In the news

The focus of iPhone J.D. is the intersection of lawyers and the iPhone, and most of the time that means a focus on how lawyers can make the most of their iPhones.  But one of my favorite stories from this week has to do with another intersection, the legal terms in Apple’s contract with iPhone app developers.  One expects to see complicated legalese in such a contract, and I’m sure that there is a lot of that in there, but John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a fascinating post about changes Apple made yesterday to the contract including new bullet points at the start of the agreement that are certainly not legalese, and frankly are somewhat funny, such as:  “We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any
more Fart apps.”; “If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or
you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to
impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have
lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be
surrounded by amateur hour.”; and “We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe
is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court
Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it’. And we think that
you will also know it when you cross it.”  Also, Jason Snell of Macworld wrote an interesting editorial on the changes.  Other interesting iPhone news of the past week:

• If you sync your iPhone with your home computer but want to connect it to your work computer and play music on your iPhone through your computer speakers, in the past this was only possible if you enabled the “manual sync mode” option.  Seth Weintraub of 9 to 5 Mac reveals that with iTunes 10, you can do this even without changing a setting.
• Philip Michaels of Macworld writes about RIM’s acquisition of most of DataViz, although unfortunately he mostly raises questions and doesn’t have many more answers than I had when I wrote about this earlier this week.  But maybe there is life in the app after all; yesterday, the company released version 4.0 of Documents to Go Premium with a revamped user interface, support for external keyboards, increased speed, new options for formatting paragraphs, support for the iPhone 4 retina display, and more.  Is the release of 4.0 a sign that the app has a future?  Is this update just the last hurrah?  I can’t wait to find out.
• California Lawyer magazine identifies iPhone apps that are handy for lawyers.  (Link via Dan Friedlander.)
• Bianca Male of Business Insider compiles a good list of 10 helpful iPhone apps for business travelers.  Unfortunately, this one of those annoying posts where you have to click a button to page through each suggestion, so consider yourself warned.
• If you like to run, check out Vlad Savov’s Engadget review of Nike+ GPS, the new app that lets you use your iPhone to track your run, even without using a Nike+ shoe-mounted sensor.
• If you are a Florida lawyer interested in condominium and homeowner association laws, check out this post by Daniel Vasquez of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on iPhone resources including the FLCondo and FLHOA iPhone apps.
• I always love it when iPhone thieves get caught because of the Find my iPhone feature.  Gary Allen of ifoAppleStore.com writes about one such incident in Madison, Wisconsin.
• Chris Ziegler of Engadget writes about a headset that lets you control your iPhone, using your brain.
• If you or a friend is thinking of getting an iPhone but doesn’t want the phone or the AT&T contract, the iPod touch is a great alternative, and Apple’s newest model makes it very similar to the iPhone 4.  John Gruber explains what you don’t get in the iPod touch that you do get in an iPhone 4.  And there are lots of well-written (and favorable) reviews of the new iPod touch that are worth a read such as these from Joshua Topolky of Engadget, Jim Dalrymple of The Loop and Christopher Breen of Macworld.
• John Paczkowski of All Things D writes that more people are being iPads and fewer people are buying PCs.
• Dan Friedlander of LawOnMyPhone reviews the Westlaw Next app for the iPad.
• And finally, I previously mentioned Meninos, a company that sells coasters that look like iPhone apps.  The New York Times Gadgetwise blog writes about another company called, appropriately enough, iPhone Apps Coasters, that sells even larger coasters that are rounded at the edges just like real app icons, not squared off like the Meninos product.  If you love your iPhone and love to drink, then you might want to plop down £20 (about $30) for each set of six.