In the news

It’s another Friday, so here is another collection of the iPhone and iPad items of interest that were in the news during the past week:

• Angela Morris of Texas Lawyer‘s Tex Parte Blog describes a 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session at the State Bar of Texas Annual Meeting.  Attorneys Ronald Chichester, Grant Scheiner and Mark Unger recommended several apps for iPhone (and Android).  There are a few errors in the article — for example, GoodReader is described as a “news reader” — but the apps themselves seem to be good picks.
• New Orleans attorney Ernie Svensons writes about “true” digital signatures on his PDF for Lawyers blog.  His premise is that nobody really likes the digital signature feature of Acrobat, and it usually is better to just insert a graphic of your signature in a document.  I agree 100%, and it is amazing to me that the digital signature feature of Acrobat has been around for so long and yet it is still so awkward.
• Indiana attorney Bill Wilson discusses Dropbox security on his Third Apple website.
• I’ve long been a fan of the Fastcase app for iPhone and iPad.  This week, Fastcase announced a new free product, Fastcase Advance Sheets.  These are the latest, not-yet-published decisions from courts, provided by Fastcase in an e-book format.  And best of all, Fastcase Advance Sheets are free.  Sean Doherty of Law Technology News writes about this new product.  Click here to get more information on the Fastcase website.  My assumption is that Fastcase Advance Sheets are not yet available; I see this on the Amazon Kindle Store but those Fastcase e-books have prices, and I don’t yet see anything on the Apple iBookstore.
• New York attorney Niki Black writes about the SignMyPad app.
• Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web describes the new Passbook app coming in iOS 6.  I’m really looking forward to this app, both because of what it will do at first and how the app could evolve in the future.
• Peter Cohen of The Loop describes upgrades to the app PDFpen including folder syncing with Dropbox.
• Carmine Gallo has an interesting article about Apple Stores in this article in Forbes.
• MacNN reports that, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, it costs an iPad owner about $1.36 a year to charge an iPad (assuming a full charge every other day).  By comparison, a desktop computer costs about $28.21 a year and a clothes dryer costs about $105 a year.
• Kit Eaton of the New York Times discusses augmented reality apps.
• And finally, here is a really fun video created by British duo Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp, who call themselves The Theory, using an iPhone and a miniature video projector.  They call it the world’s smallest police chase.  Too funny: