Month: May 2010

We are barely more than a week away from the Steve Jobs keynote address at WWDC at which time I expect that we will see the introduction of the new iPhone, hopefully for sale shortly thereafter.  For iPhone enthusiasts such as me (and perhaps you, if you are reading this), it is exciting to think about what we might see at WWDC.  I generally stay away from posting rumors on iPhone J.D. because they are so often just made up, so I normally would never post this bizarre rumor from Eric Savitz of Barron’s, citing as a source analyst Trip Chosdhry of Global Equities Research, that none other than Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, would join Steve Jobs on stage at WWDC.  But I do love this funny response from Microsoft on its official Twitter account:  “Steve Ballmer not

speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor

riding in the Belmont. Just FYI.”  For the record:  I, Jeff Richardson, will also not appear with Steve Jobs on stage at WWDC, but as for Dancing with the Stars all I can say is “no comment.”  And now to shift from the News of the Weird to the iPhone news of note from the past week:

• John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a great post
  
  on the recent Google I/O conference and Google’s attempts to challenge
  
  the iPhone with the Android operating system.
• For those of you in Louisiana, this weekend is a tax-free weekend
  
  for hurricane preparedness supplies, including cell phone batteries and
  
  chargers.  External batteries for the iPhone are not very expensive
  
  anyway, but if you want to buy local and save the 4% state sales tax
  
  (you still need to pay the local sales tax) click
  
  here for more info from the Louisiana Department of Revenue.
• Attorney Robert Ambrogi discusses
  
  Apptorney: IP, an iPhone app “designed to provide easy access to a
  
  range of Internet resources
  
  commonly used by IP lawyers.”
• 
  It is hard for me to believe that pretending that you are an attorney makes for a fun video game, but the Phoenix Wright videogames on the Nintendo DS are very popular and get good reviews.  Capcom has now brought the game to the iPhone, and Levi Buchanan of IGN gives the game a good review.  I haven’t tried the game myself, but if you want to do so, click here to get Phoenix Wright:  Ace Attorney ($4.99): 

  

• Notwithstanding Phoenix Wright and the tons of other great iPhone games, and dispelling the notion that iPhones are just for fun and games and not for use in business, Larry Dignan of ZDNet reports that AT&T executive Ron Spears revealed that 40% of AT&T’s iPhone sales are to enterprise users.
• According to an article in The Oregonian, a man in Gresham, Oregon was in an Apple Store when he witnessed two thieves steal a bunch of iPhones, jump in their car and start to drive away.  So he decided to take out his gun and try to shoot out the tires.  He missed, the thieves escaped, and he instead got himself arrested for the unlawful use of a weapon, reckless endangerment, disorderly conduct and
  
  unlawful discharge of a firearm.  Next time you want to stop iPhone thieves, it may be better to use the MobileMe Find My iPhone feature and involve law enforcement.  (Via Gizmodo.)
• Last week, I wrote about the recent suicides at the Foxconn facility that manufactures iPhones and many other consumer electronic devices.  According to Reuters, Apple had this to say on the matter:  Apple said on Wednesday it was saddened by the
  
  apparent suicides, and would continue to inspect all facilities where
  
  its products are made.  “We are
  
  saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn,” the maker of
  
  iPhones and iPads said
  
  in its first public comment on the deaths.”We
  
  are in direct contact with Foxconn senior management and we believe
  
  they are taking this matter very seriously,” Apple said in a statement,
  
  adding that its own investigating team were carrying out independent
  
  evaluations of what Foxconn was doing to “address these tragic events.” 
• If you buy music on iTunes for your iPhone, you are not alone.  According to Ed Christman of Billboard, iTunes continues to be the largest music distributor in the U.S. with its market share growing from 21.4% in 2008 to 26.7% in 2009.
• Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News reviews the iPad 3G, finding that the 3G is slow and that it might be better to just get the Wi-Fi model.
• The Geeky Talky Thinky blog has an interesting post on the numerous niche markets in which the iPad is being used.  The post starts with law but discusses a bunch of other specialized uses.
• And finally, I realize that the “Get a Mac” campaign is about Mac vs. PC, not iPhone vs. other phones, but I can’t resist talking about them because the campaign has been so funny over the years.  The successful ad campaign is now over.  Apple ran the last Get a Mac ad last fall and has now removed the ads from its website.  AdFreak has a single webpage showing all 66 of the ads from 2006 to 2009, and the One More Thing podcast put together this great YouTube video with highlights of the campaign over the years:

I reviewed the 1.0 version of the LawBox app last October, and at the time, I thought that the app was already useful but also had a lot of potential.  It was a free app containing many sources of law, such as federal rules, plus the app allowed you to download additional paid content, plus the app served as a news reader.  At ABA TECHSHOW earlier this year, I met with the developer, Nicholas Zeltzer, and he showed me some of the ideas that he was planning for the 2.0 version of this app.  Version 2.0 is now available in the App Store, and I must admit that I’m a little overwhelmed by all that this very ambitious free app can do.

First, just like in the 2.0 version, you get lots of law included in this app for free: the federal rules of appellate, bankruptcy, civil and criminal procedure, the federal rules of evidence the U.S. Constitution, and Title 28 of the U.S. Code.  That is a heck of a lot of law in one app, and again, this is free.  But Zeltzer hopes that you will tap the plus button at the top right of the Index screen to purchase additional state law, right now from California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas, or additional titles of the U.S. Code.  Each statutory title costs $0.99, which can add up if you want to purchase the entire statutory scheme, but it cheap if you just want to grab the titles that you use the most often.

   
 

Just like before, the app includes a helpful search feature that can search by content or even by title.  But you start to see some of the power of the 2.0 version of this app when you double tap on a rule, which brings up what the app calls a “Slip Bar” on the left, a context-sensitive bar that allows you to do many different things.  In the below screens, for example, I searched the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for the word “deposition” and then tapped on Rule 32.  The search terms are highlighted in red.  (Any rules highlighted in yellow are links to those rules.)  Once I double tap, the screen darkens and the Slip Bar gives me several options.  I can tap the @ to send an e-mail with the text of the rule, I can tap the target icon to advance to each subsequent instance of the search term “deposition,” I can tap the bubble icon to see the official Comments to the rule, I can tap the arrow to see a list of rules around the current rule, and I can tap the star to add this rule to my favorites. 

   
 

The app also has a new feature called Flip Wiki, which allows you to jot down notes on any rule (or news story when you use the News function).  If you make your note public, other users of the app can see your note, and you can see notes jotted down by others.  Zeltzer is also working on a way to only share Flip Wikis with users that you designate, so for example you can share notes with just your law partners.  I don’t know how often people will use the Flip Wiki feature but it is interesting to bring a social media element into a legal reference app.

I’m really just scratching the surface on what this app can do, and because I can’t begin to do this app justice, forgive me if I turn over this post to the developer, Nicholas Zeltzer, for a moment.  The following is based on an e-mail written to me by Zeltzer, so these are his words, not mine.  However, I edited down his words for this post, so if anything is unclear, blame me for my edits, not Zeltzer:

1. The New Search Engine. This engine is fast, fast, fast and
   
   allows for booleans, phrases and stemming. It’s also context-sensitive,
   
   meaning that what you search depends on where you are; tap the search
   
   button from within a section and your search screen and results will be
   
   limited to statutes from that section. This allows you to narrow down
   
   your search results before you even begin the search process, and
   
   simultaneously provides a convenient way to browse code sections (as the
   
   code hierarchy is flattened on the search screen).
2. AutoLinks. This is a piece of “best-guess” technology that works
   
   surprisingly well. Every time you view a statute, the software will scan
   
   the document and attempt to identify references to other statutes in
   
   the same code, or even in other codes, and create links between them. If
   
   the referenced code isn’t on the device, the app will contact the
   
   LawBox server to determine whether or not it is available for download.
3. Slip Bars. That’s our fancy name for the slide-in, slide-out utility
   
   bars that appear on double taps when you’re reading content. Like
   
   everything else in the app, they’re context sensitive, with different
   
   buttons and tools depending on what sort of content you’re looking at.
   
   They’re also handy space savers, as they’re only on screen when you need
   
   them.
4. Swipe Cells.  Just like Slip Bars, these utility menus allow you to
   
   act on content. They appear when you swipe to the right across a news
   
   story cell.  (Swiping to
   
   the left reveals the delete button).
5. Built-in Web browser. This really shines on the iPad, which has a much,
   
   much more robust web toolkit and increased browsing speed. Using the
   
   browser, you can follow links from downloaded articles (and statutes,
   
   where available) out on the internet. And using the browser’s slip bar,
   
   email, tweet, post, save, etc. You can also use the browser to submit
   
   new news feeds to the community feed pool, if you happen to stumble
   
   across a compatible website while you’re out there.
6. Favorites. There is a new Favorites Index that, in combination with the
   
   “add favorite” button, allows you to browse news stories and statutes
   
   that you’ve starred as favorites. The Favorites Index is sorted by
   
   feed/statute.
7. New Store. It’s already stocked with California, Florida, New York, Illinois,
   
   Texas, and some federal content. As the new content browser can —
   
   theoretically — handle any size data set, we’ll be adding content to
   
   the store rapidly. 
8. News Index and Pools. We
   
   finally have a working community/personal feeds setup (still toying
   
   with the idea of Google Reader compatibility), so you can browse feeds
   
   submitted by other users, or submit your own feeds to the community
   
   pool, or your personal, private feeds list. This works well with the
   
   built-in web browser, because users can now submit feeds from within the
   
   app, from any site they visit, without having to type in feed URLs, or
   
   mess around with submission forms.
9. The News
   
   Browser. Rewritten from scratch, it’s faster, provides multiple view
   
   modes, and features a nifty new live-update stream, whereby stories
   
   appear as they’re downloaded — allowing you to get to the reading
   
   immediately, without having to wait for the parsing process to finish. 
10. The FlipWiki. The FlipWiki allows you to make public or private notes on content (statutes,
    
    rules, news stories, etc).
11. Context-Sensitive Help. Tap three fingers on the screen from anywhere in
    
    the app to bring up a settings menu that includes a help page for the
    
    particular screen you’re viewing. You can also use this control panel to
    
    adjust most of the app’s settings from within the application. 
12. iPad support. Primitive at this point, but it’s there. LawBox is a
    
    universal app, and everything is tied to the user’s LawBox account,
    
    which means that a user can download their purchased content to both
    
    their iPad and iPhone without having to purchase it again. Our next
    
    update will feature much improved text layout for the iPad, and we’ll be
    
    able to carry that back to the iPhone when OS 4.0 comes out. 
13. 3rd-Party APIs. We’re still social media friendly, and we’ve added
    
    Facebook to the mix. 
14. Extensibility. This
    
    is really the greatest feature: LawBox 2.0 is an entirely new
    
    application. The first version was a nice little utility, but it wasn’t
    
    going to scale well. We went back to the drawing board and started over
    
    with an eye on building something that could really be built upon. We
    
    succeeded: the app is now a genuine content platform, and there’s a lot
    
    going on under the surface that we haven’t had time to bring to the
    
    foreground yet. (This also means an end to the six-month update/content
    
    drought that plagued the first version).

Obviously, LawBox 2.0 goes far beyond what any other legal reference app has ever tried to do on the iPhone.  You might even think that it is too much.  For example, I prefer to use a news reader app like NetNewsWire which syncs with Google Reader so I don’t think that I will make much use of the RSS news feeds in this app, but having said that, it was interesting to see the extensive list of hand-selected legal news sites that are included in this app.  But even if you don’t use all of the advanced features in this sophisticated app right away, LawBox is still just a great and free source for the federal rules that many of us use all the time.  Thus, I highly recommend that all attorneys check out this app.

Click here to get LawBox (free): 

Court reporting is a competitive industry and court reporters are always looking for ways to maximize the service that they provide to attorneys to get repeat business.  By providing services like RealLegal e-transcripts (those .ptx files that you often get) or real-time reporting, court reporters keep their attorney clients happy, and the attorneys use them again and again for depositions.

The creators of Mobile Transcript have come up with a new service that they hope that court reporters will pay for and provide to their attorney clients:  iPhone-formatted depositions.  A court reporter signs up for the service and uploads the deposition to a website, and the deposition is immediately converted into a Mobile Transcript.  Attorneys create a free account with the company and they can download the transcripts directly to an iPhone.  The app alerts you when new transcripts are available.

I’ve tried out the product using some test transcripts provided by the developer, and it works quite well.  Upon launching the app, you see a list of the cases for which you have depositions.  

  
 

Tap on a case name to see a list of the depositions, and then tap on a deposition to start reading.  When a deposition launches, you are given the option to start a timer in case you want the app to keep track of how long you spent viewing the depo.  Unfortunately, the app itself cannot tell you how much time you spent reading a deposition; you need to access the website and view your account information to get the elapsed time.

  
 

The default text is white on black, but you have many other choices such as black on white.  You can also change the font size.

  

When you are reading the deposition, you tap the arrows at the top right to go page by page.  Each page represents a full transcript page, so if the app says “Page 6” at the top, you are on page 6 of the actual transcript.  Unfortunately, there is no way to jump directly to a specific page number, and if you exit the app it does not remember which page you were on.  I’d like to see that added in a future update.  (As noted below, the developer does plan to add bookmarks, which would be one solution to this.) 

It is nice to be able to read transcripts on an iPhone, but the real key feature is the ability to highlight text.  As you read something important in the transcript, tap once on a line to highlight the line.  Tap again to remove the highlight.

 

When you are looking at the list of all of your transcripts for a case, there is an Edit and a Mail button at the top right.  The Edit button allows you to delete transcripts from your iPhone.  The Mail button allows you to send either the transcript file itself (a plain ASCII file which does not indicate the lines that you have highlighted) or a table listing the page and line numbers that you highlighted (a format useful for deposition designations). 

  
 

The developer told me about some of the improvements coming in the
next version in a few weeks, such as better navigation controls, the
ability to e-mail highlights from within the transcript instead of from
the list view, and the ability to jump to the next highlight (a great
addition).  And when iPhone
Software 4.0 comes out, the developer plans to add a bunch of new
features including bookmarks, the ability to e-mail the entire
transcript with yellow highlights as a PDF file, the ability to swipe a
finger to move from page to page (instead of having to use the arrow
keys), word search, and the ability to save when you are in airplane
mode.  Another feature on the horizon, one which will be very useful, is
the ability to export highlighted lines as a Q and A in words instead
of the current version which only sends page and line numbers.

The court reporter, not the attorney, pays for this service, and the price ranges from $29 for a single reporter to $99 a month for a large agency of up to 19 reporters.  (Just as a point of comparison, an individual court reporter pays over $140 a month to create RealLegal e-transcripts, although of course the service that Mobile Transcript provides is different from what RealLegal provides.)

For the attorney, the app is free and it costs nothing to download transcripts.  The only question for me is whether attorneys will see a value in this app — and, therefore, an advantage to hiring court reporters who offer this service.  Do people want to read entire transcripts on a screen the size of an iPhone?  If an attorney plans to read depositions during a commute or when traveling, then perhaps yes.  In an office, however, most attorneys would probably rather use the larger screen of a computer.  But for those for whom reading a transcript on an iPhone makes sense, the app certainly makes it easy for attorneys to read transcripts and highlight text, and the planned new features will make the app even more powerful.  You don’t need an app like Mobile Transcript to read a deposition on an iPhone; you can always just convert an ASCII transcript to a Word file and read (and even highlight) the deposition using an app like Quickoffice or Documents to Go.  But Mobile Transcript offers a lot of advantages such as the ease of downloading transcripts, the ease of viewing and highlighting, the ability to prepare a table listing lines that you highlighted, etc. 

Mobile Transcript is a nice app for attorneys looking to read and highlight transcripts on an iPhone.  When the updates planed for the future, this app will become even more useful.  And even if reading long transcripts on the small iPhone screen doesn’t sound ideal to you, the developer tells me than an iPad version is also in the works, and on an iPad this app could be amazingly useful — perhaps even far better than reading a transcript on a computer.  Thus, the Mobile Transcript app is interesting not just because of what the current version offers, but also because it provides a glimpse into the future of mobile lawyering using an iPhone or iPad.  If this looks like something that you would want to use today, encourage your favorite court reporter to sign up for the Mobile Transcript service.

Click here to get Mobile Transcript (free): 

I was invited to be a guest on the most recent episode of This Week in Law, and it was a really fun experience.  The host Denise Howell asked me on primarily to discuss the legal issues surrounding the “lost” iPhone prototype that has been in the news lately, but we spent so much time talking about other issues such as Facebook privacy and unauthorized file sharing of movies that we didn’t even get to the iPhone topic.  Nevertheless, it was a really interesting discussion.

I encourage you to subscribe to This Week in Law for an always intelligent discussion on issues at the intersection of law and technology.  You can subscribe on iTunes, or just download Episode 61, here:

Audio Podcast: 

Video Podcast (High Quality): 

Video Podcast (Normal Quality, best for watching on an iPhone): 

Yesterday Apple announced that Steve Jobs will be delivering the keynote address at WWDC, Apple’s
developer conference, on Monday, June 7 at 10am Pacific.  I fully expect for Jobs to announce the next iPhone at that conference.  Hours later, as reported on numerous sites such as Engadget, Walmart announced that it is  selling the 16GB iPhone 3GS — which normally sells for $199 — for only $97 starting today. 

Less than $100 for an iPhone 3GS is an amazing price.  The 3GS is a fantastic phone, for all of the reasons that I discussed last year.  Having said that, I discourage anyone from getting this $97 iPhone 3GS right now.

Last year when Apple came out with the iPhone 3GS, it reduced the price of the prior year’s model, the iPhone 3G, to $99.  Apple got a ton of new iPhone users at that very attractive price, and surely Apple will continue to sell some phone at $99 even after it announces the next version of the iPhone.  It seems most likely that Apple will discontinue the iPhone 3G, start to sell the iPhone 3GS at $99, and sell the next version of the iPhone for $199.  If this is how it unfolds, Walmart’s brand new pricing won’t be that special; everyone will sell a $99 iPhone 3GS in a few weeks.  Thus, you don’t gain that much by taking advantage of Walmart’s offer today.  But if you buy a $97 iPhone 3GS from Walmart today, before we know all of the details of the next iPhone, it is impossible to make an informed decision on what you are giving up by not spending an extra $100 for the new 2010 model iPhone.

Thus, if you or any of your friends are tempted to get the $97 iPhone 3GS from Walmart, my advice is to wait just two more weeks.  On June 7, I’m sure that we will learn all about the next version of the iPhone, which I still suspect will be called the iPhone HD (even though someone at Apple apparently called it the “iPhone 4G” in connection with the criminal proceedings arising out of the “lost” iPhone a few weeks ago).  After the upcoming Steve Jobs keynote, anyone buying an iPhone can make an informed decision on how good of a deal $99 is for an iPhone 3GS.

Apple just announced that Steve Jobs is delivering the keynote address at WWDC, Apple’s developer conference, on Monday, June 7 at 10am Pacific. 

At WWDC 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G.  At WWDC 2009, Apple
introduced the iPhone 3GS.  I feel quite confident that at WWDC 2010 in two weeks, we’ll see Steve Jobs introduce the next iPhone.

When you buy an iPhone from AT&T for $200, that is not the “real” cost of the iPhone.  I’ve read that AT&T pays Apple around $550 for the iPhone, so they lose $350 on the sale.  Of course, AT&T makes that up because you have to agree to a two year contract and AT&T collects far more than $350 from you over two years.

If you want to get out of your AT&T contract before the 24 months are over, you need to pay an early termination fee (ETF).  Right now, the ETF for all AT&T phones is $175, but AT&T announced this past Friday that starting June 1, AT&T is raising the ETF for smartphones like the iPhone to $325.  That amount decreases by $10 every month that you are on your two year contract (it used to be $5 a month), so if you want to leave AT&T in month 23 without waiting that extra month, the ETF drops to $95.  AT&T explains the reasons for these changes in this open letter to its customers. (Note that Verizon currently has a $350 ETF, so even the increased AT&T rate is lower than Verizon.)

I presume the next iPhone will be out in June or July, so if you plan to get the next iPhone, either by becoming a first-time AT&T customer or by extending your current contract, then the new ETF will apply to you.

Frankly, I don’t see the ETF as a big deal.  Right now in the U.S., you can only use an iPhone with AT&T, so as long as you plan to use your iPhone for two years, you are going to need to stick with AT&T anyway.  And even if Apple starts selling an iPhone through Verizon, the iPhone you buy to work with AT&T won’t work with Verizon anyway.  At least, not this year; in the future, when AT&T and Verizon both have a 4G network and a future iPhone works with that network, then the same unit could work on both carriers so it might be important to you to be able to switch from one to another.  But for now, if you buy an AT&T iPhone, you’re going to want to stay on AT&T as long as you continue to use that iPhone.

The only real impact I see is that if you buy a new iPhone this June, and then in say June of 2011 there is an iPhone on Verizon and you want to switch to Verizon, at that point you will need to pay an ETF to switch.  Twelve months into a contract, with the new ETF, you will need to pay AT&T $205 to jump over to Verizon.

Whether you ever switch networks or not, it is always good to know what you are agreeing to in a contract.  Thus, if you plan to get a new iPhone this summer when Apple releases the next model, keep in mind that you will be agreeing to the new ETF.

Today, I will be appearing live on This Week in Law, the great podcast hosted by Denise Howell on Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network.  I am huge fan of TWiT podcasts such as TWiL, MacBreak Weekly, net@night and of course the flagship show This Week in Tech, so I am really honored to be on the program today.  In addition to Denise Howell and me, the show will feature TWiL regular and Chicago technology lawyer Evan Brown of the Internet Cases website and Fred von Logmann, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an accomplished IP lawyer and a crusader for free speech and privacy in the digital age who has appeared on CNN, CNBC, ABC’s Good Morning America, and Fox News O’Reilly Factor.  If you want to listen live today, the show airs at 11 am Pacific / 1 pm Central / 2 pm Eastern at http://live.twit.tv and usually lasts about two hours.  For those of you who actually need to work today, in a few days you will be able to download the video or audio podcast on iTunes.  Here is the iPhone news of note for this week:

• Foxconn Technology Group, which manufactures Apple’s iPhone, has been in the news lately because of number of its workers have committed suicide.  This led the Chinese weekly newspaper Southern Weekend to send one of its reporters to work undercover at Foxconn for a month.  Engadget has posted a full translation of his report on the inner workings at Foxconn, plus has an editorial on the subject by Laura June.
• Robyn Weisman writes for TidBITS about some of the major iPhone game developers.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T President Ralph de la Vega laughed off the notion that AT&T will be in trouble if (when?) the iPhone become available on another carrier:  “Mr. de la Vega just laughs when asked to give the date that AT&T’s
  
  deal with Apple runs out.  He downplays the effect AT&T will see when the iPhone becomes
  
  available to other carriers.  He says about 80% of AT&T’s customers
  
  are on family-talk plans or business-discount plans, which are very ‘sticky.’ Customers are reluctant to move away from those plans, so even
  
  if the iPhone is available elsewhere, AT&T believes it can hold on
  
  to those users.”
• Yardena Arar of Macworld reviews the AT&T MicroCell, the $150 device that uses your Internet connection to give you a bubble of 3G coverage in an area that is otherwise a 3G dead zone.
• Charles Jefferies of Brighthand reviews Documents to Go by DataViz for the iPhone.
• Apple continues to make inroads into the enterprise smartphone market.  AppleInsider reports that “Standard Chartered, a British bank with nearly 75,000 employees
  
  in more than 70 countries, has switched its standard corporate
  
  communications device from RIM’s BlackBerry to Apple’s iPhone.”
• Shane Lord, an HP employee in Australia, switched from an iPhone to an HTC Desire running Android, but recently switched back.  He writes in great detail on his Shasam.net blog that the problem is that the Android operating system has too many inherent flaws for any device running Android to match the advantages of the iPhone.
• Analyst guesses are often wrong so don’t trust these numbers, but
  
  Donald Melanson of Engadget reports
  
  on a prediction by analyst Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets that
  
  Apple is currently selling more iPad than Macs.  He predicts that Apple
  
  is selling about 200,000 iPads per week, compared to 110,000 Macs and
  
  246,000 iPhones per week.
• Speaking of analysts, Eric Slivka of MacRumors reports that Gartner believes that Apple sells 2.7% of all cellphones in the world and 15.4% of all smartphones.
• Looking for good iPad apps?  Macworld published lists of its editors’ 11 favorite paid apps, 9 favorite free apps and 10 favorite games.
• Looking for even more good iPad apps?  Just wait.  Andy Ihnatko writes for Macworld that a second wave of even better iPad apps is coming soon.
• If you want to use an iPad to make presentations in court, at CLEs, etc., check out Joe Kissell’s article in Macworld on tips for presenting with the iPad.
• And finally, I’m sure that anyone who loves their iPhone would love to have this iPhone-inspired art in their home or office:  (Electroboutique via Gizmodo.)

There are lots of apps, both free and paid, that provide you with federal rules and other statutes on your iPhone, but LawStack is notable because it is a free and powerful app that contains in a single app all of the federal rules you are likely to need:  the federal rules of civil procedure, criminal procedure, appellate procedure, evidence and bankruptcy plus the U.S. Constitution.  LawStack was developed by Tekk

Innovations, a small technology firm in Massachusetts.  Last year I reviewed some of their CFR apps (some of which are free and some of which are paid), apps originally developed because Kasim Te at Tekk was an aviation consultant and helicopter instructor with a frequent need to review the applicable CFR regulations. 

Upon starting LawStack for the first time you see the bodies of law loaded into the app.  Subsequent launches bring you to whatever you were last viewing, which is helpful.  Tap on a body of law to see the titles, then tap on a title to see the rules, then tap on a rule to read the text.  One feature that I really like is that a date is located underneath each body of law so you know when the text was last updated.  I wish all of the legal reference iPhone apps had this feature; nobody wants to rely on outdated law.

   
 

You can tap once on the text of the rule to make the header and footer disappear to maximize the screen real estate for the text of the rule itself.

  
 

You can search for rules by searching for words either in the body of the rule itself or in the header.  Your search terms are highlighted in yellow in the text of the rule.  You can also pull up your search history to run a prior search again, a nice feature.

  
 

You can use the iPhone’s built-in copy feature to copy text, or you can e-mail the full text of a rule by tapping the button at the top right.  The app also allows you to change the font size if you prefer larger or smaller type when reading rules; tap the info button at top right of many screens to do so.

In addition to the free bodies of law that are included, the app also contains a built-in store at which you can download additional free or paid bodies of law such as notable bills, most any title of the CFR or US Code (the developer is working to add them all), and state statutes from (as of now) California, Florida, Texas or Washington.  Right now, many of these bodies of law are on sale.  You can rearrange your list of bodies of law on the main page or delete any compilations that you no longer want to have.

  
 

I like the model of this app:  you get a lot of great content for free, and as you grow to love the app you can choose to pay to add even more content. But even if you never pay for additional content, LawStack is a useful, free compilation of rules and laws that I encourage all lawyers using iPhones to check out. 

Click here to get LawStack (free): 

Today, John Gruber posted details on the top 10 operating systems used by visitors to Daring Fireball over the
past month as reported by Google Analytics.  He was impressed to see 5.85% of visits from people using an iPad, considering that the device has only been shipping for six weeks and still isn’t available outside the U.S.  It was also interesting to see the low percentage of Android visitors (0.21%) and even lower percentage of BlackBerry visitors (0.05%).  Gruber speculates that most BlackBerry users do not use the web very much because the screen size is so small and the browser on the BlackBerry is so poor.  I agree with that assessment.  But isn’t the Android supposed to have a nice screen and a superior web browser?

Gruber admitted that his site has a focus that encourages users of
Apple products to visit the site, but I still thought it was
interesting to see statistics from a site that gets well over 3 million
visitors a month.  Moreover, Gruber compares the traffic sources on Daring Fireball to other popular websites that have a different focus.  For all of those sites, traffic for the iPad was far more than the Android even though the iPad has not been out very long.

To provide one more point of comparison, here are the similar numbers for iPhone J.D.  Keep in mind that my traffic is far smaller than Daring Fireball and this site is far more focused on a
particular interest (um, that would be the iPhone) than Daring Fireball, but
with those caveats in mind, here are the operating systems
that I saw on iPhone J.D. from April 18 to May 18:

OS	Percentage
Windows	55.98
Macintosh	26.30
iPhone	13.17
iPad	2.55
iPod	0.76
Linux	0.62
Android	0.29
(not set)	0.20
BlackBerry	0.08
SunOS	0.01

If you find it easier to comprehend a picture than a table, here is the same info in a pie chart.  Windows is blue, Mac is green, iPhone is orange and iPad is the larger  yellow slice:

 

Because of the iPhone focus here, you would not expect to see much traffic from other smartphones, but note that the ranking of operating systems here is very similar to what Gruber (and others) saw on their websites, with the obvious exception that most iPhone J.D. visitors use Windows computers —no surprise considering that most lawyers use Windows, at least in their offices.

[UPDATE:  I had hoped to see other sites follow Gruber’s lead, and now I see that Josh Barrett at Tablet Legal has done so.  It comes as no surprise that iPad traffic there is almost 20%.]

I’ve always considered the excellent ability to access the web to be a major advantage of the iPhone, and now the iPad.  The numbers cited by Daring Fireball, much like mine, seem to provide some anecdotal support to the notion that accessing the Internet is such a good experience on the iPhone / iPad and thus folks using an iPhone / iPad access the web far more often than users of other smartphones and other mobile devices.

And no, I still don’t have an iPad myself, but I did get another chance to play with one this past weekend.  I have not yet decided how an iPad would fit into my life, but I cannot deny how cool the device is.