There were lots of stories about Siri this week. The more I use it, the more I find more uses for it. For example, I saw a reference on Twitter to the fact that you can perform date calculations in Siri. How useful! Just tell Siri “45 days after October 18” to quickly see the answer. This is so much faster than using an app (even though there are some good ones like Court Days Pro and DaysFrom) and MUCH faster than using a calendar and counting by hand. Here is the news of the week:
- Chris Smith of Stepcase Lifehack offers some great tips for being productive with Siri.
- Los Angeles attorney Bob Malhotra offers Siri advice for lawyers in Law Technology News.
- Evan Koblentz of Legal Technology News discusses both sides of the debate over the importance of Siri.
- New York attorney Niki Black linked to this helpful YouTube video from “ThatSnazzyiPhoneGuy” that offers 10 trick to better Siri dictation.
- Conan O’Brien offers this humorous take on Apple’s new TV commercial for Siri.
- Scoopertino, the funny fake Apple news site, reports that Apple has fired Vice President Phil Schiller and replaced him with Siri.
- Do you like reading about legal loopholes? David Heath of iTWire explains how Steve Jobs managed to always drive a car without a license plate.
- Josh Barrett of Tablet Legal explains the new support for Outlook tasks in iOS 5.
- Lex Friedman of Macworld notes that Apple has updated the Smart Covers for the iPad 2. One nice addition is that you can now get a polyurethane version (the cheaper model) in Dark Grey. In the past, if you didn’t want a bright color, your only alternative was to get the more expensive leather models. Apple has discontinued the orange model, but you can still get it on Amazon. For the record, I have the black leather model and I really like it. My wife has the red leather model, which looks very distinctive and is part of (PRODUCT) RED‘s fight against AIDS.
- Angela West of PC World provides some reasons why the iPad is good for businesses.
- I’m enjoying reading the new Walter Isaacson book on Steve Jobs. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has a good interview of Mr. Isaacson.
- David Pogue of the New York Times reviews Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone, Windows Phone 7.5.
- Joe Sharkey of the New York Times reports that so many travelers are using iPads that Wi-Fi service at hotels is slowing down and may become more expensive.
- Steven Sande of TUAW reports that Conde Nast is selling a lot of magazines now that the iPad has the Newsstand feature in iOS 5.
- I recently reviewed the new Adobe Reader app. I’ve since learned two new things that make the app more useful. First, as reported by Evan Koblentz of Law Technology News, the app supports PDF files protected by Adobe’s LiveCycle Rights Management. Second, I encountered a PDF file this week that wouldn’t display correctly in Safari, but did display correctly when I opened it in the Adobe Reader app. So the moral of the story is that you definitely want to download this free app so that you have it when you need it. Click here for Adobe Reader (free):
- And finally, if you have kids, you probably know the famous book Goodnight Moon. Ann Droyd wrote a parody called Goodnight iPad, which you can watch in video form here: