Month: June 2012

There are four major office suites for the iPad and iPhone that work with Microsoft Office files:  Apple’s iWork apps such as Pages, Documents to Go, Quickoffice, and Office².  I reviewed Office² yesterday so you know the latest on that app.  Documents to Go was purchased by RIM (manufacturer of the BlackBerry) in September of 2010.  I used to be worried that RIM would cancel Documents to Go in order to help the BlackBerry, but fortunately it doesn’t look like that is happening. Now Evan Rodgers of The Verge reports that Google acquired Quickoffice this week.  I think that the goal is to improve Google services like Google Docs.  Once again, only time will tell whether this has a negative impact on the app for the iPad and iPhone.  All of this uncertainty in the market demonstrates why it is a good idea for Apple to have its own Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps to ensure that there will always be good options for iPhone and iPad users.  And now, for the rest of the iPhone and iPad news of note from this week:

• I recently reviewed Paperless, a great ebook by Florida attorney David Sparks.  Macworld just posted an excerpt from the book, the great chapter on naming files.  Ever since I read this chapter earlier this year, I changed the way that I name all files on my PC and my Mac.
• Karen Sloan of the National Law Journal writes about a seminar at my alma mater, Georgetown University Law Center, devoted to writing law-related iPhone apps.  What a great idea!
• Canadian attorney Ted Tjaden provides advice to lawyers who use an iPad in this article at Slaw.ca.
• An Australian attorney sent me a note about this article in the Sydney Morning Herald about an interesting Kickstarter project that aims to create a far more precise stylus for the iPad.  I’d love to see how this works.
• Maryland criminal defense attorney John Katz explains why he switched from a BlackBerry to the iPhone.
• Last week I noted that Cricket was the first pre-paid carrier to offer the iPhone.  Dan Moren of Macworld reports that Virgin Mobile is now offering the iPhone as well.  You have to pay full price for the phone ($649 for the iPhone 4S with 16GB) but then you can pay as little as $35 a month for 300 minutes and 2.5 GB of data.  For many people, this will be cheaper than buying a subsidized phone with higher monthly fees from AT&T, Verizon or Sprint.
• Since I started iPhone J.D. in 2008, only once have I devoted an entire post to a product that competes with the iPhone.  On June 4, 2009, soon after the Palm Pre was introduced to the world, I called it the first true competitor to the iPhone.  The Pre had some neat features, but it was never successful and it is now gone.  Chris Ziegler of The Verge wrote a long, amazing and well-researched article on the story of the Palm Pre.  If you have any interest in the business side of technology, I strongly recommend that you read this great article.
• In a similar vein, Jessica Vascellaro and Amir Efrati wrote a great article for the Wall Street Journal on the competition between Google and Apple in the mobile map arena. 
• If I’m going to mention the Palm Pre, I should also mention that it is the 20 year anniversary of the Newton, the first personal digital assistant sold by Apple.  Harry McCracken of Time started using an original Newton again and wrote this article about the experience.
• Alan of Art of the iPhone offers 25 useful iPhone tips.  There are some good ones in there.
• Bryan Wolfe of AppAdvice notes that Apple now has a free book on iOS security.  It is quite technical; attorneys are not the target audience, but the IT folks at your law firm might find this interesting.
• Glenn Fleishmann of Macworld reviews Dropbox, an essential file-synchronization system used by many attorneys who use an iPhone or iPad.
• If you are looking for a case for your iPad, Georgia of iMore provides a good overview of some of the best options available.
• Adam Dachs of LifeHacker offers a tip for marking all e-mails read on an iPhone.
• And finally, for all of you who are looking for an iPhone case to use when you are talking on your iPhone (?), the All Ears iPhone Case will be available for purchase in just a few short weeks.  Available from Perpetual Kid, for $11.99, it comes with all six designs.  And yes, there is also a version for men.

When I travel with an iPad and leave my laptop computer at the office, one of the few features that I sometimes miss is the ability to create redline edits to a document.  I could use apps like Pages or Documents to Go or Quickoffice to view or revise a Microsoft Word document, but to make my edits obvious I would have to enter the new text and then manually highlight my text in yellow so that the other attorney could see what I added, and even then there was no easy way for the other attorney to accept my edits.  For serious edits I often had to resort to using LogMeIn to connect to my work computer from the iPad and use my work computer to make the edits in MS Word with the track changes feature enabled.  Fortunately, those days may be coming to an end.  Yesterday, the iPad app Office² HD from Byte² was updated to add support for true MS Office track changes support, so I bought a copy of this $7.99 app to try it out.  Unfortunately I’ve run across a few bugs in this app, but the track changes feature is implemented quite well.

The app has a nice layout.  You can view a list of your documents and organize documents into folders.  The app doesn’t include Dropbox support, but you can use the Dropbox app and then the “Open in…” feature to open a document from your Dropbox in Office² HD.  [UPDATE:  As pointed out in a comment, the app does have support for Dropbox, Google Docs, SkyDrive, Box and other services.  I didn’t see it the first time I looked for it.]  When editing a document, the standard features are all there to format text, highlight text, change the font or font size, etc.  Strangely, all of my documents showed up in the app with Helvetica as the font, even though the app seems to support Times New Roman and that is what I used on my computer.  Even so, after editing a file and then sending it back to my computer, I once again saw Times New Roman as the font on my computer.

Office² HD is more than just a word processor.  It can also review and edit Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, and in my simple tests last night it did so quite well.  But I focused last night on track changes support for Word documents because that is the main reason that lawyers will consider purchasing this app. 

The website for Office² includes this full explanation of the track changes feature, but it works pretty much like you would want it to.  Tap the tools icon at the top right of the screen and tap the last option, Track Changes.  In the next window, you can turn on the track changes feature and then decide how you want to view the document, either the original (without any of your changes shown), the original with redline indication of what is changed, the final document with all of your changes shown as if accepted, and final with markup so that you can see what you have edited.

In the following appeal brief, for example, I am using the final with markup view.  I inserted a few words (The Supreme Court explained) and they are shown in blue and an underline with a black line in the left margin to show that a change is there.  Next I deleted a sentence, and the main body of the screen shows the text without that sentence but a bubble on the right shows where I made a deletion and what I deleted.

The bubble on the right is small and a little hard to read, but you can simply tap once on the bubble to enlarge it.

The final with markup view is also useful if you want to review the changes in a document that someone else has edited.  As you can see in the last picture, from the bubble you have the option to reject or accept a change.  You can also tap on an edit and from the popup menu choose to accept or reject that change.  Also, there is an option under the tools menu to accept or reject all changes in a document.  Thus, another attorney can create redline edits in a document and send them to you for review, and using Office² HD on your iPad you can accept or reject each of those edits, make whatever additional edits are necessary (with the track changes feature turned on if you want to make it obvious what you changed), and then you can send the document back.

The track changes feature alone would make this a great app, but this app has other powerful features.  For example, Office² HD lets you export a document to PDF format.  I’m not aware of any other app that lets you create a PDF from a Word document on the iPad itself.  [UPDATE:  A reader tells me that iAnnotate can export from Word to PDF, but I haven’t tried that app so I cannot confirm this.]  Also, Office² HD is one of the rare apps that lets you create and view footnotes in a Word document.  Quickoffice doesn’t support footnotes at all, and Documents to Go lets you view footnotes but not add them.  Unfortunately, even Office² HD doesn’t support editing or deleting footnotes.  Moreover, I found that when I added a footnote in Office² HD and then later viewed the footnote in the document on my computer, the footnote had two question marks instead of a space between every single word.  (I reproduced this bug in several different documents.)  I’m thrilled to see that Office² HD attempts to go beyond all other iPad apps in handling footnotes, but clearly more work is needed. 

And since I’m mentioning problems, let’s get to my major gripe with Office² HD, and it is a big one.  This app crashes more than any other app I have ever used on an iPad. Documents of around 25 pages or less on letter size seemed to work without incident, but for larger documents, such as a 27 page appeal brief and a 38 page appeal brief, both on legal size paper, the app crashed so frequently that I frankly lost count.  I’m not sure if the problem was the page size, the fact that the documents were on legal size paper, or just the fact that these were long documents with lots of footnotes and formatting, but the crashes were a real problem for me.  I even restarted my iPad to clear the memory and then started editing a document, and the crashes still happened.  And when the app crashes, you lose all edits made since the last time that you manually told the app to save your work, so unless you get in the habit of saving every few minutes, you can lose work that will take a while to recreate.  I deal with large and complicated documents in my practice almost every day, so I was annoyed to see these crashes.  Ugh.  My hope is that this problem will be fixed in a future update, but for now, you need to be cautious when working with longer documents.

In this review, I focused on the iPad version because word processing on an iPad is superior to using the small iPhone screen, but the company also sells Office² for the iPhone and it also now has the track changes feature and the other features I noted above, including the ability to export a Word file to PDF format.  It is harder to edit a document on a small iPhone screen, but it does work in a pinch, and with Office² you can now make redline edits when you are on the go.  Note that when I edited large briefs on the iPhone version, I experienced the same types of crashes that I saw with the iPad version.

Later this year we may have more options for editing a Word document with track changes support.  I know of one other app developer who is currently working on this feature for another app, and there are fresh new rumors that a version of Office from Microsoft itself will be out this November, and if that happens perhaps we will see a Microsoft-sanctioned option for track changes support.  (Before you starting counting non-hatched chickens, note that earlier this year there were rumors that Office for iPad would be out in March of 2012, and that obviously didn’t happen.)  But for now, there is only one app in town with the important track changes feature for litigators who want to make or review edits in briefs, transactional attorneys who want to revise contracts, or anyone else who wants to take advantage of the track changes feature in a Word document. 

Click here for Office² HD for iPad ($7.99): 

Click here for Office² for iPhone ($5.99): 

I usually talk about adding apps or accessories to your iPhone or iPad to make it more useful, but we shouldn’t forget that sometimes all you need is a book.  Thanks to modern self-publishing tools, it is possible for anyone to create and publish a book that you can easily read on your iPad without finding an agent or signing with a traditional publisher.  I recently wrote about how California attorney David Sparks self-published the ebook Paperless, and Sparks plans for that to just be the first in a series.

Brian Owens is a docketing professional in the Atlanta office of an AmLaw 100 firm. As someone who often calculates deadlines in different jurisdictions, he thought that there would be a demand for an ebook that covers the basics of court rule on date calculations and provides the rules for calculating deadlines in federal court and all 50 states.  The result is the $10 ebook Calculating Court Deadlines: 2012 edition.  Owens sent me a free copy of the iBooks version of the book to review (which requires the iPad; it does not work on the iPhone), but I see that it is also available in Kindle and Nook formats.

Unlike the Paperless ebook that David Sparks authored, Calculating Court Deadlines doesn’t take advantage of all of the bells and whistles that one can add to a modern iBook such as video, sophisticated graphics, animation, etc.  This ebook just contains little more than the basic text.  Having said that, it provides the information that you need if you are a national counsel, in-house counsel, or someone else who wants to have a resource on your iPad with date calculation rules for all U.S. jurisdictions.

The book starts with a basic overview of the concepts relating to calculating legal deadlines such as calendar days versus court days, how to handle the last day when it falls on a holiday, adding additonal days for service, etc.  The book then has a chapter for federal courts followed by a chapter for each of the 50 state courts.  In each chapter there is a summary of the rules for calculating dates in that jurisdiction, the full text of each of the applicable rules, and then a series of examples that applies the rules.  Chapters also include links to the appropriate court website that will open in Safari when tapped.  Here is an example of one of the Louisiana pages in the ebook:

I suspect that most attorneys, paralegals and legal secretaries are only concerned about the rules for calculating deadlines in their own jurisdiction, and (hopefully) they already know those rules well.  But if it would be useful for you to have the rules for all jurisdictions, this ebook is a way to have all of the rules that you need at your fingertips.  I can’t decide if $10 is too much for this ebook; it includes much less content than the $5 Paperless, but on the other hand this ebook is written for a much more narrow audience.

Click here for Calculating Court Deadlines on the iBookstore ($9.99): 

Click here for Calculating Court Deadlines on the Amazon Kindle store ($9.99).

Earlier this year, I started writing a monthly column for the TechnoLawyer BigLaw newsletter.  My columns address topics related to the use of iPhones and iPads in midsize to large law firms.  If you work for such a firm, this is a great (and free) newsletter and I encourage you to sign up for a free subscription.  I’ve enjoyed writing my articles, and I’ve enjoyed reading a bunch of other great BigLaw articles.

The first article I wrote for BigLaw discussed the usefulness of iPads for attorneys and whether this means that law firms should buy each of their attorneys an iPad, similar to what Minneapolis firm Bassford Remele did as I noted in this article from August of 2011.  If you weren’t a subscriber when my first BigLaw article was first published on January 17, 2012, you can now read it on the TechnoLawyer website.

Although my law firm doesn’t purchase iPads for attorneys, we now have around 100 iPad users and that number is steadily increasing every month.  I suspect that most of you have seen more and more iPads at your law firms, too.  Last year’s ABA Technology Survey revealed that around 13% of lawyers used an iPad.  We should see this year’s numbers in about a month or so, and I have no doubt that we’ll see a significant increase.

The All Things D conference, run by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, took place this week.  This was the only conference that Steve Jobs spoke at in recent years, other than the Macworld Expo and Apple presentations.  His presence was noted in the form of tributes and frequent references by the other speakers.  I reference a few of those today, along with other news of note from the past week:

• [UPDATE 6/11/12:  You can now view the entire Tim Cook presentation on the All Things D website.]
• Steven Levy of Wired is one of my favorite tech writers, and he wrote a great article:  All Things D is Haunted by the Man Who Isn’t Here.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the opening keynote at All Things D.  It was an interesting presentation that signalled that we will soon see big improvements to Siri, Facebook integration with the iPhone, and maybe even something new from Apple in the TV space.  Jordan Golson of MacRumors wrote a good liveblog as it happened, as did Jason Snell of Macworld.
• Macworld also published an edited, near-transcript of the highlights of Cook’s presentation.
• Ina Fried of All Things D reports on a tribute to Jobs by Ed Catmull of Pixar and Larry Ellison of Oracle.
• When I wrote about the Wacom Bamboon Stylus duo earlier this week, little did I know that so many other people would be talking about styluses at the same time.  I updated the end of the article to note that Serenity Caldwell of TechHive and Macworld published an article in which she also named the duo the best stylus for writing.  Additionally, I see that Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac named a number of “best of” styluses and concluded that the Bamboo Stylus is the best stylus for drawing.
• J.D. Biersdorfer of the New York Times reminds us of the helpful multitasking gestures that you can use with an iPad.
• If you use TABS3 for time entry at your law office, you’ll be interested to learn that you can now use Bellefield’s iTimeKeep app to enter your time on mobile devices.  I watched a demo of this app in action at ABA TECHSHOW this year and I was very impressed.
• Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that you can finally buy an iPhone that uses no-contract, pre-paid plans thanks to Cricket, although it isn’t available in all cities.
• You can use Apple’s Cards app to create and send a paper card from your iPhone or iPad.  It wil be beautiful, but it won’t have the personal touch of handwriting.  Alex Heath of Cult of Mac reviews Thank You Pen, an app that creates beautiful cards and then uses a room full of machines with real pens to create the appearance that you hand-wrote your cards.  Interesting.
• If you like casual games, Bejeweled has long been one of the best.  There is finally a version for the iPad with great retina display graphics for the third generation iPad.  I bought it and have had a lot of fun with it, and so has my six-year-old son.  Click here for Bejeweled HD ($3.99): 

  

• And finally, here is a fun video from magician Simon Pierro that shows how the iPad can quench your thirst: