Month: March 2010

Yesterday afternoon, Apple released an update to iTunes on the Mac and PC, bringing the version number to 9.1.  The primary reason for the update was to get iTunes ready for the iPad, but there are a few minor changes that iPhone owners will notice.

First, there are some cosmetic changes to the Summary tab that appears when you connect your iPhone to iTunes.  Here is a comparison.  The Summary tab in 9.0 had the different regions in either white or gray:

The new Summary tab in iTunes 9.1 now has gray boxes around each region:

 

A minor cosmetic change, but I suppose that someone at Apple though it looked better this way.  The only new feature on the Summary tab is the addition of the option “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” for the iPhone (and iPod touch), an option that used to only work with the iPod nano and Shuffle.  If you have songs in iTunes at a very high bit rate to give you super high quality, you can choose to instead sync a 128 kbps version of the song to your iPhone to save some space on your iPhone.

Another minor change is that the tab at the top of the iPhone section of iTunes that used to say Applications now simply says Apps.  The new short name for the tab makes sense because everyone calls them apps anyway, but additionally the shortening of that tab gave Apple room to add an additional tab called Books.  Before iTunes 9.1, audio books were handled under the Music tab.  Now, both audio books and the new iBooks that Apple will be selling for the iPad are placed under the new Books tab.

I also noticed a very minor change on the Apps tab that might be cosmetic but has the potential to add functionality.  Previously, you could sort items by name, category or date by pressing a button.  Now, you have those same choices in a pop-up list.  This change makes it easier to add other sort fields in the future.  (For example, perhaps there will be different ways to sort iPad versus iPhone apps?  We’ll find out this Saturday.)  Here is the old way (on the left) and the new way under iTunes 9.1 (on the right):

    

If you use Genius Mixes (I don’t), iTunes 9.1 now lets you rename, rearrange or remove those mixes.  Additionally, seven security flaws on the Windows version of iTunes and one security flaw on some of the Mac versions of iTunes have been addressed, which is always nice.

One of the great traditions of ABA TECHSHOW is to have sessions with a title of 60 ____ in 60 Minutes.  The final session of the conference is the very popular 60 Sites in 60 Minutes, and the popular Friday night presentation is 60 Tips in 60 Minutes.  In that spirit, last week Reid Trautz and I presented 60 Apps in 60 Minutes, a collection of the most notable apps for attorneys using an iPhone.  In many cases, we selected what we considered to be the best apps.  In some cases, we mentioned an app just because it served as an example, such as the La. Civil Code app that I picked knowing full well that only Louisiana attorneys would use it, but it is a nicely done app with features that should be copied by others, plus it is an example of the usefulness of having the law of the state in which you practice on your iPhone.  And in a few cases, we mentioned an app just because it was funny.

A bunch of you have asked me for the full list of the apps that we discussed.  Those who attended will be able to download our slides from the ABA TECHSHOW website later this week, but here is a full list of the apps that we discussed.  If you want more information, many of these have previously been reviewed here; click on “iPhone J.D. Index” at the top right to get links to those reviews.

60 Apps in 60 Minutes, 2010 Edition

Research and Accessing the Law

1. Fed. R. Civ. Pro. by Cliff Maier ($2.99): 

   

2. Black’s Law Dictionary ($49.99): 

   

3. Barron’s Law Dictionary ($14.99): 

   

4. La. Civil Code ($6.99): 

   

5. U.S. Code by Prof. Shawn Bayern (free): 

   

6. Fastcase (free): 

   

7. Lexis Get Cases & Shepardize (free): 

   

8. Congress in Your Pocket ($0.99) 

   

   ; ($4.99) 

   

   ; ($29.99)

   

9. Merck Manual ($9.99) 

   

   ; ($29.99) 

   

10. Drug Trials (free): 

    

11. Wikipanion (free)

    

    ; ($4.99)

    

12. People (free): 

    

13. Google Mobile (free): 

    

14. Bing (free):

    

Viewing and Editing Documents

1. Documents to Go ($9.99)

   

   ; ($14.99)

   

2. Quickoffice ($9.99)

   

   ; ($14.99)

   

3. Office² ($5.99): 

   

4. Zosh ($2.99): 

   

5. Bento ($4.99):

   

6. ScanR Business Center ($24.99): 

   

Remote Access

1. LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99): 

   

2. Dropbox (free): 

   

Personal Productivity

1. Groups ($4.99): 

   

2. Time tracking apps (various)
3. Things ($9.99): 

   

4. Personal Assistant (free)

   

   ; ($6.99)

   

5. Evernote (free): 

   

6. Dragon Dictation (free): 

   

7. SpeakWrite (free): 

   

8. Awesome Note (free)

   

   ; ($3.99)

   

9. West CLE Mobile (free): 

   

Travel

1. GateGuru (free): 

   

2. MotionX GPS Drive ($0.99): 

   

3. Skype (free): 

   

4. Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (free): 

   

5. The Weather Channel (free) 

   

   ; ($3.99)

   

6. WeatherBug (free)

   

   ; ($0.99)

   

7. AutoPark ($4.99): 

   

Utilities

1. Eye Glasses ($2.99): 

   

2. DaysFrom Date Calculator ($0.99): 

   

3. AppBox Pro ($0.99): 

   

4. Keynote Remote ($0.99): 

   

5. AT&T’s Mark the Spot (free): 

   

6. Pastebot ($2.99): 

   

7. Gorillacam (free): 

   

8. Print n Share ($6.99): 

   

9. ZeroTap (free): 

   

Marketing and Social Networking

1. Facebook (free): 

   

2. Twitterific (free)

   

   ; ($4.99)

   

3. TweetDeck (free): 

   

4. Bump (free): 

   

5. UStream Live Broadcaster (free): 

   

6. No Traffic Tickets (free): 

   

7. MoFo2Go (free): 

   

Assisting With Your Personal Life

1. NotifyMe (free)

   

   ; ($3.99)

   

2. Grocery IQ ($0.99): 

   

3. Siri (free): 

   

4. Anti-Mosquito Pro ($0.99): 

   

5. Bills ~ On Your Table ($1.99): 

   

6. Yelp (free):

   

7. RadLaser ($1.99): 

   

8. Relax ($2.99): 

   

9. Amazon Kindle (free): 

   

10. Mint (free): 

    

Entertainment

1. DirecTV (free): 

   

2. Cocktails+ ($2.99): 

   

3. Lightsaber Duel (available soon)
4. Pandora Radio (free): 

   

5. SoundHound ($4.99): 

   

6. RunPee Mobile ($1.99): 

   

7. More Cowbell ($0.99): 

   

Whether you were there or not this year, I hope to see you at TECHSHOW
next year, April 11 – 13, 2011 in Chicago.

Last week at ABA TECHSHOW, one of the tips that I discussed in one of my iPhone presentations was the ability to hold down on a key on the iPhone U.S. keyboard to see a pop-up list of additional letters or symbols that are not on the main keyboard.  For example, if you hold down the letter “E” you will see the following:

 

When I was preparing my slides, I couldn’t find a good comprehensive list of all of the additional letters and symbols that could be typed by holding down a key, so I created my own list for my presentation, and here it is for those of you who could not attend.

The vowels A, E, I, O and U:

The consonants C, L, N, S, Y and Z:

 

The punctuation marks and symbols:

Additionally, there are many characters that the iPhone is capable of creating or viewing that cannot be typed from the U.S. keyboard, even if you hold down a key.  However, there is a simple web app called created by developer Neven Mrgan called Glyphboard that you can use to access some of those characters.  (For example, I wrote this post last year about using Glyphboard to create an en dash.)  To use Glyphboard, go to this address on your iPhone:  http://mrgan.com/gb/  Then follow the
on-screen directions and press the plus sign at the bottom of your
Safari screen to Add to Home Screen.  Then click on the icon that you
just added to your home screen to start the web app, and you can copy a
special character from Glyphboard and then paste it someplace else, such
as in an e-mail.  Glyphboard includes 48 special characters. 

Note, however, that some of those characters may not display on a PC.  The following characters can be created with Glyboard and should display on most PCs (although this can vary from browser to browser and setup to setup), so you are likely safe to add them to your e-mails and text messages if you want to be fancy:

☺ ♥ ♪ ♫⇧ ↑ ↓ ← → 
♀ ♂ – © ™ ∞ ± ≠ π ² 
¼ ⅓ ½ ¾ ¶ ♠ ♦ ♣

On the other hand, the following characters can be created and displayed on the iPhone using Glyphboard but are unlikely to display correctly on a PC (although again this can vary from system to system), so think about what kind of computer the other person is using before you include them in an e-mail.

☹ ★ ✔ ♨ ☂ ✈ ⌚  ⌘ ⌥ ⌃ ☞ ☮ ☯ ✿ ✉ ☎ ✄ ☠ ☃ ✪

And just in case you are viewing this post on a PC and the above line looks like gibberish to you, here is an image of those characters that iPhones and Macs can see:

I hope that you find this list helpful.

In the news is typically the Friday post here on iPhone J.D., but this is probably my last post of this week.  If you want more, you’ll have to come to Chicago and see me at ABA TECHSHOW.  

Even if you cannot make it to Chicago this year, you can still attend the pre-TECHSHOW event that occurs tonight, Ignite Law 2010, because it will be streamed live to the Internet starting at 7:30 Central.  Click here for more information.

Here are some of the interesting iPhone-related items that I came across over the last few days.

• As reported
  
  by Dan Moren of Macworld, Apple has added the ability to send someone
  
  an iPhone app as a gift.  Art of the iPhone provides more
  
  information on how it works.  Still unclear to me:  what happens if
  
  the person already has the app?
• This time last year, Apple allowed you to buy an iPhone in the U.S. without a two year AT&T contract, although the phone was more expensive and still only worked with AT&T.  Presumably it was an effort to clear inventory before the new iPhone 3GS came out in July.  Well here we are, one year later, and once again Apple is doing the same thing, as reported by Dan Moren of Macworld.  If you want to spend more, $499 to $699, for an iPhone you can get one without an AT&T contract.  But again, the only U.S. carrier it will work with is AT&T, so I suspect that few will want to do this.
• Rocket Matter, which sells online time and billing software for law firms that can be accessed from a computer or iPhone, produced a short, fun YouTube video to preview the schwag that they plan to give out at ABA TECHSHOW this week, as well as the schwag that they decided not to provide.
• Harry McCracken of Technologier has used an iPhone for years but recently switched to a Droid for a few weeks to see what Android is all about.  Here is his report of the advantages and disadvantages of a Droid versus an iPhone.
• Similarly, the ABA Journal asked attorneys Finis Price and Ryan McKeen to debate the merits of the two phones for lawyers.  The result is this article.
• Lex Friedman of Macworld compares Dragon Search and ACTRocket, two search apps for the iPhone.
• Steve Jobs was a critical impetus for a bill pending in California that would require the DMV to ask whether each person with a driver’s license wants to become an organ donor.  (Currently, a person needs to know to ask to have a sticker put on his license.)  AppleInsider reports on and has the video from the press conference by Steve Jobs, Governor Schwarzenegger, and others.  It seems like a reasonable bill that should be the law everywhere.  It is very rare to see Steve Jobs speak in public outside of an Apple event.
• What is becoming less rare is to hear about Steve Jobs personally responding to e-mails asking about upcoming Apple products and features.  When these reports come out, one never knows if they are true, but Michael Grothaus of TUAW rounds up some recent reports on e-mails reportedly sent by Jobs.  One that caught my eye was a supposed e-mail from Jobs saying that Apple is adding a universal inbox to Mail on the iPhone.
• Dave Caolo of TUAW writes about iPhone apps that can be used to track packages.
• Matt Newburg of TidBITS reviews Things, a To-Do List program for the Mac that syncs with an iPhone client.
• Art of the iPhone writes about and shows a video of Opera Mini, a web browser for the iPhone that was submitted to Apple for approval.  I don’t know whether Apple will approve it; there are no other third party browsers on the App Store that don’t rely on webkit, the backbone of Safari.  If Apple does allow Opera Mini, it would be significant because it would be approval of an app that duplicates a core function of the iPhone.  Note that this video shows Opera Mini being many times faster than Safari, but John Gruber writes that the speed increase may noticeable mostly on slower Edge connections; on Wi-Fi the speed advantage may decrease and the rendering is likely to be worse than Safari.  We’ll see.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that “Apple has seen strong demand” for the iPad and has already pre-sold “hundreds of thousands of units,
  
  say people familiar with the matter.”
• Most people need to wait until April 3 to get an iPad, but a select few — including  Major League Baseball, The Wall Street Journal and The New
  
  York Times — have one already, according to Brad Stone and Jenna Wortham of the Times who describe the secrecy required by Apple for those who currently have an iPad.  Douglas MacMillan of BusinessWeek has a similar report.
• Attorney Dennis Kennedy writes in the ABA Journal about whether the iPad could replace the legal pad for lawyers.
• And finally, here is a fun video showing someone using the icons on an iPhone to create the alphabet.  It took 540 icons to do.

I’m flying to Chicago tomorrow for the ABA TECHSHOW conference that runs Thursday through Saturday.  I look forward to talking with as many iPhone-using lawyers as possible to find out your favorite apps and uses for the iPhone, so please stop me to say hello if you are there!  (I look like this and this.)  And to help you find me, here are some items already on my schedule.  (You can get the complete TECHSHOW conference schedule in PDF format here.)

Wednesday

7pm – 8:30pm:  Ignite Law 2010.  I plan to attend this event, at which 16 speakers get just 6 minutes and 20 slides each to discuss the future of law.  Should be interesting.  It is free to attend, and you can sign up and get more details here.

Thursday

4pm – 5pm:  60 Apps in 60 Minutes.  Reid Trautz and I will be giving this presentation.  I hope that you can attend and I’d love to chat after the session.  The location is room Northwest 2.

5pm – 6pm:  ABA TECHSHOW Welcome Recption.  At the Normandie Lounge at the Hilton.  I will try to stop by after my presentation.

6pm – 7pm:  TechShow Tweetup.  LexisNexis is sponsoring the ABA TechShow Tweetup from 5:30 to 7:30 at Kitty O’Sheas Pub at the Hilton.  I’ll probably stop by whenever I leave the Welcome Reception.

7:15pm – ?:  Taste of Techshow.  Ernie Svenson and I are leading the iPhone-themed Taste of Techshow dinner.  If you own an iPhone, and if you eat dinner, then you should plan to join us.  There will be a sign up sheet at the show, at the concierge desk.  I believe that the location for our dinner will be Tutto
Italiano Ristorante.

Friday

2pm – 4pm:  Concierge Booth.  The concierge booth always tends to be a gathering spot throughout TECHSHOW so you may find me there frequently, but I’m specifically assigned to work at the booth on Friday from 2 to 4.

5:30pm – 7:30pm:  Beer for Bloggers.  The ABA Journal and legal blogging expert Kevin O’Keefe, the founder of LexBlog, Inc., are hosting the Beer for Bloggers event at the Lakeside Green Lounge in the Hilton.  You can get more information and sign up here on O’Keefe’s site or here on the ABA site.

Saturday

8:30am – 9:30am:  iPhone Tips for Lawyers.  Ben Stevens and I will be giving this presentation on tips and tricks for using your iPhone, including ways to
maximize the built-in iPhone apps such as Mail, Contacts and Safari, strategies and third-party apps that can help you
better integrate the iPhone into your law practice, and more.  Our location is room Northwest 5.

11am-Noon:  60 Sites in 60 Minutes.  I’ll definitely attend this final presentation of TECHSHOW, which is always a lot of fun.  You can see some of the sites selected in past years here.  This year, the speakers are Toby Brown, Debbie Foster, Adriana Linares and Ernie Svenson.  Of course, there will be hundreds of people attending, so the chance of you finding me in the room are pretty small, but I’ll be there somewhere.

Finally, this week I’m following the hashtag #techshow on Twitter so I’ll be listening to you if you include #techshow in your tweets.

For those of you headed to Chicago, I look forward to seeing you this week!

iPhone owners love to download apps, so it is understandable that many companies have produced iPhone apps for the purpose of marketing the company.  Even law firms have gotten into the act, and I discussed some early efforts this past January.

Morrison & Foerster, a megafirm that has been around since the 1800s and has over 1,000 lawyers, recently unveiled new marketing initiatives.  First, the law firm — which calls itself MoFo — unveiled a new website.  The design sparked a lot of controversy, but I like it; it’s unique and fun.  My only critique is that the font is Arial, and if a law firm wants to be seen as a leader, it should select the font Helvetica instead of Arial in light of the Arial’s reputation of being a cheap imitation of Helvetica.  (Having said that, I acknowledge that few people know the difference.)  The firm also unveiled an iPhone app called MoFo2Go (which uses Helvetica, not Arial, giving the app that extra touch of class over the website).  I’m still undecided on whether an iPhone app makes sense as a law firm marketing opportunity, but if you are going to do one, you need to check out the MoFo2Go app because this is an example of how to do it right.

First, the app is functional.  What would a client want in a law firm app?  Bios on attorneys and easy links to call or e-mail them, firm addresses, and perhaps firm news.  This app has all of this, and every screen is nicely formatted for the iPhone.  The attorney bio pages are organized either by attorney, by practice area, by office or by law school.  You can also do a search to find a person, although the app only searches for names and does not do a full text search of each attorney’s bio.

The Locations portion of the app is particularly well done.  Locations brings up a nice Google Map displaying not only a black pin for the office location, but also red pins for travel locations (airports, parking), green pins for recommended nearby restaurants, and blue pins for recommended nearby hotels.  This makes it very easy for a client to find places near the law firm.

I don’t know how often people would want to use an iPhone app to read news releases from a law firm, but the app also includes a news page brings up standard law firm news releases, including tech-related articles with pictures that are nicely formatted for the iPhone.  A user can also create notes related to an article, another feature that I suspect will get rare use, but its inclusion doesn’t take anything away from the app so why not include it.

In addition to the function, the app has some fun.  First, the app includes a maze game, giving the user a reason to start up the app even if he is not looking to get MoFo information.  Second, the app itself, like the website, is nicely laid out and has a vibrant, fun feel.

One problem with the app is that every time you launch it, you need to wait for the app to download new information — presumably updated bios, new news, etc.  I understand why this is necessary to ensure that the app is always current, but it is a drag to have to wait.

Overall, while I remain on the fence about whether a law firm should have an iPhone app, MoFo has shown one way to do it well.  Some other bloggers have been less kind
about this app, but I like it, and if I were a client of MoFo I could
see myself both using the app and having positive thoughts about the
firm because of the app.  I give the firm credit for doing something unique and doing it well, although some of the credit also goes to Rubenstein Technology Group, the developer of the app.

Click here to get MoFo2Go (free): 

The number of iPhone users should continue to grow, the New York Times loves talking about the iPhone, lots of people love to speculate about the iPhone, plus cheese, all in this week’s edition of In The News.

• Reuters has an article about patients being told by attorneys to use their iPhones to record appointments with their doctors, without telling their doctors.  Obviously, the doctors are not happy about this, nor are the malpractice attorneys who represent them.
• GigaOm has a neat infographic on smartphone OS share.
• As that GigaOm chart shows, there are still a lot of Blackberry owners, but Art of the iPhone reports on a study by Crowd Science that finds that 40% of Blackberry owners want their next phone to be an iPhone.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, 10% of Microsoft employees are using iPhones.  I presume they are hiding them in paper bags or something.
• Attorney Finis Price of TechnoEsq.com discusses PadNote, an app for the upcoming iPad that will allow you to easily annotate PDFs.  Price predicts that this could be very useful at trial, considering that the iPad has a VGA out port.
• Charles Starrett of iLounge writes
  
  that Apple is banning from the Apple Store all products which are, or
  
  which include, protective screen film.  I don’t use one of these
  
  products myself — I find the iPhone screen sturdy enough, I prefer the
  
  feel of the iPhone screen without a cover, and I especially like the
  
  oleophobic coating on the iPhone 3GS — but having
  
  reviewed the Invisible Shield product last year I can understand
  
  the appeal, and my wife likes having one on her iPhone.Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports on an update to the PayPal iPhone app that lets you send someone else money just by bumping iPhones, giving you an easy way to pay someone back or divide a check.
• Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times reports that the cable channel Epix is developing a new TV series called “iCon” written by Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons and television veteran Larry Charles.  The show will focus “on a fictional Silicon Valley CEO whose ego is a study in power and
  
  greed.”
• Brad Stone and Miguel Helft of the New York Times report on a rumored spat between Apple and Google because of Google coming out with phones to rival the iPhone.
• And the iPhone articles from the New York Times aren’t over yet.  Jenna Wortham has written several interesting iPhone-related stories
  
  for the New York Times over the last few months (previously discussed
  
  here: 1,
  
  2,
  
  3,
  
  4). 
  
  Her latest is this
  
  one in which she speculates that Apple may be developing a service
  
  called iGroup that would “use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to allow a group of
  
  users in the same area to
  
  share information such as contact information or chat about an event
  
  while it’s happening.”  Interesting, if true.
• If you are in the mood for more iPhone speculation, AppleInsider
  
  reports on an Apple patent that would add walkie-talkie
  
  capabilities to an iPhone.
• Let’s keep the speculation coming:  Stan Schroeder of Mashable reports
  
  that Chetan Sharma Consulting estimates that mobile app downloads on
  
  all smartphones, which were around 7
  
  billion in 2009, will jump to almost 50 billion in 2012, at which time
  
  the market
  
  will be worth $17.5 billion.
• I’m not sure if this is inside information, speculation, or just hopeful thinking, but according to Art of the iPhone, the parent company of T-Mobile USA has said that it hopes to offer the iPhone on T-Mobile by the end of 2010.
• Ars Technica reports on a study by mobile analytic firm Localytics which concludes that most iPhone app use occurs around lunch-time and around 9pm on weekdays, and throughout the day on weekends. 
• If you are a woman, you like to use your iPhone while you workout, and you don’t mind giving people a reason to stare at your chest, TiPb writes about Gracie Gear workout clothes with an iPhone holder built-in to the top.
• And finally, are you trying decide what food you serve when you have a party to celebrate your love of the iPhone, or perhaps the arrival of the iPad?  Ken Aversano, Director of Public Relations at the cooking enthusiast website CooksDen.com, with the help of his wife Diane, created a sculpture of Steve Jobs’s head made out of mozzarella cheese, and his website gives you step-by-step directions so that you can create one yourself.  Aversano even suggests three different servings:  Apple Cheese Plate, iPad Thai, and my personal favorite, Spicy Steve Nachos Supreme which starts out looking like Steve Jobs and then melts over your chips.  Here are a few pictures, but you should really check out The Cooks’ Den to see all of them.  Aversano’s creation has gotten him much attention, including an article in the L.A. Times.  I give the credit to New Orleans attorney Dewey Scandurro for bringing this one to my attention:

 

Last November, Gary McFarlen, a computer consultant in Texas, wrote a comment on iPhone J.D. asking if there were any time tracking apps that synced with Timeslips, a popular Windows product used by many law firms and other companies that bill by the hour.  Back in November of 2009, there were not, but as I posted last week, the new iSlips app is the first to do so.

Since the release of iSlips, Gary and I have been talking via e-mail about various topics including this app.  At $49.99, iSlips is one of the more expensive apps you might purchase for your iPhone, so if you are thinking about buying iSlips I’m sure that you are interested in hearing from someone who has actually used the app.  Because I don’t use Timeslips at my law firm, I won’t be able to give iSlips a formal review myself, but when Gary told me about his experiences I thought that it would be something that others might like to read.  Gary gave me permission to post his e-mail, so here is one person’s first-hand experience with iSlips after the first week of use:

I wanted to give you some feedback about the new iSlips app for use with Timeslips.  I have been testing a copy for over a week now.  As I had related previously, I have previously used a product from iambic named “Timereporter for Timeslips” that ran on the Palm platform.  I have used it for years and it has been a tremendous productivity tool.  I had attempted to locate a similar item for the iPhone with no success.  I had recently entered into discussions with a programming group to develop this type of product [but iSllips] eclipses my own design interests. 

I ran into a couple of hiccups getting it originally installed on my iPhone.  This was due more to my own ignorance than anything else.   The best technique is to buy through the iTunes store and sync it directly into the iPhone.  Once installed on the phone, it is necessary to go to Brain Freeze software’s website and download and apply the iSlips Sync software to your computer.  This need is not readily apparent at purchase.  Fortunately, between Steve’s timely support and my own “Never Say Die” attitude, it was easy to figure out. 

After installing both pieces of the software, configuring the PC portion for my Timeslips database, I was ready for action.  The sync between the iPhone and database takes place wirelessly.  So it is imperative that a WIFI connection is available between the iPhone and the PC.  Once this was enabled, my first sync transferred all of my clients, fee and expense categories into my iPhone.  Fantastic!  I began entering time and expense entries from that point forward and they synchronized into my Timeslips without fail.  All I have to do in Timeslips is edit the entries for content and accuracy. 

A built-in feature allow the iPhone to [calculate] mileage using the built-in GPS.  This is a great tool for expense recapture of that nature. 

On a support note, I reported some anomalies that I observed in the Sync interface on the PC and an amended / corrected version was posted in just a few days. 

So far, I am very pleased with this application.  I will be recommending it to my colleagues and clients.

Thanks to Gary McFarlen for sharing his thoughts on this app.

[UPDATE 5/26/2011:  McFarlen wrote me again to provide some follow up on his use of this app a year later:

The original release was a very well developed product.  Nevertheless, some minor tweaks and improvements have been made over the last year to further enhance the wireless sync activities, etc.  My daily use to capture consulting fees and expenses has been greatly enhanced.  I find I capture my time more accurately and methodically with iSlips.  The automatic updates of my client list, categories, etc. is a huge time saver.  I wirelessly dump my data to Timeslips, perform slight edits and fire off electronic billings to my clients.   As an example of maximized cash flow, I have performed work that was entered in iSlips, sent an electronic bill later in the day, and received a check in the mail the very next day! 

And now for the good news.  iSlips has just been released for the iPad.  I had the pleasure to work with both beta, and the shipping versions.  I would write this in All Caps, but shouting is not cool.  This is a “Must Have” app for any attorney or contractor that bills by the hour and uses the Timeslips billing program.  The original interface for the iPhone has been modified to take advantage of the larger iPad screen.  The availability of the larger iPad onscreen keyboard makes working with the interface a snap.  Yes, I am extremely fired up about this app.  Not only do I get the familiarity of the original version for the iPhone, I now have a much more useful device for its use.  I have shown this app to a number of attorneys and they all want it.   At this point it is only available for the Timeslips platform for $64.99.   I have had very little need to contact the vendor, Brain Freeze Software, for support.  However, every instance has been met with genuine interest and very prompt response.  I could not be happier with this product.

Thanks for the update!]

Click here for iSlips ($49.99): 

 

Law Practice Magazine is the publication from the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA.  The magazine has always included good articles on legal technology.  Indeed, the reason that I joined the section in the 1990s — back when I was an associate and had nothing to do with the management side of a law firm — was that the magazine included a column by attorney Erik J. Heels, one of the pioneers in the use of the Internet by lawyers.  In 1992, Heels published an electronic and print book called The Legal List which compiled law-related resources on the Internet.  You can now read the old editions of The Legal List on his website, and it is an interesting trip down technology memory lane, back in the days when “The Internet” meant GOPHER, FTP, WAIS and BBS.

Fast-forward to the present, and lawyers interested in the Internet and legal technology are gearing up for ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago later this month.  The current edition of Law Practice Magazine includes tech tips from many of this year’s TECHSHOW speakers, including a short column I wrote
recommending a few iPhone apps for lawyers.  It reflects a small portion of the “60 Apps in 60 Minutes” presentation that Reid Trautz and I are giving on March 25.  

I also enjoyed reading the columns suggesting Blackberry apps by Toby Brown and
Dan Pinnington and Palm Pre apps by Erik Mazzone and Nerino Petro.  (UPDATE 3/19/10: The print issue of the magazine also has recommended apps for the Motorola Droid running the Android OS by Rick Georges, but I don’t see that column is online.)  Some of the apps suggested in those columns include:

• Documents to Go and other apps to view Word, Excel and PDF files
• Twitter clients
• Task managers
• Flight information apps
• Instant messaging clients
• Voice control apps such as Vlingo and Google Mobile
• Compilations of statutes and rules
• Internet radio apps such as Pandora
• GPS navigation apps
• Evernote
• Weather apps
• e-Book readers

In light of those two columns, if you are wondering what would happen if you had to use a smartphone other than the iPhone, apparently the answer is that while you would lose the elegance and power of the iPhone, the apps that you would be using would for the most part be very similar to the apps that you are using now with the iPhone.  Interesting.

I’ll recommend two more good articles from the current issue of Law Practice Magazine:  this
article by Nicole Garton-Jones with tips for lawyers who travel, and this one which collects a wide variety of legal technology tips from many different TECHSHOW presenters.

On my desktop computers (both my PC at work and my Mac at home), I’ve long been a fan of a free service called Readability.  It allows you to take a website that contains an article and a bunch of other extraneous information on the side (ads, other stories, etc.) and reformat the page so that all you see is the text of the article itself and the pictures, plus you can format the text into beautiful fonts at different sizes on a nice background.  It is sort of like taking the text of an article and placing it into an elegant book reader on your computer screen.  By increasing the text size, the text becomes easier to read, and by stripping away the ads, you remove the distractions and can just focus on the articles.  Here is a link to a great post by David Pogue of the New York Times which describes Readability better than I can.

It never occurred to me that this service could work with an iPhone until I saw this article by Darren Becket on iPhone Alley, which prompted me to do some more digging and locate this post from Herm Greider last year.  The steps to set it up are a little complicated, but essentially you use your computer to create a bookmarklet for the Readability site, and then you transfer that bookmarklet to your iPhone.  There are two ways to do this.  If you already use MobileMe to sync your Safari bookmarks on your computer and iPhone, then just create the Readability bookmark on your computer and it will automatically sync.  Greider describes that easier method, and also gives step by step instructions on a more complicated way that I used which involves sending yourself an e-mail containing the javascript for the bookmarklet.

Once you have it set up, here is what you can do with it.  Let’s say you are reading the New York Times using Safari on your iPhone and you see an article like this:

There is a lot of extraneous information on that page, such as all of the ads on the right and the related stories on the left.  You can of course double-tap on the text of the article to zoom in, but you still have some of this distracting information.  But with the Readability bookmarklet, you can just tap your Bookmarks icon, then select Readability bookmark that you created, and then the article that you were looking at will instantly be reformatted.

Here are two examples which both use the settings of Newspaper style, Extra Large size but the one on the left uses a Wide margin and the one on the right uses the Extra Wide margin (to get an even more narrow column, which you can double-tap to get even larger text):

The text in the Newspaper / Extra Large / Extra Wide Margin version is obviously quite huge, but I like that I can hold my iPhone far from my face and still easily read the text.  Of course, with fewer words per page I have to do more scrolling, which is a reason to instead use Newspaper / Extra Large / Wide Margin.  I actually set up two bookmarklets on my iPhone, one with each size of margin, so I can just choose the one that fits my mood.

I prefer the white background and typeface of the Newspaper style, but if you want something different you can choose other styles such as Inverse (on the left) and Novel (on the right):

For those of you planning to get an iPad, keep this tip in mind as I’m sure that Readability would look fantastic on the iPad’s large screen.  But even on the iPhone, it is wonderful to have a fast option for stripping away the extras and focusing on just the text in an article.