The ABA Journal announced the winners of the 2011 Blawg 100, and thanks to all of you who took the time to vote, iPhone J.D. won the legal technology category for the second year in a row. Y’all are awesome! Hopefully this helps to spread the word about all that attorneys can do with iPhones and iPads. I don’t know about your law offices, but in mine there were LOTS of attorneys who received an iPad for Christmas or Hanukkah, and I’ve been pointing many of my partners to posts on this site such as this one. Some great sites won in the other Blawg 100 categories as well. For example, Abnormal Use won the Torts category, and Jim Dedman and his partners at Gallivan, White & Boyd do a great job with that site. Kevin Underhill’s Lowering the Bar won the For Fun category, and that blog always makes me laugh. The winner in the News category was Above the Law, always an interesting source of law firm news and gossip. Second place in News went to SCOTUSblog, and I always turn to that site when I have a case, or I am monitoring a case, before the U.S. Supreme Court. George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley won the Opinion category, and Turley and his team do a great job of reporting, and providing opinions, on issues related to civil liberties and other legal topics. I’m not as familiar with the winners in the other categories, but congratulations to all of the sites that made the Blawg 100. And now, on to the news of the week:
- Apple doesn’t announce its quarterly results, including an update on the recent iPhone and iPad sales, until January 24, but Darrell Etherington reports that Verizon announced that it sold 4.2 million iPhones during the last quarter of 2011, double the previous quarter. Between the new iPhone 4S and the holiday season, I suspect that Apple will have some great numbers to report in a few weeks.
- Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog reports that one billion apps were downloaded in the last week of 2011 and analyzes what it might mean for lawyers.
- Bob Tedesci of the New York Times identifies some of the best apps of 2011.
- Jason Hiner of TechRepublic lists his 20 favorite iPad apps.
- Fraser Speirs has an informative article on Macworld explaining how multitasking works on iPhones and iPads.
- Rupert Murdoch, who was frequently mentioned in the Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, had this to say about the book on Twitter: “Steve Jobs biog interesting but unfair. Family must hate.”
- Portland attorney Josh Barrett of Tablet Legal reviews CloudOn, a new iPad app that provides access to a cloud-based version of Microsoft Office. Among other things, this means that you can make redline changes to a document on the iPad, something I’ve been wanting for a long time. Soon after the app was released, it was pulled from the App Store because of too much demand. As I type this, the app is there again, but it may not stay for long. For now the app is free, but in the future the company plans to make you pay for the service. I’ll write more about this app after I have had some time to try it out, but I wanted to post about it now in case you want to try to grab a copy before it gets pulled from the App Store again. Click here to get CloudOn (free):
- When I travel with my iPad, I leave my PC in my office but I carry a bluetooth keyboard with me to make it easier to type. For a long time I’ve used the $69 Apple Wireless Keyboard, which I love because it is a full size keyboard — indeed, the exact same keyboard that ships with many Macs. But if you want to save some money, T.J. Luoma of TUAW reviewed a similar, somewhat smaller, keyboard sold by Amazon’s AmazonBasics subsidiary called the AmazonBasics Bluetooth Keyboard for Apple iPad, iPhone that sells for only $40.
- Evan Koblentz of Law Technology News wrote an article titled “iPad Mania Aside, Tablets Are Inefficient Work Devices for Lawyers.” The article itself is mainly a critique of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, not the iPad, and he admits that “for most lawyers, it makes a lot more sense to follow the herd into Appleville” and get an iPad.
- The Palm WebOS story is a curious tale. When the Palm Pre was first announced, it looked great, and in June of 2009 I thought that it might be the first true competitor to the iPhone. But the Pre never lived up to expectations, and then after Palm was purchased by HP, the TouchPad tablet only stayed on the market for a few weeks before HP pulled the plug. Brian Chen, who used to write for Macworld and then Wired and now writes for the New York Times, wrote an interesting report on why WebOS failed.
- Nick Bilton of the New York Times writes about his “New Year’s resolution: In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone. Without Internet, Twitter, Facebook and my iPad. Spending a half-hour a day without electronics might sound easy for most, but for me, 30 unconnected minutes produces the same anxious feelings of a child left accidentally at the mall.”
- If Nick Bilton goes hiking during those 30 minutes, I hope he at least keeps his iPhone in his pocket. Kelly Hodgkins of TUAW writes about a hiker who got lost on a mountain on New Year’s Eve but who was rescued thanks to the light on his iPhone.
- The BBS reports that Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, was recently knighted. Bravo, Sir Jony! I liked Andy Ihnatko’s take on this: “He’ll be the first English knight to wear unibody aluminum armor.”
- Serenity Caldwell of Macworld reviews a bunch of iPad styluses.
- The website FunkySpaceMonkey has pictures and a description of the Newton Cadillac, a product developed by Appple in 1993 but never released that sort of looks like an early version of an iPad.
- Turning back the clock even more, Jay Mug has pictures and a description of an “iPhone” (ahem) developed by Apple in 1983 but never released.
- And finally, when a guy named Joe was looking for a creative way to propose to his girlfriend Jen, he asked an iPhone game developer to insert the proposal in a speical version of the app that his game-loving girlfriend would play. The developer of the game Foozle agreed to do so as long as Joe took a video of the proposal. Read more about the proposal here on the Foozle website, and here is the video. (via AppAdvice)