Today, I will be a panelist on This Week in Law, the great podcast hosted by Denise Howell on Leo Laporte's TWiT Network. Also on the show will be TWiL regular and Chicago technology lawyer Evan Brown of the Internet Cases website and Toronto attorney Monica Goyal of i5 Capital and My Legal Briefcase. If you want to listen or watch as the show is recorded, the show airs at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern at http://live.twit.tv and usually lasts about 90 minutes. (It's a law-related podcast, so that counts as work, right? And you can actually get CLE credit for watching TWiL in some states.) Otherwise, you can download the audio or video podcast from iTunes tonight. And now, here is the news of note for this week:
- Virginia attorney Rob Dean of WalkingOffice explains how to crop U.S. Supreme Court opinions to make them easier to read in GoodReader on an iPad. I do the same thing with most of my GoodReader files. The smaller margins make the text larger and easier to read, and also makes it easier to swipe through pages.
- If you were thinking of purchasing California attorney David Sparks' book on going paperless that I reviewed three months ago, get it right now before the price goes up from $5 to $10 next week. And next month, Sparks will release a free update to Paperless adding "new screencasts, new sections, the works." I love the idea that an electronic book can easily gain new content without the need to use those annoying pocket parts stuck in the back of a book.
- The Attorney at Work website asked me and several other attorneys about alternatives to the iPad's on-screen keyboard. I talked about the Apple Wireless Keyboard and the speech-to-text feature of the third-generation iPad; others discussed different solutions.
- In a related note, Ellis Hamburger of The Verge posted an extensive review of external keyboards for the iPad.
- PDF Expert by Readdle is an advanced tool for editing and annotating PDFs that I reviewed a few months ago. This week the app was updated to version 4.2, adding a presentation mode that lets you connect your iPad to a projector and present documents in a non-linear fashion, something that could be useful in meetings or even in court. Click here to get PDF Expert for iPad ($9.99):
- I know that many attorneys use Things, an iPhone/iPad/Mac app to manage tasks. Version 2.0 of the app was released yesterday, a major update that (finally) adds cloud syncing. Megan Lavey-Heaton of TUAW describes the update, and Dan Frakes of Macworld says "I’ve been testing Things Cloud for several months, and it’s been rock-solid and, indeed, quite fast."
- David Pogue of the New York Times explains how to configure and use Find My iPhone so that you can (hopefully) locate your device if it is lost or stolen. As I noted last week, Pogue's phone was recently stolen on an Amtrak train, but using the service he was able to trace his phone to Maryland and the police caught the thief and recovered his iPhone.
- Speaking of tracking an iPhone, Mark Sullivan of TechHive wrote an interesting description of the history of GPS.
- Someone else that I mentioned last week was Ken Segall, the author of Apple's famous Think Different ad campaign when he worked ag Apple's advertising agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, and one of the funny guys behind the Scoopertino site. Harry McCracken of Time magazine recently interviewed Segall about his new book called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success. The interview is just over an hour and I haven't had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet, but so far it is fascinating.
- Speaking of Scoopertino, they have an funny, albeit fake, story explaining the much-maligned new Apple ads featuring Apple Store Geniuses. (I know that Segall doesn't like the ads, but I don't think that they are THAT bad, although I admit Apple has also had much better ads in the past.)
- Roy Furchgott of the New York Times describes xPrintServer, calling it a pricey ($100) but effective device that provides AirPrint capability to any printer, meaning that you can print to it wirelessly from an iPhone or iPad.
- For two years now, the best perk of being a customer of Chase bank is that I have been able to deposit checks on my iPhone. Bryan Wolfe of AppAdvice writes that Bank of America customers can now do the same thing. I know of at least one attorney who is excited about this new feature, and if you use an iPhone and are a Bank of America customer, you'll love this feature too.
- Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac explains how to create a macro lens for your iPhone for only $1.
- There is lots of great coverage of the interesting and ongoing Apple vs. Samsung trial regarding iPhone and iPad IP, but if you had to pick one source, I'd suggest this page on The Verge which has links to their coverage.
- Conan O'Brien has a funny video purporting to show the Samsung side of the litigation.
- The New Yorker has a new iPhone app, and to talk about the new features, Lena Dunham (of the HBO show Girls) created a short video staring herself and Jon Hamm of Mad Men.
- And finally, while I realize that this has nothing to do with the iPhone or iPad, as someone who loves technology I have been more excited about the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars than the Olympics this week. I stayed up late on Sunday night to watch coverage of the landing, and I've enjoyed following the tweets "from" Curiosity, both the official account and the fake but hilarious SarcasticRover account. NetworkWorld put together this great, splitscreen version of the last few minutes as we learned that Curiosity landed on Mars. If you have any interest in space, you'll enjoy watching this one:
