Month: January 2012

Happy Friday the 13th!  The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place in Las Vegas over the last few days.  Lots of products that work with the iPhone or iPad, or are inspired by their success, were previewed.  History tells us that many of these items will never see the light of day, and many more will prove to be interesting ideas that never panned out.  Nevertheless, there are always a few diamonds in the rough.  I discuss a few CES announcements below, and I’ll be talking about more over the coming weeks.  And now the news of the week:

• Florida attorney Katie Floyd makes Apple predictions for 2012.  I agree with almost all of them.
• Trial presentation consultant Ted Brooks wrote an extensive review for Law Technology News of ExhibitView, an iPad app that you can use to display and annotate exhibits at trial.
• Joan Feldman of Attorney at Work recommends 10 apps for attorneys.
• Martha Neil of ABA Journal writes about two Portland attorney who are trying to raise money through Kickstarter to manufacture a product that they call the Clutch, a handle and stand for the iPad.
• This article is dated June 6, 2011, but I just saw it a few days ago and it is worth noting.  Jury consultant Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm reviews iJuror and Jury Duty, two apps that can help you pick a jury.  His article includes a great video that shows the apps in action.  I’m intrigued by apps like these, but the author notes that in their current versions, they are not quite helpful enough to replace traditional voir dire tools.  Nevertheless, I suspect that in the future, apps like this could become essential in trial.
• Virginia attorney Rob Dean discusses using GoodReader and Dropbox to get documents on an iPad to use in court.
• Houston attorney David Bissinger discusses in Texas Lawyer what trial lawyers can learn from Steve Jobs regarding presentation skills.
• On January 19, Tom Mighell, the author of iPad in One Hour for Lawyers, Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma Bar Association, and Birmingham, AL attorney Jamie Moncus are presenting an online CLE through ALI-ABA called “iPads for Litigators.”  The course will showcase apps and accessories to help litigators get the most out of their iPads. 
• Camille Reynolds, law librarian at the Nossaman firm, recommends iPhone and iPad apps for lawyers in an article for The Recorder at Law.com.
• Mike Scarcella of The Blog of LegalTimes discusses authenticity and admissibility of notes on an iPhone in a conspiracy prosecution.
• On Thursday, January 19, Apple is hosting an event at the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York.  Dan Moren of Macworld shows the invitation sent to members of the press, which states:  “Join us for an education announcement in the Big Apple.”  Many are predicting that this will be an announcement related to textbooks on the iPad.  Given the weight of the books that I carried around when I was in college, and especially when I was in law school, textbooks on an iPad sounds like a good idea.
• Do you like to read Kindle books on your iPad?  The Kindle app works great as an e-book reader, but unfortunately it doesn’t let you find and buy new books because Amazon doesn’t want to pay Apple a percentage of every sale.  Steven Sande of TUAW discusses a new Kindle website that is optimized for the iPad to make it easy to find and purchase books.
• On Monday, I noted that it has been five years since Apple announced the iPhone.  Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times was one of the few reporters to get to play with an iPhone five years ago, and he has a great post describing the experience.
• Ihnatko also wrote a great article about the new tablets announced at CES and how they compare to the iPad.
• If you have ever applied a protective screen to your iPhone or iPad, you know how difficult it is to do so without getting dust or bubbles under the screen.  John Brownlee of Cult of Mac describes an interesting new device that is supposed to make it easy to apply a screen by using a roller.
• Nick Wingfield of the New York Times describes a new free iPad ap called OnLive that let’s you run Windows on an iPad.  It works similar to Citrix or LogMeIn.
• Warren Buckleitner of the New York Times reviews four iPhone cases designed to make the iPhone even more child-friendly.
• And finally, earlier this week I reviewed the Chef Sleeve, a solution for using your iPad in your kitchen.  But what if you want to use your device in the shower?  A new product was announced at CES in Las Vegas this past week that addresses this urgent problem.  The iShower is a waterproof Bluetooth speaker that works when your iPhone or iPad is up to 200 feet away.  That way, you can press play on your iPhone and leave it in your bedroom and then sing along to the tunes while you take a shower.  It will debut in March and will cost $99.99.

I know lots of attorneys who also love to cook.  As useful as the iPad is in the office, it can be just as handy in the kitchen.  There are tons of great cooking apps so you might use an iPad in place of a physical cookbook, or maybe you just want to have a video play on the iPad while you are in the kitchen, or maybe you just want to keep your e-mail open while you are in the kitchen.  Just prop up the iPad on a stand in your kitchen and you are all set — until the moment when you need to touch the screen and you realize that you have been using your fingers to prepare food.  You don’t want to get cookie dough on your iPad screen, but you also don’t want to take the time to wash your hands every time you need to tap or swipe.

The Chef Sleeve is a great solution to this problem.  This is a thin, plastic bag that is a perfect fit for a first or second generation iPad.  The Chef Sleeve is thin enough that the iPad has no problem recognizing your fingertips, but it provides some protection so that anything on your fingers just gets on the Chef Sleeve, not the iPad itself.

The Chef Sleeve is almost invisible when it is on your iPad; it just makes the screen a little more shiny.  I used a flash when taking this picture which makes the Chef Sleeve more obvious, but remember that you won’t see it nearly as much in actual use, which is a good thing:

When you first take a Chef Sleeve out of the box, there is a flap on one side.  You slide your iPad in the sleeve, then remove a thin white strip to expose a sticky part on a flap, then you fold the flap back over the iPad.  This creates a seal to protect the iPad in the Chef Sleeve.  It’s not water-proof, but it certainly makes it water-resistant.

You can easily open the flap and remove the iPad and then reuse the Chef Sleeve at a later date.  The sticky substance on the flap is akin go a Post-It Note; you can remove it and reapply it many times.  When the Chef Sleeve gets dirty, you can wipe it off to reuse it, or you can dispose it or recycle it.

You get 25 Chef Sleeve in a box, and the box itself is worth discussing.  The box is shaped like a prism, and there are perforated lines on two of the slides.  As a result, not only can you use the box to store your Chef Sleeves, but also the box itself can act as a stand that will hold the iPad in the portrait position.  It’s not the most sturdy iPad stand in the world, but it works in a pinch, and is a clever way to make the box useful.

The manufacturer primarily advertises this as a device to use in the kitchen, but Chef Sleeves can be useful elsewhere.  Being the father of two young children who love to use my iPad but who often seem to have sticky fingers, I can definitely envision protecting an iPad in a Chef Sleeve before letting them use it, although I admit that I haven’t actually done so yet.  The Chef Sleeve website also promotes using the device in a hospital, on the beach, or in any other location where your hands might get greasy or wet.  (I’m not sure about beach use, though; how are you supposed to see an iPad screen with that much sunlight?)

I have heard of people doing something similar by just placing an iPad in a gallon size Ziploc bag.  That works too (and the thicker Ziploc bag is probably easier to clean and reuse), but the Chef Sleeve is perfectly sized for the iPad, and the thinner plastic is a plus for ensuring that the iPad recognizes your fingers.

The manufacturer sent me some free Chef Sleeves for this review, and I’ve been showing them to others over the holiday season.  The most common critique that I heard is simply that it seemed weird to touch an iPad through a plastic bag.  I agree to a certain extent, but that is the trade-off to protect the iPad, and I myself never considered it a major problem.  I wouldn’t want to keep the Chef Sleeve on my iPad all the time, but in a situation where I want to protect my iPad from food, moisture, etc., this seems like a great solution.  If you are looking for quick and easy protection for your iPad in the kitchen or elsewhere, the Chef Sleeve works very well.

Click here to get the Chef Sleeve from Amazon (box of 25 for $19.99).

The iPhone and iPad let you take a document from one app and open it in another app that can handle the same file type.  If you are like me, you use this feature most often when someone sends you an attachment to an e-mail.  Just hold down your finger on the attachment for a second or so, and you’ll be give the option to open the attachment in some other app.  For example, I often like to open up a Word document in the Documents to Go app because that app lets me see redline edits and footnotes, plus the app makes it easy to increase the font size by just pinching.

For some file types, you may have many apps that can handle the file.  For me — and perhaps for you as well — this is especially true for PDF files because a large number of apps can handle PDF files, and I have quite a few of them installed on my iPhone and iPad.

I have two tips today.  First, keep in mind that you can see a list of up to 10 apps that can open a file type, even though this is not so obvious on the iPad.  Second, here is a solution for when the app that you want to use to open a file doesn’t appear in the list of ten.

Seeing all ten apps in the menu

In iOS 5, Apple will show you up to 10 apps that can handle a file type.  This is fairly obvious on the iPhone, but can be confusing on the iPad

On the iPhone, the list of apps that can open a file type appears in a large, full-screen list, and if you have more than seven items, the last item on the list is somewhat cutoff, indicating that there are more items if you scroll down.  Scroll down to see the rest of the list:

 

On the iPad, even though the screen itself is larger, the iPad only shows four apps in the list.  Even worse, there is little indication that there are additional items beyond those four.  When the menu first appears there is a scroll bar on the right, but it quickly disappears.  If you think to touch the menu and start to scroll it, you will again see the scroll bar to alert you that there are more items, but if you don’t touch the menu you may just assume that only four apps can handle this file type:

So my first tip is that if you want to open up a document in another app, keep in mind that you can select from a list of up to ten such apps, even though on the iPhone you only see seven at first, and on the iPad you only see four at first.

Using apps that are not in the menu

What if you have more than ten apps that can handle a certain type of file, and the app that you want to use is not in the list of ten?  There is a solution, but it is not obvious, nor is it all that elegant. 

I had to deal with this issue yesterday because I updated the GoodReader app on my iPad.  GoodReader is my favorite app for handling PDF files on my iPad becuase it is such a powerful app, and indeed one reason that the app can do so much is that the developer frequently updates the app to add new features.  But after updating the GoodReader app on my iPad yesterday, I then tried to send a document attached to an e-mail to the GoodReader app, only to learn that GoodReader was no longer one of the ten listed apps for a PDF file.  Until yesterday, GoodReader had always been in my list of ten.

The solution is to delete some of the apps in that list from your device.  I looked at the list of ten PDF-reading apps and deleted one of them.  This caused another app that could handle PDF apps to appear on the list — but unfortunately, it wasn’t the GoodReader app.  I deleted a second app, and again no luck.  When I deleted a third app, suddenly GoodReader was once again on my list, at the very bottom.

What about those apps that I just deleted?  Fortunately, you can always re-download an app from the App Store, and even if it is not a free app, Apple will not make you pay for the app again.  Thus, I re-downloaded the three apps that I had just deleted.  That put all of the apps back on my device, and none of them showed up in the “Open In…” menu; GoodReader remained in the last position.

The mystery of the list

How does the iPhone or iPad decide which apps to include in the list of ten?  Frankly, I don’t know.  At first I thought that the list was simply organized by date, with apps that had been purchased or updated more recently appearing lowest in the list (and off the list completely if beyond the tenth position).  But no date that I could associate with an app — date added, date modified, purchase date or release date (all fields that you can see in iTunes) — explained the order of the apps in my list of ten.

The developer of GoodReader states on its troubleshooting page that it is completely random whether an app shows up in the list or not:

The Open In functionality is controlled by iOS, we have no active control over it, we just declare GoodReader to be capable of accepting certain file types. iOS is known to show only a limited number (10 or so) of randomly selected apps for any given file type when you invoke the Open In action in any app. The actual maximum number of apps depends on a device type and on a version of iOS. The only way to resolve this issue is to delete some apps that you don’t need that expose themselves for a particular file type, to make way to other eligible apps.

I suppose that could be true, but there does seem to be some rough (albeit imperfect) association between when an app was added or updated and where it falls on the list on my iPhone or iPad.  A bunch of Google searches didn’t give me any answer for how apps are listed (or not listed) in the menu other than what I just quoted from the GoodReader website.  Perhaps someone reading this post knows the full answer, and if so I’d appreciate it if you commented on this post or sent me an e-mail to answer the mystery of which apps appear in the list of ten and the order in which they appear.

An area for improvement

I love using the iPhone and iPad because the smart folks at Apple do such a good job at paying attention to the tiny details.  Having said that, there is always room for improvement, and that’s why Apple frequently updates the iOS.  My hope is that Apple improves the way that the “Open In…” menu works in a future version of the iOS.  Specifically:

1. It would be nice to have a way to control which apps appear in the list of ten, most obviously by using the Settings app.  I would like to be able to select (1) which apps show up in the list of ten, (2) the order of those apps on the list and (3) the default app for each file type (i.e. the first item in the list).  Right now, Apple gives the #1 spot to its own apps.  Thus, iBooks is always the top choice for PDF files, Pages is the #1 spot for Microsoft Word files, etc.

2. Apple does a good job of using the full screen on the iPhone to show apps that can handle a file type.  The iPad has a much larger screen, but we can only see four apps at a time in the list.  That makes no sense.  The screen is more than big enough to show all ten apps at one time.

3. Do we even need the limit of ten?  I presume the thinking is that it gets confusing to have too many choices, but it is even more confusing when the app that you want to use doesn’t show up in the list at all.  Why not include every app that can handle a file, and even if the user is not allowed to control the order, how about just using alphabetical order, or perhaps the order of which apps have most recently been used to handle that file type.  With the ten app limit, you need to delete apps to get other apps to show up in the list of ten.  This “solution” is not obvious, nor is it desirable if the app you delete has a document stored in the app.  Deleting the app deletes all of its documents, and when you re-download the app, the documents are gone unless you also stored them somewhere else.  For example, one of the apps that I deleted to make GoodReader appear was the Amazon Kindle app, and after I re-downloaded the app, I was given the option to restore my purchased Kindle titles to the app.  But very few apps include this feature.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.  Jobs had given many such addresses in the past, and gave many more after that, but the speech he gave five years ago today was the best and most important presentation that Steve Jobs ever made:  the introduction of the iPhone.  Here is how Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world:

This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years.  Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.  And Apple has been, well, first of all, one is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career.  Apple has been very fortunate.  It has been able to introduce a few of these into the world.  In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh.  It didn’t just change Apple, it changed the whole computer industry.  In 2001, we introduced the first iPod.  And it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry. 

Well, today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class.  The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.  [Crowd cheers]  The second is a revolutionary mobile phone.  [Crowd cheers even louder]  And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.  So, three things.  A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device.  An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator.  An iPod, a phone…  [Crowd goes wild]  Are you getting it?  These are not three separate devices.  This is one device.  And we are calling it iPhone.  Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

Right after Jobs said that, he then joked “And here it is” and showed this slide:

Obviously, Apple didn’t just slap a phone dial onto an iPod, and today the look and feel of the iPhone is so well-know that it may seem obvious.  But at the time, smartphones looked nothing like the iPhone.  During his speech five years ago, Steve Jobs showed a slide of what the best smartphones on the market at the time looked like:

Jobs said that Apple wanted to do something completely different, something that was both smart and easy to use.  “What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device that has ever been and super easy to use.  … We’re going to reinvent the phone.”

Apple certainly did reinvent the phone in 2007, and in the five years since then it has frequently reinvented the iPhone, adding great new hardware and software features.

If you have never seen the Steve Jobs iPhone introduction, it really is worth watching.  Even if you have seen it before, it is worth watching again, not only because it is fun to see how revolutionary the iPhone was back in 2007, but also because it is interesting to compare the iPhone that was introduced five years ago to the iPhone of today. 

Here is the Jobs presentation in two parts, the first of which is 41 minutes and the second of which is 38 minutes:

Here’s looking forward to the next five years of the iPhone!

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)

As we start a new year, lots of folks are figuring out how to make the most of an iPad.  Many received a new iPad during the holidays.  Some of those were upgrades to the iPad 2, which means that an original iPad was passed on to a friend or family member.  And some folks have had an iPad for a while, but want to start the new year with a greater understanding of what they can do with the iPad.  For any of these folks, I have an excellent recommendation — buy a copy of iPad at Work, a book by California attorney David Sparks. Sparks, who is also known as “MacSparky,” runs a website by that name and co-hosts the excellent podcast Mac Power Users with Florida attorney Katie Floyd.

The publisher sent me a free copy of the book to review, and I just finished reading it last night.  It is an amazing resource for anyone who is trying to get work done with an iPad, which would include every single attorney who reads iPhone J.D., and most non-attorneys as well.

The book starts with three chapters on iPad basics, so anyone who is brand new to the iPad can read these chapters to learn the fundamentals.  These chapters are useful and well-written, but the rest of the book is what really impressed me.  Sparks has thought of virtually every task that a person trying to get work done with an iPad might want to undertake, as you can see from the chapter titles:

1. iPad Fundamentals
2. Useful Utilities
3. Security
4. The Internet
5. The Cloud
6. E-mail
7. Contacts
8. Calendars
9. Video Conferencing and Messaging
10. Remote Access
11. Travel
12. The Enterprise
13. Writing
14. PDFs and Your iPad
15. Reading Books
16. Notes and Meetings
17. Brainstorming
18. Presentations
19. Task Management
20. Calculators and Spreadsheets
21. Business Graphics
22. Databases
23. Project Management
24. Billing and Finance

In each chapter, Sparks identifies the strategies and the apps that you can use to get the task done, explains the features of the apps with tons of pictures, and then ends each chapter with a few paragraphs explaining the strategies and apps Sparks himself uses and why. 

Some chapters include extensive discussions of key apps.  For example Chapter 14 includes one of the best discussions of GoodReader that I have ever seen, and GoodReader is the first app that I tell attorneys to buy after they get an iPad.  It can be a little confusing to figure out, but it does so much.  As Sparks says after devoting eight pages to the app:  “By now you can see why GoodReader is so popular.  It does everything.  You can also see why the interface can be confusing and overwhelming.  It does everything.”  Amen to both parts of that.

Chapter 13’s discussion of writing on the iPad is particularly extensive.  He discusses the best word processing programs (Pages, Quickoffice Pro HD and Documents to Go), a large number of apps for working with plain text, strategies for taking notes, formatting text with Markdown, advice on collaboration tools and working with WordPerfect files, etc. 

I was a little surprised that in Chapter 16, “Notes and Meetings,” the only apps that he discussed for using a stylus to take notes on the iPad are Notes Plus and Penultimate, and only the first of those two apps is really appropriate for taking extensive notes during meetings. He doesn’t discuss Note Taker HD, which has long been my favorite app for taking notes with a stylus.  The only reason I mention this is that this book is so comprehensive that in virtually every other chapter, Sparks does a great job of identifying all of the apps that I myself would recommend, plus he recommends quite a few apps that were new to me and that I look forward to trying out.

(By the way, I’ve been waiting a long time to review Notes Plus here on iPhone J.D. because, ever since the Summer of 2011, the developer has been promising extensive updates in a version 3.0.  That version was finally submitted to the App Store on December 31, 2011, and once it is approved and I have had a chance to try it out, I’ll discuss it here.)

Although Sparks is a commercial litigator, his book is aimed at a broad audience — anyone trying to get work done with an iPad.  However, in the book’s appendix, he identifies some key apps for certain professionals: teachers, doctors, IT professionals, real estate agents, construction professionals, and yes, attorneys.  Apps for attorneys that he discusses include TrialPad, Black’s Law Dictionary and Court Days Pro.  Moreover, he could easily get away with marketing the book as “iPad at Work for Lawyers” because every single chapter discusses tasks that many lawyers will want to do with an iPad.  Indeed, it almost seems like during the last year, while I’ve been writing iPhone J.D., Sparks has been writing his own website with reviews of great apps for lawyers, but instead of publishing reviews of one app at a time like I do, he waited to publish them all at one time with the apps organized by category.

This book is great not only because it covers so much, but also because Sparks has a great writing style.  He is direct and easy to understand, and while he definitely gets down to business in this book, his sense of humor also shines through.  For example, many of his screen shots involve a fictional business he invented for the book, Area 51 Products, LTD located in Roswell, NM, and I found myself laughing at the fake business proposals, letters from customers regarding the tin foil hats that they claim are defective, etc.  Sparks clearly had fun as he was preparing the extensive graphics for this book, such as this one that appears in the discussion of Dropbox:

You can buy this book as a traditional paper book or as an e-book from Amazon’s Kindle Bookstore or Apple’s iBookstore.  The printed book is beautiful, and I can understand many preferring that version so that you can go back and forth between the book and your iPad.  However, since the point of this book is to get you using your iPad more often, I recommend that you get the electronic version of the book.

iPad at Work will help anyone with an iPad became much more productive.  Attorneys will especially appreciate the chapters on creating and manging documents, travel, presentations, task management and remote access, but there is something for everyone in this excellent book.  I have looked at quite a few iPad-related books, and there is no question that this is now the #1 book that I will recommend to any attorney looking to get more done with his or her iPad.

Click here to get iPad at Work (physical book) on Amazon ($18.25)

Click here to get iPad at Work (Kindle edition) on Amazon ($15.29)

Click here to get iPad at Work on Apple’s iBookStore ($16.99): 

 

A few weeks ago, Wolfram Alpha released a $5 app called Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant.  The app, which works on both the iPhone and iPad, allows you to make a series of complicated calculations that could be useful for attorneys.  Wolfram Alpha provided me with a free review copy of this app, and not only is the app useful, but it reminds me of how useful Wolfram Alpha itself is.  Before discussing what this specific app does, let me begin by discussing where this app came from.

Wolfram Alpha — Background

Almost three years ago, I wrote about the debut of the Wolfra Alpha website and explained the background as follows:  “Since 1988, Wolfram Research has been selling Mathematica, a high-end computational software product that is used by scientists and mathematicians and sells for about $2,500.  For the last five years, Stephen Wolfram and his team have been looking at using the complicated math that can be done with Mathematica to answer questions by computing connections based on existing data.  A few days ago, this research culminated with the unveiling of the Wolfram|Alpha website.”

I thought that the Wolfram Alpha website was interesting when it debuted in May of 2009 because it was a unique search engine, one that doesn’t link to other sites to find answers to search terms (like Google does) but instead one that tries to compute an objective answer to a search query by accessing a vast database of information with the answer displayed using organized tables, graphs, charts and/or pictures.  Here are some examples of what Wolfram Alpha can do:

• Enter “Easter 2012” and the site gives you not only the date (April 8, 2012) but also the number of days from today, other significant historical events on that date, and estimated sunrise and sunset for your city.
• Enter “New Orleans airport” and the site gives you the official name (Louis Armstrong International Airpot), the FAA code (MSY), the location and elevation of the airport, the number of runways, flights currently leaving from and arriving at MSY, and other nearby airports
• Enter a food item and get nutritional information
• Enter a disease and get lots of factual information such as the number of patients diagnosed with the disease each year
• Enter a university to get addresses, enrollment, tuition, number of degrees awarded by field, etc.

Wolfram Alpha is simply a huge collection of knowledge, especially knowledge with some numerical component.

Wolfram Alpha on the iPhone

When Wolfram Alpha debuted in 2009, I was happy to see that there was an iPhone-friendly version of the website that looked great on the small screen.  But then in later in 2009, Wolfam Alpha decided to remove its iPhone-formatted website and instead encourage people to pay $50 for its iPhone app.  The move was not popular, and in April of 2010, the company dropped the price of the app to only $2 and offered refunds to people who had paid $50 — a practice that I had not seen before and I don’t remember having seen since.  The company also brought back the iPhone-formatted version of the website and made the $2 version of the app work on both the iPhone and iPad.  Somewhere along the way, the price of the app increased to $3.

Even though you can now access Wolfram Alpha for free on an iPhone using Safari or at a small cost with the $3 app, there is so much information available on Wolfram Alpha that often you don’t even know what is there that you might find useful.  As a result, Wolfram Alpha has released dozens of iPhone apps that focus on, and provide simplified access to, a subset of the universe of knowledge available on the website.  Apps cover topics such as statistics, flight information, physics, U.S. Presidents, music theory, personal finance, and genealogy. 

Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant

And this brings us to the legal app that came out a few weeks ago, Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant.  The app provides a simplified interface to lots of information that a lawyer might find useful.

 

Some of the calculations and information that this app provides include

• Statutes of limitations in different states
• Roman numeral conversion
• Date calculations (all calendar days or just business days)
• Settlement calculators
• Historical value of money.  (I see that $1 today is equivalent to $0.16 when I was born in 1969.)
• Interest rates
• Tax rates
• Historical weather on specific dates in specific cities
• Blood alcohol calculator
• Demographics in cities or congressional districts
• Occupational salaries
• Cost of living comparisons between cities
• Family relations computations (e.g. my mother’s cousin’s son is my second cousin)
• Unit conversion
• Closing cost estimation
• Currency conversion
• Time zone conversion

 

Not every aspect of the app is perfect.  For example, although this app can perform date calculations, the interface is better on a focused app like DaysFrom.  This app includes a legal dictionary, but so few terms are included that I doubt most attorneys would consider it very useful, and it is certainly no competition for the other legal dictionary apps in the App Store.  On the other hand, most calculations are done very well, and the amount of information you get from your search terms can be simply amazing.

The app runs on the iPad as well as the iPhone, and the iPad interface is very nice.  You see search fields on the left and search results on the right.  Considering the large amount of information that Wolfram Alpha provides when you run a search, it is nice to have a larger screen to see more of it at once.

Is the app worth $5?  One might say no considering that all of this information is available on the free Wolfram Alpha website itself or the $3 app that provides an iPhone interface to the website.  If you have an iPhone 4S and use Siri, Siri often uses Wolfram Alpha to provide answers to questions.  Indeed, you can even instruct Siri to search Wolfram Alpha just by saying “Wofram” before your other words.  For example, you can ask Siri “Wolfram weather in New York on January 2, 2000” and you will get lots of information from Wolfram Alpha, including the high of 54º and the low of 38º on that day.

On the other hand, the Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant app includes specific fields that can make it easier to formulate a query.  Moreover, as much as I’ve used the Wolfram Alpha website before, it never even occurred to me that the website could make some of the computations listed in this app, so just seeing the menu items is helpful as a reminder of what Wolfram Alpha can do.

I strongly recommend that every iPhone-using attorney be aware of what Wolfram Alpha is so that you can remember it when it might be useful.  Whether you use the website in Safari, Siri, the $3 app, or this new Lawyer’s Professional Assistant, you can tap into an incredible database of knowledge.

Click here for Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant ($4.99): 

Click here for WolframAlpha ($2.99):