Every year in December, the ABA Journal publishes its list of the top 100 law blogs (blawgs). The blawgs are divided into categories, and then people are allowed to vote for their favorite blawg. The ABA is starting to decide which 100 blawgs to include in this year's list and is asking for your help in the form of "Amici" submissions. Click on this link if you want to tell the ABA Journal editors about one or more websites aimed at legal professionals that you enjoy, whether it be iPhone J.D. or any other blog. The deadline for submissions is September 7, 2012. Every year, I find the list to be a great resource for finding great websites, so for all of you who take the time to nominate sites, thanks for making this year's list as good as the prior ones. And now on to the iPhone and iPad news of the week:
- Yesterday I talked about lawyers designing great apps that are unrelated to the practice of law. A perfect example is TallyPad, an app by California attorney Dan Friedlander that makes it easy to tally. I often use it to keep score when I am playing games with my kids. This week only, you can get the app for free by clicking here:
- Indiana attorney Bill Wilson of the Third Apple blog compared some of the top iPad styluses, and concluded that the Wacom Bamboo stylus was his favorite. I agree.
- I find it hard to imagine that an attorney using an iPhone would want to switch to an Android phone, but apparently it does happen. Oklahoma attorney Jeffrey Taylor of The Droid Lawyer explains why some attorneys have made the jump.
- Patrick Jordan of iPad Insight recommends apps that let you work with Microsoft Word documents on your iPad. (Thanks to Adriana Linares for the link.)
- After the iPhone 4 was released in 2010, a small number of people complained about the antenna. A class action was filed and a federal judge recently approved the settlement, except that he slashed the attorneys fees in half because of a low number of claims and a high number of plaintiff attorneys. Cynthia Foster of The Recorder has the details.
- Stenograph, a leading developer of computer-aided transcription software used by professional court reporters, has come out with an iPad version of its CaseViewNet software. The app lets you view realtime transcripts on an iPad. Read the press release for more details, and you can download the free app here:
- Richard Lutkus of Law Technology News writes about getting forensic data off of an iPhone or iPad in e-discovery.
- And finally, we are starting to get some great pictures from the Mars Curiosity rover, and Andrew Bodrov put together a really cool 360 degree panorama that stitches together some of the images. Click here to see it, but don't do this on your computer; do it on an iPhone or, better yet, an iPad. The website uses your iPhone and iPad gyroscope as you spin around to change the view, so you can hold up your device and as you move it around, the image moves too, just as if you were standing right next to the rover on Mars. Very cool. (via iMore) Normally I would put a picture below this post, but you really need to go to that website to experience the 360 degree version of it. So instead, I'm giving you a link to the background image I'm currently using on my iPad, which I created by combining an image from NASA taken by Curiosity with a picture of Marvin the Martian that I found on this website. Click the picture to see the full-size version formatted for an iPad screen (it is retina-quality for the third generation iPad), and then you can save it to the Camera Roll on your iPad and then select it in Settings -> Brightness & Wallpaper.
