I’m starting a long trial and thus there won’t be much new activity on iPhone J.D. for the next few weeks. In the meantime, I recommend that you read the eulogy for Steve Jobs given by his sister, the acclaimed writer Mona Simpson, which was published yesterday in the New York Times. It is beautifully written and shows a side of Steve Jobs rarely seen in public. It will make you smile, but be warned that it will also bring a tear to your eye.
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:
The day after Apple announced the iPhone 4S, I wrote the reasons that I predicted that lawyers would love it. Now that I’ve been using an iPhone 4S for over a week, all of those reasons have turned out to be very true for me. I love Siri, and even though I have used it for less than two weeks, I cannot imagine using an iPhone without the feature. It is amazing how well Siri works to quickly give me information that I need, and I love being able to dictate e-mails on my iPhone. The improved camera takes beautiful pictures and video, and the speedy processor and iOS 5 make that camera even more useful. The improved antenna is giving me faster speeds downloading over 3G, typically over 6 Mbps in New Orleans, versus the 3 or 4 Mbps that I had been seeing. (It wasn’t that long ago I was paying AT&T for a 3 Mbps DSL line for my home computer, and now I’m seeing twice that on a phone!)
I’ve also discovered a few things about the iPhone 4S that I had not expected:
Louder. The internal speaker on the iPhone is just so-so for music, but has always been very useful for when I want to listen to a podcast. My only complaint in the past was that the volume on my prior iPhone 4 (and previous models) was sometimes not loud enough. On the iPhone 4S, the speaker is much louder. I don’t have the equipment to measure volume, but I can say that the volume is increased enough that I often find turning down the volume while listening to a podcast, something I rarely did in the past.
Good vibrations. The internal mechanism used to make the iPhone vibrate is different in the iPhone 4S. I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that it is smoother and, as a result, somehow more pleasing when it vibrates.
From Russia, with love. In addition to using the U.S. GPS satellites to determine where your iPhone is located, the iPhone 4S can also use Глобальная Навигационная Спутниковая Система (Globalnaya Navigazionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema). GLONASS, as it is more commonly known (and not to be confused with GLaDOS), is a global navigation satellite system operating by the Russian government. According to Mikey Campbell of AppleInsider: “By combining location data from the two dozen Russian satellites with U.S. GPS’s 31, accuracy and speed of determining a user’s location are greatly increased.” Also, including GLONASS support may help Apple avoid taxes on iPhones sold in Russia, an emerging and important market for Apple. Quickly determining your location is increasingly important on an iPhone, so it is nice to see that this feature is improved on the iPhone.
These three features are minor, but add them to the marquee features of the iPhone 4S, and the result is a very impressive device.
On October 19th, Apple held a special event on its Cupertino campus to honor the memory of Steve Jobs. Apple employees around the world were invited to watch the event via live streaming, and employees heard from friends and colleagues of Steve Jobs, along with musical performances by Norah Jones and Coldplay, favorites of Jobs. Apple has generously shared this event with the rest of the world. Click here to see the page on the Apple website containing the 80 minute video.
This past April, I noted that esteemed biographer Walter Isaacson was writing an authorized biography of Steve Jobs due in 2012. A lot has changed since then. Steve Jobs’s health took a turn for the worse, and presumably as a result the release date was advanced to today. Also, the title of the book changed from iSteve: The Book of Jobs to the more simple and elegant Steve Jobs. You can purchase the book today from Amazon in hard cover or Kindle format, or you can purchase the book on Apple’s iBooks store. I haven’t previously purchased an iBooks book, but that seems like the most appropriate way to read this, so I’ll be reading it in iBooks format on my iPad 2.
Walter Isaacson wrote biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, so writing about important and influential people is nothing new to him. What is different for this book is that Isaacson conducted countless interviews with Steve Jobs himself, up to the very end of his life. This gives the book an air of autobiography which is especially rare for Steve Jobs, who did not like to talk to the press about himself. And Isaacson is more than just a biographer. After growing up in New Orleans (we even attended the same high school) and graduating from Harvard, he then became the editor of Time magazine and then the CEO of CNN — jobs that gave him a keen sense of the events in our generation that were so influenced by Steve Jobs.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote a favorable review of the book, and I’m very excited to read it. Considering that you are a reader of iPhone J.D., I suspect that you will enjoy this book as well.
Click here to get Steve Jobs from iBooks ($16.99): 
Click here to get Steve Jobs from Amazon ($17.88 hardcover; $16.99 Kindle)
The iPhone 4S has dominated the news this week now that 4 million people purchased one last weekend and I know that many, many more purchased one during the past five days. Siri, especially, has dominated the news.
One of the more useful accessories that you can get for your iPad is a device to prop up the iPad at an angle. I’ve talked about many such devices here such as Apple’s own Smart Cover, the GorillaMobile Yogi, and most recently the FlexStand. All of those are devices that attach in some way to the iPad. If you are looking for a simple stand that does not connect to the iPad, the iTilt from Bracketron might be for you.
The design of the iTilt is very simple. It mostly consists of black plastic but also has rubber pads at the top and bottom to protect your iPad. The bottom has non-slip feet that do a very good job of keeping the stand steady.
On the back, a metal clip snaps into one of eight viewing angles.
You can place your iPad in the iTilt in either portrait or landscape mode.
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When you are not using it, you can easily fold the iTilt onto itself to make it flat, making it easy to slip into a briefcase, purse or suitcase for travel.
My wife has been looking for a stand for her iPad 2, so she has been using the iTilt for the last few weeks while I have also been trying it out. She used the iTilt to prop up her iPad while she was working at her desk, and also used it to prop up her iPad in the kitchen when she was reading a recipe. It is nice that the iTilt is so light (3.7 ounces) that it is easy to carry it around the house.
The iTilt is advertised as working with many iPad cases. This is true, but note that if you place an iPad in the iTilt with an Apple Smart Cover attached that is folded back behind the iPad, and if you then unfold the Smart Cover to protect the screen, the rubber feet may prevent the Smart Cover from completing snapping shut — which means that the magnets won’t activate to put the screen to sleep:
You can avoid the Smart Cover remaining ajar if you first take the iPad out of the stand, then close the cover, and then return it to the iTilt with the cover attached and make sure that the cover stayed in place. This is a minor detail but it is something that my wife sometimes found annoying.
The MSRP for the iTilt is $20, which seems a little high considering that there is not much to the device, but you can get it on Amazon for $12.99 and that seems about right. Indeed, even though there is not much to the iTilt in that it does not have a lot of complicated parts, its simplicity and small size is part of what makes it so handy and effective. Overall, the iTilt does a nice job of propping up the iPad, and I like that it is so portable.
Click here to get the iTilt on Amazon ($12.99).
Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2011 fiscal fourth quarter (which ran from June 26, 2011 to September 24, 2011) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. It was a record-setting quarter for Apple, with sales of $28.27 billion and net profit of $6.62 billion. It was also a record-setting fiscal year, with $108 billion in revenue and $26 billion in profit. If you want to hear the full call yourself, you can download it from iTunes. Apple’s official press release is here. Here are the highlights of the call that I think would be of interest to attorneys who use an iPhone or iPad:
One of the most useful features of the iPhone and iPad is the ability to view PDF files. This is especially true on the iPad; the larger screen makes it a natural for reviewing documents. If someone sends you an e-mail with a PDF file attached, you can easily tap on the file and view it using the built-in iOS document viewer. The recent iOS 5 update enhanced that viewer on the iPad, placing previews of every page along the right side of the screen so you can quickly scan for another page in the document and then jump directly there. But often you will want to copy a PDF file from your e-mail, or from some other source (such as a web page), and store it someplace to view it later. There are many useful apps that let you do so and that also include sophisticated annotation features so that you can markup a pleading, a deposition, etc. On the iPad, GoodReader (which costs $5) is my favorite.
On the other hand, if you are not looking to annotate a PDF and just want a simple app to read the document, there are several free apps that can do that, the best of which is Apple’s own iBooks. Yes, iBooks is normally thought of as an app to purchase and read books, but the iBooks app also can view and store PDF files. The app is free, and in my testing has always been the fastest PDF viewer on either the iPhone or the iPad. Perhaps this comes as no surprise for Apple’s own product to be the best PDF viewer.
Yesterday, Adobe released Adobe Reader, an app for the iPhone and iPad that lets you view PDF files. Like iBooks, it is free, and while Apple may have created the iPhone and iPad, Adobe created the PDF standard, so I was curious to see how Adobe Reader stands up to iBooks as a PDF viewer. Adobe Reader is an excellent app, although right now, I slightly prefer iBooks as a PDF viewer.
Speed when browsing through a document
Sometimes you have the luxury of working with a short PDF file, but I often find myself working with very large PDF files such as pleadings, compilations of evidence, depositions, etc. When you work with large files and browse from page to page, you don’t want the app to lag behind you. This has always been the strength of iBooks because it renders PDF pages faster than any other app. In my tests, the new Adobe Reader app is very fast, but not quite as fast as iBooks. In iBooks I can quickly flick my finger on the screen to browse through pages on my iPad 2 and I see each page appear almost immediately. In Adobe Reader, I can flick through pages just as quickly, but I have to wait a little longer before the image appears. In other words, I flick to the next page, I see a white blank screen for a short moment, and then the page appears. I don’t mean to suggest that Adobe Reader is slow; it is actually quite fast. Just not as fast as iBooks.
Searching a document
Another key feature when looking at PDFs that contain text is the ability to search the PDF. Both iBooks and Adobe Reader have a search function, but I prefer the implementation in iBooks. In Adobe Reader, you enter a search term and then the app shows you the first page with the highlighted word on the page. Tap the very large (nice touch!) arrows at the bottom to go through each instance of the word. Here are screenshots from the iPad and from the iPhone:
In iBooks, on the other hand, when you search for a term you see a list that shows each instance of the word, in context, and the page number on which the word appears. This makes it even faster to find the instance of the term that matters most so that you can get the right page even faster. Again, here is the iPad and the iPhone version of the same search:
While I prefer the iBooks approach, I admit that this is a matter of personal preference. For some searches, you may find it more efficient to see the entire page of the document at once so that you can view the term in context on the page. And for search terms that appear in a document only a few times, this makes sense to me. But for search terms that appear in a document many different times, I consider the iBooks approach more efficient.
Jumping to another page
Besides browsing and searching, I believe that the next most important feature of a PDF viewer is the ability to jump to another page. If you are on page 4 and you want to go to page 36, you don’t want to have to swipe 32 times. And when jumping to another page, page previews are important because you often only have a general sense that you want to jump to somewhere around page 36. For this feature, both apps do a great job, and the slight edge may go to Adobe Reader. In iBooks, if you tap once in the middle of a document to bring up the menu bars, you see tiny previews of each page at the bottom of the screen. You can tap on another page to jump there, or scroll your finger along the page previews to quickly find the right page. This system works quite well, and here is what it looks like on the iPad:
Adobe reader only shows one page preview at a time, but that preview is much larger and thus much more useful. After you tap in the middle of a document to make the menus appear, a bar at the bottom of the document lets you quickly slide through previews of all pages in the document, and the page preview is large enough to give you a good sense of what is on the page. Here it is on the iPad:
Again, I admit that this is a matter of personal preference, but I think that the Adobe Reader approach works better.
Storage
Another key feature of a PDF viewer is the ability to store a file for later viewing. In iBooks, you can view all of your stored documents either as large icons (with previews of the first page) on a virtual bookshelf, or you can view a list of documents. In Adobe Reader, you can only view a list. In iBooks, you can create different “collections” of documents, which work like folders. In this initial version of the Adobe Reader app, all of the documents are in just one long list. Frankly, if I am going to store a bunch of Acrobat documents, I prefer to use an app like GoodReader that lets me use both normal folders plus folders within folders. Moreover, an app like GoodReader can work with cloud storage providers like DropBox, Google Docs and Apple’s new iCloud service. Neither iBooks nor Adobe Reader support these advanced features yet. Having said that, as between the two, iBooks is more powerful than Adobe Reader becuase of the “collections” feature and the ability to view documents as icons or in a list.
Other features
Both iBooks and Adobe Reader let you create bookmarks to specific pages. [UPDATE 10/22/12: iBooks lets you create and view bookmarks to specific pages. Adobe Reader does not currently let you create bookmarks, but you can jump to bookmarks already in a PDF document.] You can get a PDF file into either iBooks or Adobe Reader by using the standard iPhone and iPad “Open in…” feature. Adobe Reader also lets you send a PDF file to another app using the same “Open in…” feature; iBooks is a one-way app that lets you send files to iBooks but not export files to another app. In iBooks, you can only browse through a file by flicking left or right; Adobe Reader also lets you view a PDF file in continuous mode, one page after another, in which you can quickly scroll up and down. Both apps let you e-mail a PDF file or print a PDF file.
The iBooks app also lets you change the screen brightness from within the app. In a way this is cheating; other apps don’t have this feature because Apple won’t let third party app developers do so, and yet Apple adds this feature to its own iBooks app. As Mel Brooks wisely noted in History of the World, Part 1: “It’s good to be the king.”
One annoying feature of the iBooks app is that the document title that it displays is not the file name but instead the title contained within the document properties. In my experience, that is often not the title that you want to associate with a document. Adobe Reader displays the file name. Neither app gives you the option of changing the title.
Summary
On the PC and Mac, Adobe Acrobat is the gold standard for editing PDF files (although other programs compete by offering the most useful features at a reduced price), and Adobe Reader is arguably the best free PDF reader (although the Preview program built-in on every Mac is arguably just as good). Reading PDF files on the iPad is so important that I’m thrilled to see Adobe itself now offering a free reader app. In this first version of the app, it has some advantages over iBooks, but I still give iBooks the slight edge. Hopefully, Adobe will add new features in the future, and if it does so I can easily see Adobe Reader one day becoming the gold standard for viewing PDF files on the iPad and iPhone.
Fortunately, these apps are free so you can try them out yourself, switch between them at your leisure, and not worry about choosing one and losing out on new features added to another app.
Click here for Adobe Reader (free):
Click here for iBooks (free):
I suspect that if you ask lawyers what app they use the most on an iPhone or iPad, the answer would be Mail. I suspect many non-lawyers would say the same thing. We get and send tons of e-mail messages a day, and anything that makes it easier to handle those messages is appreciated. The new iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS 5, became available last week. The upgrade can take several hours and some features (like iCloud) can be confusing at first. Nevertheless, there are so many new features in this free upgrade that I think that virtually all iPhone and iPad owners should make the jump. Here are the improvements to the way that the iPhone and iPad handle e-mail in iOS 5 that I have found to be very helpful, and which many will find to be a good reason to upgrade:
These are some pretty major improvements to one of the most important apps on the iPhone and iPad.