This Apple commercial is not an exaggeration. I’ve successfully used an iPad, an iPad mini and FaceTime to bring my family together when they were miles apart.
Whether you are in the same room with your family members over the next few days or just connected in spirit, I hope that you have a Very Merry Christmas.
As we start the weekend before Christmas, I hope that you and yours have a wonderful holiday season. I suspect that for many of you, Santa will be leaving some presents created by his elves in Cupertino. And now, the news of note:
This Friday is the deadline for votes in the ABA Journal Blawg 100. The ABA is now hiding the vote tallies, but before the numbers were hidden, iPhone J.D. was about 200 votes behind Groklaw in the Legal Technology category. That’s a formidable gap, but it ain’t over ’till it’s over, and thousands of people read iPhone J.D. every day so anything is possible.
If you found iPhone J.D. useful at some point this year, I’d appreciate it if you could spare 10 seconds — it really is that quick! — to click here, provide your name and email address (which the ABA asks for just to prevent vote fraud), select the Legal Technology category and then vote for iPhone J.D.
To those who have already voted and those who are about to do so — thanks! You are awesome.
P.S. Kudos to Prof. Jonathan Turley for this amusing Mayan Apocalypse-themed post aimed at getting out the vote for his blog in the News/Analysis category.
From time to time, attorneys who read iPhone J.D. write to tell me
how they are using
their iPhone or iPad in their practice. I love to read these stories,
and with permission I like to share them here on iPhone J.D. I recently heard from K. Lindsay Rakers, a personal injury attorney with Hefner, Eberspacher & Tapella who practices in Missouri and Illinois. She tells me that she frequently finds herself traveling to meet with injured clients, potential clients and fact and expert witnesses, and with her iPad and iPhone she has everything that she needs without having to lug around a computer. She currently uses an iPhone 4 (and plans to upgrade to an iPhone 5 in the future) and the third generation iPad.
I asked Lindsay to share with iPhone J.D. readers the most useful apps on her iPhone and iPad. Here is what she told me:
Twitter/LinkedIn/AvvoI asked Lindsay if she has tried using an Airport Express in a courtroom to create her own wireless network to use for TrialPad — the setup that California attorney David Sparks described in this post that I discussed this past Friday. She has not; she tells me that so far she has simply relied on the WiFi available in the courtroom, and that has worked well for her (although she emphasizes that she practiced first).
Thanks for sharing with us, Lindsay!
If you are willing to share your experiences using an iPhone or iPad in your law practice with other iPhone J.D. readers, I’d love to
hear from you! And in case you missed them, here are the reports that I previously shared from other attorneys:
Virtually every time that I have to give a presentation to any sort of audience, I prepare slides using the Keynote app on my iPad. Sure, I could use PowerPoint or Keynote on a computer, but Keynote on the iPad is a powerful app that creates beautiful presentations, and I prefer using the touch interface on an iPad to move objects around. Also, I use my iPad to give presentations, and I like that the software that I am using to give the presentation is the same software that I used to create the presentation so I never have to worry about incompatibilities when I make last minute changes to slides. There is a slow trend towards using HD screens or projectors, but virtually every place that I go to give a presentation still uses a projector with a VGA connector. Thus, I consider a VGA adapter an essential part of my iPad accessory toolkit.
With my iPad 3, I use Apple’s 30-pin to VGA adapter ($29 from Apple, or much cheaper on Amazon). But if you want to run a presentation from the latest fourth generation iPad, the iPad mini, or an iPhone 5, you need a way to connect the Lightning connector to VGA. The answer is Apple’s Lightning to VGA Adapter, which Apple sells for $49 but you can save about $5 if you get it on Amazon. I recently purchased this adapter from Amazon, and it works great.
You would expect this adapter to be the same as the old 30-pin to VGA adapter except that it works with the Lightning connector. To a certain extent, this is true. This is a true plug-and-play accessory. Just like the old one, you connect one end to the VGA plug and connect the other end to your iPad or iPhone, and that’s it. Wait a few seconds and you will see your presentation on the large screen. And thanks to the iPad/iPhone mirroring feature, you can easily show off to an audience everything taking place on your iPad/iPhone screen. This is a great tool for showing an audience how an app works.
There are a few differences with this new adapter, besides the obvious — it has Lightning instead of 30-pin, and it costs almost twice as much. Fortunately, most of the differences are improvements.
First, I love that you can plug this device into your iPad with either side up (a feature common to all Lighting connectors). When I give a presentation from an iPad, I will sometimes disconnect the iPad from the projector to hold up my iPad, or to switch from my iPad to my iPhone, or for some other reason. I like that I don’t have to worry about this accessory being upside down when I plug it in. Snafus like that interrupt your flow and make you stumble in front of your audience.
Second, the Lightning to VGA Adapter has another Lightning plug on it so that you can add a Lightning cord connected to a power source. That way, you can charge your iPad during a presentation without any worries about running out of power. You can’t do that with the old 30-pin to VGA adapter. iPads have much better battery life than laptop computers, and I’ve always loved that I can run hours and hours of slides from an iPad without having to worry about power as long as I start with a good charge. But thanks to this Lightning plug, I’ll be safe even if I forgot to charge my iPad the night before and I only have a small charge remaining.
Third, the Lightning connector does a better job staying connected to the iPad. Even though the Lightning connector is tiny and is easy to unplug from an iPad or iPhone, it makes a firm connection. Several times in the past I have had an iPad or an iPhone 4 or 4S connected to a projector and the 30-pin connector would come out just a tiny bit, not enough for you to really notice if you look at it, but it results in the connection being lost to the projector. The audience instantly sees that I am no longer showing anything on the screen, but it sometimes takes a few seconds for me to notice. Ugh; very embarrassing. In my initial experiences with the Lightning to VGA Adapter (I gave a presentation from an iPad mini this past Friday, and I conducted several tests last week), the Lightning connector stayed very snug and did not disconnect until I was ready for it to disconnect. [UPDATE 7/3/13: I’ve now given countless presentations with my iPad mini using this Lightning to VGA Adapter over the last six months and I continue to love that the Lightniing connector is much more snug. The adapter has never accidentally disconnected from my iPad during a presentation.]
Fourth, the Lightning to VGA Adapter seems to do a slightly better job of sending the video signal to a projector. When I use the 30-pin VGA connector and I switch from mirroring my screen to running an app that displays something different on the projector than the screen — such as Keynote, where your audience just sees the slide but the iPad screen can show you the current slide, the next slide, a timer, etc. — there will sometimes be a flicker as the screen mode changes. I’ve never figured out what causes the flicker to occur. Sometimes I think it is the projector I’m using, sometimes it seems to have something to do with the app I’m using on the iPad, and sometimes I think it is just complete randomness. But so far I have yet to see any flickering at all when I switch modes on the iPad mini using the Lightning to VGA Adapter — even when I try to recreate the exact same circumstances that caused flicker on my iPad 3 using the 30-pin to VGA adapter.
Those are four major advantages. The only slight disadvantage that I’ve seen is that the cord is much shorter. The 30-pin version is over 10 inches end-to-end; the Lightning version is under 5 inches end-to-end. VGA plugs tend to be big and bulky, and I prefer having a slightly longer cord to separate that plug from my iPad or iPhone. Having said that, the shorter cord does make it easier to carry around the Lightning version.
I realize that in some ways, this list of advantages and disadvantages is irrelevant. If you want to connect your iPad or iPhone to a projector and you have a newer model with the Lightning connector, you simply need to get this adapter. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see that Apple took the time to make this a better adapter. And frankly, I like these improvements in the Apple Lightning to VGA Adapter enough that I suspect that in the future I will be using my iPad mini, not my iPad 3, to run presentations.
Click here to get Apple Lightning to VGA Adapter from Amazon ($43.59).
Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6 has certainly received its share of bad publicity. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that Apple “fell short” of its goal of “deliver[ing] the best experience possible to our customers,” adding that he was “extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers.” My experience with the app is that it works quite well when I provide a street address, and I love the turn-by-turn directions and the flyover feature. Where the app has fallen short for me has been its database of points of interest. Every once in a while, I give it a place name instead of an address, and the app gives me an old or otherwise incorrect address. This week, Google brought its maps back to the iPhone by releasing the free Google Maps app. I’m happy to see streetview back on the iPhone — it is often very useful to preview what a place looks like before you go there — and the reviews have been very positive. The end result is pretty good for iPhone users. We now have a better version of an app containing Google’s maps, while at the same time we have Apple devoting serious resources towards adding improvements to its own Maps app. Click here to get Google Maps (free): . And now, the rest of the news of the week:
Love Pink Candy iPhone 4G Case
Christmas Deco Whipped Frosting Candyland Gingerbread Cabochon iPhone 4 4S Phone Case
I recently received an email from Matthias M. Edrich, a tax attorney in the Denver office of Kutak Rock LLP, letting me know about an app that he developed called TouchTax. The app contains the full text of the current IRS Code and the related Treasury Regulations. I don’t practice tax law, but Edrich sent me a free copy of his $5.99 app so that I could check it out. It looks like a useful app for anyone who wants to have access to federal tax laws wherever they go.
The app has a nice interface with a main page from which you can choose to browse the Code, Regs or IRS Bulletins, jump to a specific section in the Code or Regs, perform a keyword search, or go to one of your favorites. The relevant laws then appear in a layer on top (on the iPhone), but you can always tug the icon at the bottom left to move away that layer and go back to the main page. Edrich (pictured at right) has versions of TouchTax available on a large number of devices — not only the iPhone and iPad, but also Google Android phones and tablets, the gone-but-not-forgotten HP/Palm TouchPad Tablet, and the BlackBerry PlayBook. For example, here is a recent review of the TouchTax app on Android devices by Jeff Taylor of The Android Lawyer. And Florida attorney Rick Georges of FutureLawyer, an Android user, helpfully advises: “I would not mention to a date that you carry the entire Revenue Code on your phone. You are really already plenty dorky enough.” Ahem.
If you know the Code section that you want to see, just make sure that the “Code” tab at the top is selected and enter the number. For example, if gift-giving is on your brain now that we are in the holiday season, you can enter “102” to jump to 26. U.S.C. § 102, the general rules on gifts and inheritance income tax.
One thing I like about the way that the sections are displayed is that major sections — e.g. § 102(a) and § 102(b) — are highlighted in pink. Major subsection titles are highlighted in purple, and then grey. This highlighting was helpful when browsing through a long section, often making it quick and easy to orient myself as to where I was in the statute. If you want to use the entire screen to read the law, just tap the double arrows at the top right to make the bars at the top and bottom disappear.
Use the left and right arrows at the bottom to browse backwards or forwards through the sections.
Unfortunately, the text is read-only and cannot be selected. Thus, you cannot copy a sentence of the law and then paste it into an email or another app. (See below for a work-around.)
The Code provisions also contain hyperlinks to the related Treasury Regulations, saving you the trouble of entering a new search.
If you want to email a section, tap the paper airplane icon. Instead of sending the text, the app prepares an email with a link to the same provision on the TouchTax website.
If you want to search for a keyword in the Code, Regs and IRS bulletins since 2003, tap the Keyword tab on the main screen. The search does not take place within the app itself but instead takes place on the TouchTax website. This means that the results come quickly, but it also means that you need to have internet access to perform a search.
Once the search results load, you have the option of redoing the search using a natural language relevancy search, which will give you even more results, although some might not include your exact keyword(s).
There is currently a problem with the keyword search feature: the keyword itself is not highlighted in the text. Thus, you know that the keyword appears somewhere, but you need to hunt for it manually. One (awkward) work-around: email the section to yourself, then click on the link which pulls up the text of the same section in the Safari browser, and from there you can use the search feature in Safari to see your search terms highlighted. You can also select and copy text in Safari, something that, as noted above, you cannot do in the app itself. Here are screens from Safari:
Fortunately, Edrich tells me that highlighting search terms is already on his list for the next update of the app.
The app includes a notes feature. Tap the pencil icon and enter a note associated with a section. From the main page of the app, you can see a list of notes that you have created. When viewing a note, you can choose to email it, which composes an email with the link to the statute but also includes your note in the text of the email.
I spent most of my time testing this app on an iPhone 5, but it is a universal app so it will also work on an iPad. On the iPad, the main page portion of the app is always visible on the left, with the content shown on the right.
The app does not give you any options for changing text size or font. The default actualy looked fine to me on an iPhone 5, but on the iPad mini I did find myself wishing that I could make the text larger.
Apps like this that contain the text of laws are only valuable if they are kept up to date. Edrich tells me that since he uses this app himself, he has been keeping it up to date and plans to continue to do so. He gets the content directly from the Government Publishing Office and uses the most recent official version of the Code and Treasury Regulations, updating the app each time the GPO publishes new official versions. Edrich tells me that he updates the Internal Revenue Bulletin information weekly. Edrich also states on the website for this app:
TouchTax is updated within a few weeks of each federal update of the
official finalized Code and Regulations. The federal government appears
to be updating these materials each May and June. The next Code update
is expected in May 2013, and the new Regulations update is expected in
June 2013.
This app itself was originally released a year ago, and it has already been updated six times since then, which bodes well for the future. Edrich tells me that there are already 2,000 people using his app, most of
whom are iPhone/iPad users.
I’m glad to learn that the search issue I noted above is already on the list to be addressed in a future update. Hopefully Edrich can also add the ability to select text. But even in its current form, TouchTax is a useful app for those attorneys or accountants who work with the tax laws and want to have easy access at all times.
Click here for TouchTax ($5.99):
As I noted this past Friday, there is a part of the Brian Williams interview of Apple CEO Tim Cook that was not included in the 20 minute segment that ran on TV, a part in which Tim Cook explains that he does 80% of his work on an iPad. I was surprised at how high that percentage is. I love my iPad, but I can’t imagine doing 80% of my work on it, and I don’t run the largest company on the planet. Watching that clip again, I also find it interesting that Tim Cook apparently likes to use the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. Here is the full question and answer:
Q: How adapt are you at the virtual keyboard [of the iPad] which confounds a lot of us?
A: Pretty good. I think if you stick with it a little while, you get quite good at it. And the auto-correction is quite good. And so I ditched physical keyboards. 80% of my time is spent on iPad in terms of authoring emails and working on things. And I still spend time on the Mac, and of course I have this [holding his iPhone] with me all the time.
So not only is Tim Cook using an iPad a lot more than a computer, he is doing his typing on the iPad’s virtual keyboard.
I was thinking about that over the weekend when I saw an interesting article by Jason Snell, the Editorial Director of Macworld, PC World and TechHive, called Why I’m Writing on the iPad. He says that he is writing most of his articles on the iPad using the virtual keyboard. He admits that he is faster with the physical keyboard on his computer, but explains that when uses the iPad’s virtual keyboard and has to type slower, his brain spends more time choosing his words and the end result is better. He compares it to writing with a pen and paper, in which the process of getting words written is so much slower that your brain is forced to spend more time thinking about what you are writing.
I don’t type on the iPad’s virtual keyboard very often. Just about any time that I am going to sit down at a table and type something with the iPad, I use the Apple Bluetooth keyboard. I am a fast typist on a physical keyboard, and my writing style is to quickly get the words on the page, and then once that is done, I go back and edit to improve the sentences, move things around, etc.
Those times that I don’t use the physical keyboard with my iPad, I tend to use a stylus and take handwritten notes in GoodNotes.
I’m not saying that I never use the iPad’s virtual keyboard — I use it with emails all the time — but unlike Tim Cook and Jason Snell, I never really consider using it for serious writing. But Snell’s article has me thinking, and maybe I’ll try writing with the virtual keyboard just to see how it changes both the way that I think and the final work product itself.
Note that when I say “iPad” above, I’m just talking about the full-size iPad. The virtual keyboard on the iPad mini is so much smaller that I don’t see how anyone could touch type very quickly on it. Indeed, with the iPad mini, I find it faster to turn the device to portrait orientation and then use my thumbs to type on the keyboard, which is similar to typing on an iPhone’s virtual keyboard with your thumbs except that you have to stretch your thumbs a little bit more on the iPad mini.
If anyone else out there had found it to be advantageous to type text of any real length on the iPad’s virtual keyboard, I’d love to hear from you. Cook and Snell are both pretty smart guys, so you are in good company.
Many people, myself included, wondered how Apple would continue without Steve Jobs. But Apple CEO Tim Cook seems to have done a fantastic job with the company, and it is good to know that Apple is in good hands. Cook is famously private, but he recently agreed to two major interviews. Last night, NBC’s Brian Williams interviewed him on the show Rock Center, and you can watch the program here on the NBC website (or here on YouTube). (If you’d rather read than watch, Alex Heath of Cult of Mac posted a transcript.) Second, Josh Tyrangiel of Bloomberg posted a long interview with Cook. Both are worth your time if you are interested in how Apple works and how Apple prepares for what’s next. And now for the news of note:
Yesterday Apple updated its iWork apps for iOS: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. There are lots of new features in version 1.7 of these apps, and Leah Yamshon of Macworld provides a good overview. I want to dig deeper on just one new feature because it is so critical to most lawyers: the ability to track changes to a word processing document. The good news is that the feature works well for viewing and creating redline edits. The bad news is that the app doesn’t give you an easy way to review all edits at once, and there is no support for Comments.
I am often out of the office when I am sent a Word document containing redline edits that I need to read. When it comes to just reading a document and seeing the edits, version 1.7 of the Pages app works quite well. When you first open a document in Pages containing redline edits, you will only see what is added, not what is deleted. To see both, tap the Tools icon, tap Change Tracking, and then change the view from the default setting of Markup Without Deletions to Markup. With this change, you will see additions in a different color and deletions in that different color but with strikethrough. For example, you might see something like this if an amount is changed from $500,000 to $100,000: $500100,000.
If multiple authors have changed a document, you will see the changes of each author in a different color. The Pages app doesn’t show you the name of each author, but when you send
an edited document back to a computer running Word, changes made by the
iPad or iPhone will use the name of your iPad or iPhone as the author. For example, changes that I made with my iPad showed up on my computer as being made by “Jeff’s iPad.” If you use a wacky name for your iPad or iPhone, keep this in mind before you send redline edits to a client.
You can also accept or reject edits in Pages 1.7. To do so, double-tap on an edit, andthen select Accept or Reject from the pop-up menu.
Unfortunately, Pages 1.7 does not include a review mode in which you can view a change and decide to accept or reject it and then instantly go to the next change. Instead, you must double-tap on each change to accept or reject it. When Quickoffice Pro added a track changes feature this past October, it did include this feature, as I noted in my review. However, Quickoffice Pro doesn’t currently support footnotes, which prevents me from using it on most of my litigation documents. Pages, on the other hand, includes the best support for footnotes that I have seen in any iPad or iPhone app.
The biggest shortcoming that I see with Pages 1.7 is that it still does not support the Comments feature of Microsoft Word. I myself don’t use the feature — when I am editing a document and I want to say something, I usually just type it in bold and highlight my words — but I work with several other people who do use that feature when they send me a redlined document. If you try to open a document in Pages that contains Comments, Pages will warn you after it converts the document from Word to Pages format that it has deleted all of the Comments. This warning is presented to you on the iPad like this. (I added the red circle to emphasize where you need to look.)
On the smaller iPhone screen, you instead just get a warning that “This document may look different on your iOS device” and you need to tap a button marked “View Details” to see a list of warnings that the iPad shows automatically.
If someone emails you a document with edits and you see that warning after opening up the file in Pages, I recommend that you go back to the email and open up the document in another app that does show Comments such as Documents to Go, Office2 or (if you don’t care about footnotes) Quickoffice Pro.
Track changes support has long been the Holy Grail for many litigators using an iPad or iPhone. For the most part, I really like the way that Apple implemented this feature in the latest version of Pages. I wish that the update included a better way to review each edit, but for the most part I suspect that I’ll just scroll through a document and look at the redline edits in the context of the document as a whole so this omission is not critical for me. The lack of support for Comments will sometimes be a problem (depending upon how often you work with people who use that feature), but as long as you know about it and have an app like Documents to Go, Office2 or Quickoffice Pro, you can work around the Comments omission when it becomes an issue.
I have long been a fan of Pages because it is a powerful, rock solid app. For example, Pages is my preferred app for creating Word documents on the iPad. And if I am in a meeting and I am typing notes on my iPad using a Bluetooth keyboard, Pages is the app that I always use. With the new track changes feature, I strongly suspect that Pages will also become my favorite app for viewing and creating redline edits on the iPad.
I rarely create redline edits on my iPhone, but if I need to do so, I suspect I’ll use Pages there too. For simply viewing redline edits on my iPhone, I still prefer using Documents to Go because it has the best pinch to zoom implementation of any other word processing app, and with the iPhone’s smaller screen I find that it really helps to have an elegant way to make the text larger.
Click here to get Pages ($9.99):
The other apps I discussed above:
Click here for Quickoffice Pro HD [for iPad] ($19.99):
Click here for Quickoffice Pro [for iPhone] ($14.99):
Click here for Documents to Go [both iPad and iPhone] ($9.99):
Click here for Documents to Go Premium [both iPad and iPhone] ($16.99):
Click here for Office² HD [for iPad] ($7.99):
Click here for Office² [for iPhone] ($5.99):