sixth attempt, so if you set this vlue to 6 or lower, no time delays are imposed and the device is ereased when the attempt value is exceeded.
Another passcode lock change in iPhone Software 3.1 is that, if you use MobileMe, you can now jump on the MobileMe website and tell your iPhone to immediately lock itself and even supply a new four digit code, which will override any passcode previously set on the iPhone. This could be useful if someone gets access to your iPhone and knows your
prior passcode. I tested this feature and it works great; a fraction
of a second after I told MobileMe to lock my iPhone, my iPhone
immediately went into Auto-Lock mode and wouldn’t allow access until I entered
the new code. Of course, for this feature to work, your iPhone must be on and must be on the network. A smart thief could remove the SIM chip, which prevents MobileMe from finding the iPhone, or just turn off MobileMe on the iPhone. (By the way, in my tests, after removing the SIM chip, sending a lock command via MobileMe, then reinserting the SIM chip, it took a full 15 minutes before the MobileMe-initiated iPhone lock took effect.) But thieves are often not very smart, and there are many stories of people finding stolen or misplaced iPhones thanks to MobileMe (such as 1, 2, 3). Thus, with MobileMe, you have a possible solution to a lost iPhone that otherwise would not exist.
Does the use of a passcode lock mean that no bad guys could ever access your personal data on the iPhone? Unfortunately, no. Security experts such as Jonathan Zdziarski have come up with ways for law enforcement agents to recover data from an iPhone notwithstanding the iPhone’s built-in security features. If cops know how to do it, you can bet that there are some bad guys who also know. A garden-variety thief won’t know how to do this, but a smart and dedicated hacker can probably find a way to access data on your iPhone if he tries hard enough. (For example, see this article from Wired.)
While the passcode lock is not a perfect security solution for your iPhone, I still believe it is worthwhile feature to enable and I encourage you to do so if you are an attorney or otherwise have confidential information on your iPhone (such as in your emails). It is a minor annoyance to have to enter a passcode after 15 minutes (or up to 4 hours) of non-use, but it provides you with security that will stop all but a few elite hackers from gaining access to you e-mail and other personal data if your iPhone falls into the wrong hands.
[UPDATE 4/22/10: Here is an article from the Apple Knowledge Database on understanding the passcode lock feature.]
The October issue of the ABA Journal includes the article “70 Sizzling
Apps” identifying useful apps for the iPhone, other smartphones and
even the computer. [UPDATE 10/6/09: I just received my print edition, and the article starts on page 80.] The author, Chicago attorney Gabriella Filisko, included some of my
thoughts in the article. Like most ABA Journal articles, it is well done, and I think you will enjoy reading it. Having said that, this
article reminds me of the problems of a print publication in today’s fast-paced digital world. Filisko and
I spoke on May 21, 2009, which means it took four months for the article to be
published. Wow! Although the apps mentioned in that article are all
great ones, if I had to do the interview again today, I would have
mentioned some different apps. (For example, I wouldn’t have mentioned
Quickoffice without also mentioning Documents to Go; see here for more on both apps.) I love the fact that if there is something interesting in the world of iPhone that I think you should know about, I can post to my Twitter account and (if you follow me) you will know about it instantly, or I can make it a daily post on iPhone J.D. and you can know about it in the morning, or at the very least I can include it in my Friday weekly round-up and you’ll hear about it a few days later. I would never wait four months to bring you the news! I still subscribe to many monthly print magazines, but more and more often I find that articles which used to be considered “news” are now more like “history.”
Speaking of which, here are some of the iPhone-related news items that I ran across this past week:
Starting today, you will be able to download a new carrier profile through iTunes which will allow you to use MMS multimedia messages with the iPhone. This has generated a lot of publicity because MMS has been available for other cell phones for a long time and has been conspicuously absent from the iPhone. However, I, for one, don’t care much about this. Do people really use MMS that much anymore? If I want to send someone a picture, I just use e-mail, or maybe I upload the picture to MobilMe, Flickr, etc. But for those to whom this matters, the updated carrier profile will be available for download around late morning for those on the West Coast and this afternoon for those on the East Coast.
If you use Google’s Gmail for your email, calendar, etc., you can now have your new messages pushed directly to your iPhone just like you have been able to do with Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Exchange for a long time. You get push Gmail by setting up a new Gmail account on your iPhone but acting like it is an Exchange account. For more information, see this article from Macworld and these instructions from Google.
Netflix is coming to the iPhone, just not any time soon. In response to a recent question from Reuters about the possibility of streaming Netflix movies to the iPhone, iPhone Alley reports that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings responded: “It’s something that’s likely to come over time.
But nothing in the short term. (With) movie watching, we are not
focused on mobile yet, but (instead) on the TV, on Blu-ray and on the
video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the
iPhone.”
Galen Gruman writes an article for InfoWorld about the use of the iPhone with Microsoft Exchange. Gruman is not a fan, but the article has some interesting information.
John Brandon provides advice in Macworld for getting the best video from your iPhone 3GS.
The always entertaining Michelle Slatalla used to write the Online Shopper column for the New York Times, and she then wrote the great but short lived column on raising a family in the digital age called Cyberfamilias. Her current Times column is called Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy, and in this week’s article Does This Pencil Skirt Have an App? she discusses the iPhone weight loss app Lose It!.
For the law students who read this website: I got word from the BARBRI division of Thomson Reuters that the free BARBRI Mobile Bar Review Application is now available in the App Store. According to the press release: “BARBRI
Mobile gives students with an iPhone or iPod touch the ability to
answer thousands of StudySmart MBE questions as well as study BARBRI’s
Conviser Mini-Review. The BARBRI app closely tracks each student’s
progress, compares the student’s performance to thousands of bar exam
takers nationwide and provides individual feedback throughout the study
process. The app also helps law students prepare for final exams.
Enrolled students can watch exam review lectures, work multiple choice
questions or review outlines on their iPhone or iPod touch. Students
who are taking the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination
(MPRE) can access the MPRE lecture, StudySmart questions and
mini-review content.” It appears that the app includes some free information, but is most powerful if you are enrolled in a BARBRI course. Click here to get BARBRI (free):
The latest version of the Black’s Law Dictionary app, version 1.1,
now brings you back to the page you were looking at when you last used
Do you often find yourself trying to charge your iPhone at an
airport, only to find that someone else is already using the only
convenient outlet? Divorce attorney Lee Rosen has a great solution: carry a mini surge protector with you and ask to share the outlet. Smart idea. You can get the Belkin Mini Surge Protector
for only $15.22 at Amazon.
And finally, for all of you Starbucks addicts out there, Starbucks now has two free iPhone apps. The first one is called myStarbucks, and it can tell you the location of the closest Starbucks, includes an interactive menu to help you plan your drink (or food), and lets you save your favorite drinks, get nutritional information, etc. You can even pinch to zoom to change your drink from a tall to a grande to a venti. It’s nicely done, and helpful for those of us who can never remember the difference between a Vivanno and a Macchiato. Click here to get myStarbucks (free):
The second Starbucks app is called Starbucks Card Mobile, and it lets you check the balance on your Starbucks Card, reload your card, view your transactions, and even pay using the iPhone app. The pay feature is currently only active in 16 test locations in Silicon Valley and Seattle, but it may be a sign of what is to come on the iPhone from other companies. Click here to get Starbucks Card Mobile (free):
Throughout the year, at different locations around the world, Startup Weekend events are held. The participants have 54 hours to come up with an idea for a startup business and are given the resources, financial incentives and networking opportunity to help them do so. This past August, a Startup Weekend event was hosted by Microsoft on its Redmond, Washington campus. The winner was a mobile app for the iPhone and the Palm Pre called Learn That Name! The app is now available from the app store and I was eager to check it out because it is a great idea and was developed by (among others) two lawyers.
The initial idea for Learn That App came from Eric Koester, at attorney in the Seattle office of Cooley Godward Kronish. Eric was embarrassed to sometimes find himself in the situation where he cannot remember the name of a person he encounters even though he knows that he knows the person. (We’ve all been there before.) Thus, his idea was to have a mobile app that uses some kind of flashcards to help you learn the names of people who are your contacts on LinkedIn, a social network focused on business connections. Eric pitched his idea on Startup Weekend and put together a team to develop the mobile app. You can learn a lot more about all of this from this comprehensive post by Eric.
Eric is not a computer programmer, but others on his team were. In fact, one of them was both a computer programmer and a lawyer, Chad Kirby who practices IP law with AXIOS Law Group. Chad knows how to write apps for the iPhone, and he sells several calculators on the app store through his company Uplake Media LLC including Calc Zero. Chad and the rest of the team put together the Learn That Name! app, and by the end of the weekend, the app was voted the best product developed at Startup Weekend. It also got some publicity because it was humorous for an iPhone app to win the top award at an event sponsored by Microsoft. In fact, because the app was not developed using Microsoft technology, the team wasn’t eligible to win the $5,000 award; instead that money went to the team that came in second.
Learn That Name! is an app with an interesting background, but it also turns out to be a very useful app if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts. When you first start the app you provide your LinkedIn username and password, and the app downloads your contacts. The game then starts and you see a picture of one of your contacts and four possible names. The faster you select the name that goes with the face, the more points you score. As the clock ticks down, incorrect names are removed to make it easier to guess. And if you get the name right, you get a “bonus question” to guess the company for which the person works. After five names the game ends, but you can keep playing again and again.
The concept is simple but it works. Using this app will improve your ability to match names (and companies) with faces in your LinkedIn contacts. Indeed, I suspect that all of us have used flashcards as a learning device at some point in our lives, so it is a proven educational method. The game aspect makes the learning fun.
I told Chad that this app would be even better if you could also pull contacts from other sources, such as your e-mail address book, Facebook, etc. Chad agrees that these are great ideas to expand the app in the future, and hopefully that will happen even though the team is scattered now that Startup Weekend is over. Indeed, the app only costs 99¢, and since it is the result of 14 developers who split the profits (after Apple takes its 30% cut), they each only get about a nickel for each sale, as Eric told TechFlash. It may take a lot of sales to have a financial incentive to add more features. But even in its current implementation, the app is great if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts and you can use some help matching names and faces.
There are many date calculators available for the iPhone. I reviewed DaysFrom, DateCalcPro and Date Calc five months ago, and I reviewed Court Days two months ago. I was impressed with Court Days, an app which allows you to calculate dates either counting calendar days (seven days a week) or workdays (excluding weekends) and which automatically takes into account the court holidays in your jurisdiction, but I wished that there was some way that you could see and have more control over the specific dates being counted as holidays so that you can confirm that the correct dates are being counted.
The developer, attorney Dan Friedlander, tells me that he is looking into adding this feature to Court Days, but in the meantime he has come out with a related app called Workdays that may appeal to many attorneys. Just as was the case with Court Days, Workdays lets you calculate three dates based on an initial date, either including or excluding weekends. They can either all count from the same initial date, or you can turn on “sequential dates” and they will count one after each other. (For example, a the first calculation might be 30 days from the starting date not counting weekends, then the next calculation might be 5 days after that including weekends, etc.)
After Workdays calculates dates for you, you can click the e-mail button at the top left to e-mail the full results to yourself or someone else. (This is a feature that Dan also plans to add to Court Days.)
Workdays has an option to not count federal holidays, and you can tap the information button to see what those holidays are. But what makes Workdays unique is the ability to create your own list of custom holidays. Just select a date and then add it to your list of custom holidays. So with this app, you could manually add each date that you know that a court is closed for the upcoming year, and then the app will always count correctly, excluding when appropriate those holidays.
Workdays requires a little more up-front work on your part to enter all of the holidays in your jurisdiction, but if you want to have complete control over the days that are counted in a date calculator, you’ll really like the way that Workdays works. And like all of Dan’s otherapps, at 99¢ this app is cheap enough that even if you only use it occasionally, you won’t feel guilty about the purchase.
I often hear people say that they love their iPhone, but they hate that they can’t get reliable AT&T service in X location, where “X” might be their home, their office, etc. AT&T now has a solution for this, the AT&T 3G MicroCell. You simply place a MicroCell unit in that troublesome location—for the sake of example, let’s say it is your office—and connect the unit to your office’s broadband internet connection. The MicroCell will create a mini-3G network in your office, up to 5,000 square feet, that will provide excellent signal strength for up to 10 different phones that you authorize to use the MicroCell. When an iPhone is using a MicroCell, the carrier identifier at the top left of the iPhone screen changes from “AT&T” to “AT&T M-Cell.”
The service was unveiled yesterday in one test location: Charlotte, NC. In this test market, the MicroCell device will cost you $150. Using a MicroCell’s 3G uses up the minutes on your AT&T plan, but if you pay another $20 a month, you can get unlimited calls in your MicroCell location. (If you are an AT&T landline customer, that price drops to $10 a month, and if you are both an AT&T landline customer and an AT&T internet customer, the unlimited calls are free.)
These prices may change once AT&T rolls out the service nationwide, and AT&T hasn’t yet said when the rollout will happen. While you wait for the service to come to your area, you can click here to see what the unit looks like for those in Charlotte who got a MicroCell yesterday. (Link via Engadget.) I will be interested to hear the reports from people in Charlotte, but if it does what AT&T promises, this will be a great solution for iPhone owners who are troubled by one specific location at which they cannot get reliable AT&T service.
[UPDATE 9/23/09: Here is a very positive review from one of the first guys to buy one of these.]
There are a large number of iPhone apps that can be used to track the amount of time that you spend working on a project. I’ve heard that many attorneys find these apps useful for keeping track of billable hours, especially while out of the office.
I haven’t found the need to use one of these apps myself, but it makes sense to me that some lawyers find them useful, so I have tried to keep tabs on them. I posted a fairly comprehensive survey of the then available time tracking apps in January of this year, and I followed up with additional posts in February (1, 2) and April.
Since then, many of those apps have been updated and are even better. For example, I was impressed with the prior version of Time Master, and this month the app was updated to version 2.0, adding many features, including:
CSV attachments in email
the app is now Time Zone aware for when you travel
refined “setup” screen
added rounding option to clients
additional Note field added to Projects, Tasks and Expenses for those who want an extra code feature
…and many more
Moreover, since I last took a close look at this category of apps, other good apps have come out. For example, Fossil, which was released earlier this month, has a really beautiful interface and is feature-packed. You can use it to track both time and expenses. If you are in the market for a time tracking app, you should check this one out as well. It costs $6, about the same as the other good time tracking apps, and the developer tells me that a free, lite version will be available soon (to be called “Fossil-Icebreaker”) which will let you kick the tires a bit before you buy. Here are two screens from the app:
I often hear from vendors of time tracking apps, but I would love to hear from attorneys who use these apps to learn which ones you like best. Send me an e-mail and I will share your experiences with others, or just post a comment for everyone to read.
Every year in December, the ABA publishes a list of the top 100 law blogs (blawgs) in the ABA Journal. Last year’s results are here, and there are some great blogs on the list. iPhone J.D. was launched in November of 2008—far too late to be included in last year’s list—but I hope to be included in this year’s list so that even more lawyers using iPhones can find out about this site.
The ABA is accepting “Amici” submissions to help them pick the top blawgs that other lawyers should know about. Click on this link if you want to tell the ABA about one or more blawgs that you enjoy. I would obviously be thrilled if any of you mention iPhone J.D., but please don’t feel compelled to do so. Indeed, the ABA Journal editors have explicitly said that they will look unfavorably on “campaigns to flood us with comments about a particular blog,” and the last thing I need is one of you showing off your iPhone programming skills by writing an app that votes once a minute! But I did want you to know about the ABA’s request for submissions, so now you do. The deadline is Friday, October 2.
Now I need to decide which ones I will suggest. There are so many good choices!
It’s Friday, so you know what that means. TGIF! Well, yes, but also, here is my weekly round up of iPhone-related stories that I think you might want to check out.
Andy Ihnatko provides humorous but true answers to the question of whether should you pay $100 a year for Apple’s MobileMe service. Ihnatko concludes, and I agree, that it is worth it, in part because of the iPhone features. If you decide to sign up, click here
to get it from Amazon for only $66.
Looking for a case to protect your iPhone but don’t want to spend a lot of money? Case-Mate sells the iPhone 3G / 3GS Recession Case for only $0.99, or $0.79 if you buy in bulk. It is made of cardboard, so you have infinite options for decorating the case. (Pens and markers for doing so not included.) Thanks to Ernie Svenson for the link, who saw it on CraziestGadgets.com. I’ve since seen it posted just about everywhere else, including Engadget, so I might as well post it here too.
Gizmodo posted this neat video of an iPhone as seen by an X-Ray camera.
With the new $20 Seat Buddy, you can attach your iPod to the back of the chair in front of you on an airplane, a treadmill, and other surfaces.
for Engadget late last week about the omission of a camera from the new
iPod touch. He points out that when it comes to video and still
cameras, you get both on the iPhone 3GS, still on the 3G, video on the
nano, and neither on the touch, and he ends with the amusing
observation: “iPod touch users may be condemned to carry a separate
digital camera
and endure burdens such as optical zoom, image stabilization, and
vastly better image quality.” If you missed the article last week it
is a short but good read.
Beth Snyder Bulik wrote an interesting article for Advertising Age about companies coming out with iPhone apps for marketing purposes. Her favorites include Kraft’s iFood, Dunkin’ Donuts Dunkin’ Run and Benjamin Moore Ben Color capture.
First & 20 is a fun website that shows the first iPhone screen, and the 20 apps on that screen, of some folks of note in the tech community.
Uquery, a website launched earlier this month, allows you to search for iPhone apps. It seems to work very well.
You may not know this, but the iPhone includes some really sophisticated accessibility features for people with disabilities. This post on the Mac-cessibiilty website includes a list of all of the new features added in last week’s iPhone Software 3.1. Even more impressive is this video on Apple’s website. Because the iPhone has almost no buttons and relies on a touch interface, I would have thought that the visually impaired could not possibly use an iPhone. Boy was I wrong.
Defenders of the Second Amendment will be pleased to see that the Gun Rights iPhone App has been updated to version 3.0. The app includes firearms related news, videos and information on gun shows. However, what really caught my eye is that this app is an innovative legal marketing tool. The app is the brainchild of Jason Davis, a California attorney who specializes in firearms law. The app includes updates from Davis’s Twitter feed and “attorney resources” so that you can contact, and presumably hire, Davis to handle your firearms-related legal needs. Very creative.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, LucasArts became well-known for its point-and-click graphics adventure games. One of its most successful games was The Secret of Monkey Island, released in 1990. LucasArts recently re-released the classic game for the iPhone for $7.99, and to celebrate tomorrow being International Talk Like a Pirate Day (I hope you didn’t forget to mark your calendar this year), you can purchase the game today and this weekend for only $3.99. By the way, if you ever need help talking like a pirate, former Simpson Thatcher attorney George Choundas wrote the definitive book on the subject: The Pirate Primer: Mastering the Language of Swashbucklers & Rogues. George and I went to college together, and he is very funny, as you can see from this interview. Arrgh! Anyway, click here to get The Secret of Monkey Island ($3.99 for a limited time):
Here is yet another story of a lawyer demanding that jurors be instructed not to use iPhones in court. I previously discussed this issue in this post.
And finally, I think you will enjoy watching this “incredible, amazing, awesome” version of the most recent Apple keynote:
