Shoeboxed is a service that manages your receipts. You scan receipts and e-mail them to Shoeboxed, or just use their iPhone app to scan receipts, or you can even mail them paper receipts if you want to, and they have real people review the receipts and organize them into categories. If you use the service to manage all of your receipts, then by the end of the year you have all of your expenses organized and available in multiple formats including Excel, PDF, etc.
I have had the Shoeboxed app on my iPhone for a while now and had intended to try it out, and then I read that my friend, New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson, has incorporated this app into his daily life. Thus, instead of me doing a review after a week or two of usage, let me refer you to Ernie’s excellent and comprehensive post. I am already loving that with the Chase app I can just scan a check to deposit it without having to visit a bank. Scanning receipts sounds just as easy considering that your iPhone is always with you when you get those receipts.
A few days ago, I was working in my office when I picked up my iPhone to look up something. I glanced at my home screen as I prepared to launch an app and then did a double-take. Something wasn’t right. The first thing I noticed was that there were only three icons at the bottom of my screen instead of the normal four, and then I saw that there was an empty spot on the first of my home screen pages, which is never the case. I didn’t think to take a picture at the time, so here is a dramatic reenactment of what I saw:
It took me a few seconds to figure out what was gone, and then I realized that the Safari and the Camera icons were missing. My first thought was that one of my kids must have gotten a hold of my iPhone and deleted an app, so I started to wonder how I could restore a missing app while I was in my office (considering that I sync my iPhone with my home computer). But then I realized that the missing apps — Safari and Camera — are built-in apps. You cannot delete those apps on the iPhone. You can, however, move them around, so I started to swipe through screens to see if my kids had moved them. But again, no luck.
Because I was trying to get work done at the time, I put down my iPhone and decided to try to resolve this issue later. But then ten minutes later, one of my partners called me to ask me how to get her Safari icon to come back. I asked her if her Camera app was also missing, and after she looked she confirmed that sure enough it was missing too. So at that point I knew that the problem was not unique to my iPhone. A quick Google search revealed that there was not some worldwide Safari and Camera outage on the iPhone affecting everyone else, but I did run across this article on the Apple website: Knowledge Base Article HT3582 “iOS: Restoring a missing Camera or Safari Application.”
The article explains: “If your iOS device is configured to use an Exchange account, your Exchange Server administrator may have configured your account with a policy to disallow use of Safari or the Camera.” Bingo. I contacted someone in my law firm’s IT department, and it turns out that a tech person was in the process of doing something to configure an iPhone when he accidentally flipped a switch that turned off the Safari and Camera apps for an entire set of users. Ouch. Apparently, the IT folks realized the problem and then fixed it, and within a few hours the two apps had reappeared.
I was afraid that they wouldn’t reappear without some additional intervention. The Apple article says: “This policy will remain in effect until you delete the Exchange account from the device. This is true even if your Exchange Server administrator later relaxes the policy to allow use of Safari or the Camera—the iOS device will not recognize the policy change. To restore use of Safari or the Camera, you will need to delete the Exchange account from the device.” That wasn’t my experience at all. After a few hours, the apps just reappeared again, on their own.
I don’t know how common a problem this is, but I must not be the only person to fall victim to it for Apple to see the need to draft and post a Knowledge Base article, last modified on July 19, 2010. If you use your iPhone in a corporate environment and you ever discover that the Safari and/or Camera apps are missing, hopefully you will remember this post and know that you should blame the IT department, not the kids.
[UPDATE: As noted by several people in the Comments to this post, another possible cause for this sort of problem is the Restrictions setting. Go to Settings -> General -> Restrictions and make sure that they are turned off. If they are turned on, one or more built-in apps can be made to not appear.]
We’re just a few days away from Apple announcing new products. I’m excited to learn what Apple announces next week, and I hope that it has something to do with the iPhone. The announcement of the upcoming announcement was one of the biggest iPhone-related stories this week, but here is other news of note from the past week:
If you use the next generation version of Westlaw called WestlawNext, you may have already noticed that the website has a nice interface formatted for mobile devices such as the iPhone. I’d still rather see a dedicated WestlawNext iPhone app, but the website is a nice start. However, if you use an iPad, yesterday West released WestlawNext for the iPad. The preview pictures on the West website look very nice, and I’m sure that this app will be a very useful tool for attorneys who use iPads. Click here for WestlawNext for iPad (free):
If you get poor AT&T coverage in your home or office are are contemplating purchasing an MicroCell, you’ll want to read this informative review from Wall Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.
Vicki Steiner, a reference librarian at the UCLA Law School Law Library, created a list of iPhone apps that may be helpful to attorneys using iPhones. (Link via Martha Sperry.)
If you are a Netflix subscriber and you like to watch movies or TV shows on your iPhone, you are in luck. Yesterday, Netflix debuted an iPhone app that will let you stream video. The app is focused on that one task and (surprisingly) doesn’t even let you manage your queue on the iPhone, but in my very limited tests it seems to work quite well. Click here for Netflix (free):
If you would rather rent a movie from iTunes, Jessee David Hollington of iLounge points out that as of right now, if you rent a movie on your iPhone, you cannot transfer it back to your computer. However, if you rent the movie on the computer, then you can sync it to your iPhone and continue watching it there. That seems odd. If Apple announces an update to Apple TV next week (as some are speculating) perhaps Apple will remedy this.
If you have a webcam or other security camera in your home, you can use the iCam app to monitor the video on your iPhone. According to this report from Jason Whitely of WFAA-TV, a Dallas-area couple on vacation in Connecticut got an alert from iCam that there was activity in their house, and using the iPhone they could actually see the burglars. They called the police who immediately went to the house. The intruders were gone, but perhaps that is because the police scared them away, in which case the app was a good purchase. Click here for iCam (Webcam Video Streaming) ($4.99):
The Quickoffice app (which I reviewed here) has finally been updated for iOS 4. This means that you can now use fast app switching to switch back and forth to a document in Quickoffice and you can tap on an e-mail attachment and directly open it in Quickoffice. I’ve been using Quickoffice a lot more over the last few days thanks to this update.
California family law attorney John Harding writes about how he loves his new iPhone but notes that it took him a while to get his e-mail working correctly.
Marco Arment writes about using AA batteries to recharge an iPhone.
Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal reports on businesses adopting the iPad, including the Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP.
Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal reports on the iJuror app that allows an iPad to help a litigator during voir dire. (Link via Des Moines attorney Megan Erickson.) Click here for iJuror ($9.99):
And finally, I always thought that I was a pretty fast iPhone typist until I saw this video. Wow. According to Dave Caolo at iLounge, this is a new world record for texting, and the text typed is “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus
are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they
Every September, Apple holds a special event attended by media and announces new iPods for the end of the year buying season. Yesterday, Apple announced that this year’s event will take place on Tuesday, September 1.
Because one of the most popular iPods is the iPod touch — essentially just an iPhone without the phone — these iPod announcements tend to be significant even for iPhone owners. Indeed, sales of iPod touch devices means that there are even more devices running iOS, giving software developers even more of an incentive to develop great apps, meaning more great apps for iPhone owners.
Last year on September 9, 2009, Apple announced iPhone Software 3.1, iTunes 9 and and a new model of the iPod touch. (Click here for my rundown of last year’s event.) I expect that we will see similar updates this year. We’ll probably see a release (or at least an announcement of an upcoming release) of iOS 4.1, which will hopefully address the bug in iOS 4.0 that can sometimes cause the screen to activate when you are talking on the phone and the iPhone is next to your face. John Gruber expects iOS 4.1 to debut the new Game Center for iOS, which makes sense because the iPod will be the main focus next week and the iPod touch is even more of a game device than the iPhone. Hopefully iOS 4.1 has other great new features for the iPhone.
I’m sure that we will see a new version of the iPod touch which incorporates some of the same features new to the iPhone 4 such as the HD camera, a front camera for FaceTime and retina display.
There are also rumors that Apple will come out with a new version of the Apple TV based on iOS. I love my Apple TV, even though I admit that I don’t use it very often, and it would be fun to see a new model, especially if it has interesting new features such as perhaps the ability to run iOS apps and has an attractive price. There are related rumors that Apple will allow you to rent TV shows on an iPhone for only $0.99.
And of course, there is always the possibility that we will see something that nobody is expecting.
Here is the picture (courtesy of Engadget) on the invitation that Apple sent to media outlets for next week’s events, an indication that music (the iPod, iTunes, etc.) will be a focus of next week’s event:
One of the nice things about Apple products is that Apple usually makes it easy to upgrade. If you buy a new Mac, you can just connect a Firewire cord and use the Migration Assistant to move everything over to the new computer. Or if you have a Time Machine backup, the Migration Assistant lets you restore from that backup. (On a PC, my experience is that when you get a new computer, it is better to just reinstall everything from scratch.) Apple has also made the upgrade process very easy when you get a new iPhone. Just backup your old iPhone to your computer, plug in the new one, and tell iTunes that you want to restore from the backup that you just created.
For example, after I upgraded from an iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4, my wife took over my 3GS. We simply backed up her iPhone 3, plugged in the iPhone 3GS, right-clicked on the device in iTunes and said that we wanted to restore from her backup, and then waited for everything to move over. It took a while (over an hour) but was easy and the computer did all the work.
As I noted earlier this week, I was recently given a brand new iPhone 4 from Apple because my prior model was having problems with the SIM card. For the most part, transferring my data to the new iPhone was easy. I backed up my iPhone 4, brought it to the Apple Store and returned home with the replacement model, and then told iTunes to copy everything from my backup to the new model. Again, I had to wait, but the computer did all the hard work.
But there was one very annoying difference between these two restorations from backup. My wife’s data moved from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 3GS flawlessly, including all of the apps being placed in the same place she had the app on her old model. My experience was quite different. All of the time I had spent putting apps on certain screens and in specific folders on my prior iPhone 4 was wasted on the new model. A few apps went where they belonged, but then rest of the apps were simply restored to the new iPhone in alphabetical order. (And no, alphabetical was NOT the order I had previously used to carefully arrange my apps!) Indeed, iTunes didn’t even restore all of my apps — the 11th page of the Home Screen ended with apps starting with the letter R. The other apps (such as Twitterific) were still moved to the new iPhone, but because they were past the 11th screen I couldn’t see them and instead could only launch the apps by using the Search iPhone function.
I believe that the difference between the restore on my iPhone and my wife’s iPhone was the number of apps. The iPhone can normally display 144 apps on its 11 screens (16 per screen) plus the four apps at the bottom of each screen, for a total of 148 apps. My wife only has a few dozen apps on her iPhone, but I have a lot more than that. (I just counted and I currently have 240 apps on my iPhone. Yes, I know, I have an app addiction.) Thanks to iOS 4 and the folder feature, I can easily display all of those 240 apps on only 7 screens with plenty of room for for more apps, but it seems that iTunes has a problem with app placement when you restore from a backup and have more than 148 apps and a lot of app folders.
Because of this problem with restoring an iPhone when you have over 148 apps, it has taken me probably an hour or so of time over the last few days to move all of my apps back where they belong and to recreate all of my folders. The one advantage is that my iPhone is now even better organized that it was before, but how I wish I had thought to take screen shots of each of my home screens before I moved over to the new iPhone. That would made it so much faster to put everything back where it belongs.
If you have a lot of apps and use folders to organize them, I hope that you can learn from my experience if you ever need to restore an iPhone from a backup, such as when you upgrade to a new model. Take pictures or otherwise take note of where everything is before you upgrade so that you are prepared to restore order to the location of your apps after the upgrade.
UPDATE: Before I wrote this post, I read reports from a number of people on the Internet associating this problem with a large number of apps. But several people have posted comments to this post saying that they have had problems with app placement after a restore from backup even when they had only have a few dozen apps. Hmmm. The mystery continues, but the lesson is clear — when you backup your iPhone with the knowledge that you will soon do a restore from that backup, do yourself a favor and take note of where your apps are located. An easy way to do that is to just take a screen shot of each of your home screens (by pressing the button at the top of your iPhone and the home button at the same time).
I find it very useful to have rules and statutes on my iPhone so that I can access them whenever I need them, whether at my desk or with a client or in court. I have several apps containing the federal rules on my iPhone and several apps created by New Orleans attorney Matt Miller containing Louisiana laws.
Greenwich, Connecticut attorney Hilary Miller recently told me that he has published an app containing the court rules and other content from the Official Connecticut Practice Book, which is Connecticut’s
consolidated rules of practice for attorneys, and he gave me a free copy so that I could tell iPhone J.D. readers about the app. Contents include the ethics rules, civil, criminal and appellate rules, and special rules applicable to family and juvenile matters. The app does not include annotations for which the State of Connecticut asserts a copyright, but does have all of the rules updated as of December 31, 2009. (Future versions will incorporate revisions adopted in 2010.)
The app is simple to use. Upon launch you are given a list of all of the rules, organized by topic (such as “Rules of Professional Conduct” and “Sup. Court & Apel. Proc. Rules” and then rules are listed under each topic. Tap a rule to see the text.
There is a simple search feature so that you can look for keywords, and the results are highlighted in yellow.
The app lacks advanced features such as the ability to bookmark common-used ruled or shortcuts to jump to specific rules, but if you just need to look at a specific rule, this app will do what you need. As far as I can tell, is the only iPhone app containing the Connecticut rules. Thus, if you practice in Connecticut, I’m sure that you will find this to be a useful addition to your iPhone.
Six weeks ago, I wrote about a problem that I was having with my iPhone 4. Every once in a while I was getting a “No SIM card installed” message. At the time, I reported that removing and replacing the SIM card seemed to be a fix, and I said that I would update after a while to say how things were going.
Unfortunately, that “fix” didn’t do much good after all. I continued to get the error message every once in a while. Turning on airplane mode and then turning it off again was a quick way to get my signal back, but that was still a pain to have to do. And then in late July I got the dreaded “No SIM card installed” message while I was IN THE MIDDLE OF A PHONE CALL. The call dropped, and I thought that maybe I just lost a 3G signal — something that doesn’t happen to me very often, but at the time I was in another city and wasn’t paying attention to the strength of the 3G signal in that area. But then I looked at the iPhone and saw the dreaded No SIM message. Arggh! So on Friday, July 30, I visited my local AT&T store and was told that the best fix was to replace the SIM card, which the salesperson did quickly. All was good for about a week, but then the problem happened again, and continued to happen every once in a while after that. Sometimes I would go a week before seeing the message again, sometimes I would see the message twice in one day.
So I finally made an appointment at my local Apple Store this past Saturday. I was worried when I arrived because the store was packed with people. (Back to school purchases?) I was told when I checked in that the wait would be over 30 minutes, but fortunately within 2 minutes my name was at the top of the list. I suppose the long wait was for people who hadn’t made an appointment before arriving. As soon as I mentioned what was happening, the helpful employee asked if I had backed up my iPhone 4 before I went to the store (I had) and then within a few minutes he swapped out my phone for a new iPhone 4.
I suspect that this was just a construction defect with my particular iPhone, not a flaw in the iPhone 4 series, so Apple is just guessing that another unit won’t have the same flaw. Indeed, as I noted in my prior post, others have experienced this problem with prior models of the iPhone.
So now I have a shiny new iPhone 4 (although frankly the other one looked pretty shiny and new) and my fingers are crossed that I won’t see this problem again. I’ll update this post in the future to let you know.
[UPDATE 1/11/11: It has now been several months and the problem has not come back. Apparently, getting a new iPhone was the solution. I’m glad that I live in a city with an Apple Store, which made that very easy to do.]
One of the biggest iPhone stories this week took place just yesterday, when Facebook debuted a new feature called Facebook Places for the iPhone, a location-based social network. Simply tap one button in the Facebook app to see a list of nearby places, tap the one that corresponds to where you are (a restaurant, a bar, a park, a zoo, etc.) and a Facebook status update announces where you are to your friends. It is similar to other location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla (although it lacks the extra features of those services such as the game aspects). Of course, if you are like most attorneys who I know, you have no desire to let other people know where you are and indeed may consider that an invasion of your privacy. If so, you’ll still want to pay attention to Facebook Places because if you are one of the 500 million people with a Facebook account, even if you don’t use the feature, any of your Facebook friends can use it for you and check you in at a location. So if a friend joins you at a restaurant, or even just sees you across the room at the restaurant, he can indicate on Facebook that both of you are at the restaurant — or, for that matter, at a bar or other location. If you want to prevent others on Facebook from doing this, you’ll have to change your Facebook privacy settings. Thus, for some people Facebook Places will be a cool new feature, but for others it will be an annoying invasion of privacy that forces them to change privacy settings to opt out. For more information, including advice on protecting your privacy, check out these articles by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, Miguel Helft and Jenna Wortham of the New York Times and Adrian Chen of Valleywag. By the way, the new version of the Facebook app for the iPhone also lets you upload pictures and video in the background. Other news of the week that might be of interest to you:
If you practice bankruptcy law, you’ll be interested to learn that West has released the Norton Bankruptcy Dictionary as an iPhone app. Click here for Norton Bankruptcy Dictionary ($4.99):
Oxford, Mississippi attorney Tom Freeland writes about Pano, an iPhone app that lets you take panorama photographs.
Nick Spense of Macworld UK writes about updates to LogMeIn Ignition, an iPhone app that I use all the time. (My review is here.)
Steven Sande of TUAW reports that Apple was awarded patents for two iPhone features: slide to unlock and keyboard letter pop. I use both features every day, and I bet you do too.
David Pogue of the New York Times describes three iPhone 4 tips.
David Kravets of Wired reports on a federal Second Circuit ruling that using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation does not violate the federal Wiretap App if used for legitimate purposes. (Keep in mind, though, that you also need to be aware of state laws on recording conversations, and if it is an attorney recording the conversation, the state rules of professional conduct may also limit or prohibit the practice.)
Brian Chen of Wired writes that the director of Apple’s App Store also has apps that he wrote in the app store, including a fart app. No word on whether Apple will soon release an official, Apple-sanctioned fart app.
One of the reasons that Apple has resisted putting Adobe Flash on the iPhone is that, until recently, there was no software that allowed one to run Flash on a mobile device. There is now a Flash app for Android, and according to Avram Piltch of Laptop magazine, it has serious flaws, suggesting that it is probably a very good thing that we don’t have Flash on the iPhone. (Link via Daring Fireball.)
I recently wrote about a backdoor method to use the volume buttons to take pictures with the Camera+ app. Apparently Apple wasn’t too happy about that undocumented feature because the app was pulled from the App Store. Lex Friedman of Macworld argues that Apple should let developers access the volume button. I agree and I hope that Apple reconsiders.
And finally, Rene and Georgia at TiPb tested two skins for the iPad — the Invisible Shield (which I reviewed here) and BodyGuardz — against a severe scratch test. If you have the stomach for it, you can watch the brutal test below. (Spoiler alert: both held up quite well and the iPad was protected. Whew!)
As I noted this past Friday, this is a slow time of year for iPhone news, especially iPhone news that I think might be especially interesting for lawyers. I’m working on some app reviews, but they are not ready to post yet, and as a result I had nothing iPhone-related to post yesterday and the same is true for today.
While we have this pause in normal operations, I thought that this would be a good time to recommend that you become a regular reader of the great legal humor blog Lowering the Bar. The blog is the creation of Kevin Underhill, an attorney in the San Francisco office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon and (like me) a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. Underhill consistently provides humorous takes on law-related news of the day, and it is rare that I make it through one of his posts without laughing, or at least smiling. (Heck, even his “About” and “Disclaimer” pages are pretty humorous.)
I believe that Underhill is an iPhone user [he told me after this post went live that he uses an iPhone 3GS], and every once in a while he might happen to mention something about the iPhone on Lowering the Bar — such as his post on the Phoenix Wright iPhone game or his post “Epic Trademark Battle Erupts Between Makers of Competing Fart-Sound Software” — but don’t expect to hear much about the iPhone on his blog. Instead, expect to read about absurd scenarios giving rise to even more ridiculous lawsuits, funny contractual provisions (I love this one) and Kevin’s sometimes bizarre but always funny take on the events of the day.
If you use an RSS reader, I encourage you to add his site to your feed. Otherwise, be sure to visit Lowering the Bar from time to time, whenever you need a good laugh.
I am often asked about using the iPhone to take dictation, and when this happens next, I plan to refer to this recent post by Ernie Svenson. I have never really used dictation, even when I started my law practice over 15 years ago and it was the norm for attorneys, because I am a good typist and I know my way around Microsoft Word. Thus, I have never been able to say much on the topic. The only dictation that I do on my iPhone is that I dictate short e-mails and have them transcribed using the amazing and free Dragon Dictation app that I reviewed late last year. I love Dragon Dictation, but you are not going to use that app to dictate even a section of a brief, let alone a whole brief; that app works best for just a few sentences.
Earlier this year I reviewed SpeakWrite, an iPhone app and service that will transcribe what you record on your iPhone, and I know that many lawyers love that service. Keep in mind, however, that you need to pay for every word that you have transcribed.
If you would prefer to have the computer handle dictation instead of paying a person to do it, the best iPhone solution appears to be to record your voice using an iPhone app and then transfer the recording over to your computer so that a robust program (like Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the PC or MacSpeech Scribe on the Mac) can turn what you said into a brief, letter, etc. New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson recently described his solution which uses the $9.99 Dictamus iPhone app and the $149 MacSpeech program on his Mac. Svenson points out that it is handy to use your iPhone to do the recording because you are always going to have your iPhone with you, unlike a dedicated recorder or a headset connected to your computer.
