Month: January 2013

This week was the big Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, the place where many manufacturers announce products that they will be introducing throughout the year.  Apple does not attend the show, but thanks to the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple-related products are easy to find at the show, and every year the reporters at CES often spend a lot of time talking about what Apple is planning next even without Apple being there.  This year was no different:  one of the big news items this week was a rumor that Apple is planning to release a “lower-end iPhone” to compete at the low-end side of the smartphone market, spurred by a story by Jessica Lessin of the Wall Street Journal.  Even though Apple virtually never comments on future products, just a few days later, Apple Vice President Phil Schiller told a reporter that “Despite the popularity of cheap smartphones, this will never be the future of Apple’s products.”  Schiller explained that Apple’s strategy has always been to pursue profits, not just marketshare, and that even though Apple sells only 20% of all smartphones, it takes in 75% of all smartphone profit.  [UPDATE:  And now, on Friday, this story is getting even stranger.]  Only time will tell what kinds of iPhones are released by Apple in 2013, but I suspect that Apple will stick with its plans of only selling products that are profitable, avoiding cheap products merely aimed at increasing marketshare.  And now, the rest of the news of note from this week:

• Louisiana lawyers will be glad to see that Matt Miller updated his Louisiana Civil Code and Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure apps to update the text and to add support for the iPhone 5’s larger screen.  (My review.)  If you practice law in Louisiana, you should get these apps.
• Evan Koblentz of Law Technology News reports that Amicus Attorney is adding a mobile website interface for its practice management software so that iOS users can access virtually all of the same features as the desktop time-entry modules.
• Houston attorney Reginald Hirsch sent me a link to this article describing a new ScanSnap scanner from Fujitsu that lets you send scans directly to an iPhone. 
• California attorney David Sparks reviewed that new ScanSnap iX500 from Fujitsu, and he says that the ability to scan directly to a mobile device is one of the best new features.
• South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer prepared a video on using an iPad to present a witness via Facetime or Skype.
• Attorney Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge describes the new products at CES that received iLounge Best of Show awards this year.  There are a few interesting ones on the list.
• I expected to see a ton of iPhone and iPad accessories announced at CES that take advantage of Apple’s new Lightning connector.  There were some announcements, just not as many as I would have thought.  One potentially useful product is the Scosche strikeLine Pro, a USB-to-Lightning cord that uses a retractable cable.  Horwitz of iLounge has a first look at the product.
• GoodNotes, my favorite app for taking notes with a stylus on an iPad, was updated to version 3.6 this week.  The update allows you to annotate Word and PowerPoint files (the app converts them to PDFs first), has search improvements, has an improved zoom window, and more.  (My reviews: 1, 2.)
• John Moltz of Macworld writes that Microsoft Office for iPad may be coming this year, but it doesn’t much matter because people don’t really use Microsoft Word anymore.  That’s an interesting theory for the market as a whole, but Word is still very important in the legal market, and I’d love to see Microsoft offer something good for the iPad.  We’ll see.
• Apple announced this week that customers have downloaded more than 40 billion apps from the App Store.  What I find most impressive is that almost half of those downloads were just in the year 2012.  That tells you something about the surge in iPhone and iPad users last year.  Apple says that there are more than 775,000 apps in the App Store, more than 300,000 of which are made for the iPad.
• And finally, Julie Bort of Business Insider reports that a San Francisco company is developing an iPhone accessory that will give the iPhone the ability to taste and smell.  The developer hopes that the accessory will cost less than $100 and be out in a year or two, and suggests that you could use it to let your iPhone tell you if you have bad breath.  The company, Adamant Technologies, currently has almost nothing on its website, but the talented artists on staff at iPhone J.D. prepared this detailed rendering of the product:

The iPhone 4S and 5 use Bluetooth version 4.o.  This enables them to talk to Bluetooth Smart devices, devices that can communicate with the iPhone via Bluetooth for months or years without a recharge, instead of just hours for traditional Bluetooth devices.  Ever since I purchased an iPhone 4S in 2011 I’ve been curious to try out a Bluetooth 4.0 device, and thanks to Kensington, we now have a pretty useful one on the market.  Today at the big CES convention in Las Vegas, Kensington is unveiling a $60 device called Proximo.  Proximo uses a small fob that you add to your keychain.  If you cannot find your keys, just launch the free Proximo app on your iPhone tap a button, and your iPhone helps you find your keys.  It works in reverse too; lose your iPhone and you can use the fob on your keys to find it. Kensington sent me a free pre-release review unit a few weeks ago to start testing it, and it works quite well.

Find your Keys, or Find your iPhone

The most basic, and perhaps most useful, feature of Proximo is that it can help you find your keys.  Just attach the fob to your keychain.

Then, to find your keys, just launch the Proximo app and you will see a row of icons that correspond to your fob.  The last icon will display “Find” if your fob is within range — which can vary quite a bit, but in my tests corresponded to about two rooms apart or about 40 feet apart.  If you see the word Find, just tap the magnifying glass to switch to the Find mode.  The fob on your keychain will start to play an alert so that you can find it by hearing it, plus you will see circles surrounding an icon of a person indicating how close you are to the keys.  You can almost imagine someone telling your “warmer” as you get closer and “colder” as you go the wrong direction.

 

If the fob is not within range, the last icon will instead say “Last Seen” and display an outline of a pin.  Just tap the pin to see a map.  A red pin will drop on the map where and when your fob was last in range, and a blue dot will show your current location.  Just head towards the red pin — walk in whatever direction you need to in order to get the blue dot closer to the red pin — to find your fob and your keys.  The map even tells you approximately how many feet you are from the fob’s last location.  When you get close enough to get in range, the Proximo app tells you and will trigger the alert sound on the fob.

The whole system works in reverse too.  If you have your keys with your fob and need to find your iPhone, just press the button on the fob.  In a second or two, your iPhone will start playing an alarm.  Your fob doesn’t indicate how far away the iPhone is located, but at least you can listen for the alarm to try to hunt it down.

Find anything else with tags

The $60 Proximo Starter Kit comes with one tag in addition to the fob. Tags are similar to fobs, but they are a little smaller and only work in one direction.  You can use your iPhone to find a tag, but there is no button on the tag to help you to find your iPhone.  The idea is that you connect the tag to something else that you don’t want to lose, such as your briefcase or purse.  If you ever lose it, you can use the app to track it down.

Indicators in the app always tell you how close you are to your fob and your tag. 

You can purchase additional tags for $25.  The Proximo app can work with one fob and up to four tags.

If you have your tag on your briefcase and then get home and realize that you forgot your briefcase, you can tap the “Last seen” icon to quickly learn that you were last close to your briefcase X minutes ago when you were at the office, in court, in the coffee shop, or wherever else.  Fortunately, I haven’t had to use this “for real” yet, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how useful this could be.

You can name your fob or tags whatever you want, and you can replace the default pictures with something else, such as a picture of your keys or your briefcase.  You can also select from a variety of different alerts to be played by a fob or a tag (or the iPhone itself) if it is lost, and can control the volume of the alert.

Let’s stay together

Finally, you can activate an Alarm mode for any fob or any tag.  When activated, if your iPhone and the fob/tag are too far apart, both will start playing an alert.  For example, if your iPhone is on the table of a coffee shop and you get up and start to walk away, alarms will go off to let you know that you are forgetting your iPhone.  Or if you start to walk away without picking up your briefcase, you’ll hear alarms go off.  You can adjust the sensitivity to Highest-High-Medium-Low-Lowest.  Highest is essentially useless because the two items have to be ridiculously close to each other or alarms go off.  Lowest will let you get about 30 to 40 feet or so away before the alarms go off, although this distance varies greatly based on walls and other interference.

As I tried out the Proximo over the last few weeks, I didn’t find this mode to be very useful, but I can imagine times when I might turn it on.  Perhaps I would turn it on before starting to charge my iPhone on a wall outlet at an airport.  That way if I walk off to go to the restroom or to board the plane without thinking about it, the alarms will go off once I start to walk away.  Under those circumstances, it would be nice to know that I was about to walk off without my iPhone.  Of course, when all of those alarms go off, I’ll also attract attention from a lot of other people as well.

As I think about it, though, for some people this could be the most valuable part of the Proximo.  Apple’s Find my iPhone service can already help you track the location of an iPhone that you lost, and can even make your iPhone play an alarm sound, just like the Proximo fob.  But Proximo’s Alarm function aims to prevent you from leaving the iPhone somewhere in the first place.  Finding what you lost is nice; not losing it in the first place is better.

Conclusion

Kensington says that the batteries in the fob and tag will last about
six months.  It is a CR2032 Lithium Coin Battery, so you can easily buy
replacements for just a few bucks.  This is the key to the Proximo working at all.  Without the long battery life that comes with Bluetooth 4.0, this product would be too much of a hassle to be worth it.  I’m excited to see what additional Bluetooth Smart products come out this year, and I’m sure that many are being announced this week at CES.

I like the Proximo.  I haven’t yet had a real-life situation where I have had to use the Proximo to locate, or safeguard against a real risk of losing, my iPhone or briefcase, but such a loss would be VERY BAD.  If nothing else, the Proximo has helped me to find my keys when I cannot remember where I left them the night before.  Perhaps it isn’t worth $60 just to help your find your keys, but if the Proximo prevents you from losing an iPhone, briefcase, purse, etc. just once, then it would certainly be worth it.  Like any insurance policy, you just need to weigh the cost versus the benefit — a benefit that you hope you never need.  I like that Proximo is a product that you can buy and then largely
forget about until you need it … in which case you’ll be thrilled that
you have it.

I don’t yet see a link to purchase the Proximo, but I’m sure that Kensington will soon add a link to this page on their website.

Happy New Year, and welcome back to iPhone J.D. for 2013.  I spent some time in New York over the holidays and brought both my iPad 3 and my iPad mini.  I used the iPad mini far more than the iPad 3, but there were times when I preferred the iPad 3, such as a time when I needed to connect to my office computer using LogMeIn to draft and prepare a motion and exhibits to file in federal court.  The larger, better quality screen made that task much easier.  There were also some entertainment apps that were better on the iPad 3 because of the large, Retina display.  But for day-to-day tasks like keeping up with emails, reviewing attachments, social media apps like Twitter and Facebook, the iPad mini worked great and was so much easier to hold because of its size and weight.  I mention this because I am frequently asked whether attorneys should get the iPad or the iPad mini, and I’m torn.  I can’t imagine not having my full size iPad, but I do use my iPad mini more.  As I continue to ponder that issue, here is the recent news of note:

• TechnoLawyer subscribers should check out the TL Research Guide to the iPad mini as a Serious Productivity Tool by New York attorney and TL publisher Neil Squillante for tips using an iPad mini in a law practice.  (If you are not already a subscriber, you can sign up for free.)  It’s a great article.
• Michigan plaintiff attorneys Stephen Goethel and Chad Engelhardt of Goethel Engelhardt, PLLC wrote an extensive article for the State Bar of Michigan Negligence Quarterly about using an iPad in the practice of law.  The article is in PDF format.  Click here to download it.
• Steven Sande of TUAW reports that 53% of all mobile phones in the U.S. are smartphones, and iPhones account for 18.5% of all smartphones.  Given the number of iPhones I see out and about, I thought that number would be higher.  Maybe that just reflects me being around lawyers.  According to a survey conducted almost a year ago by the ABA, 44% of all U.S. attorneys were using an iPhone.  I’m sure that number is now much higher.
• If you use the Do Not Disturb function on your iPhone automatically every night (like I do), you might have been surprised (like I was) to learn that it did not switch off on January 1.  Jacqui Cheng explains the bug, and why it won’t fix itself until January 7, 2013.  Lex Friedman of Macworld also has a good article discussing the bug.  Unfortunately, Apple has a history of New Year-related bugs on the iPhone.  Makes me think about when we all thought that Y2K was going to be a big deal.
• Connie Guglielmo of Forbes wrote an interesting article about the iPhone on AT&T.  Worth reading.
• Localscope, a useful app that I reviewed in 2011, is now free.
• If Siri has trouble pronouncing the name of one of your contacts, Rob LeFebvre of Cult of Mac explains that you can add phonetic spelling hints.
• Nicole Perlrtoh of the New York Times recommends apps that let your iPhone help you find your car.
• Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times describes a new app from the Metropolitan Transit Authority that tells you exactly when a subway will arrive at a station.  It only works with the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the S lines right now, but when I was in New York over the holidays I stayed in the Murray Hill area near Grand Central Station so I took the 4, 5 and 6 lines several times.  The app seems to work very well, and it is free.  Worth downloading out if you are in New York.  Click here to get MTA Subway Time (free): 

  

• Speaking of the New York Times, its iEconomy series has frequently criticized Apple for working conditions in China — unfairly, I think, because lots of companies use Chinese manufacturing besides Apple, and Apple is one of the few companies trying to make things better.  I was pleased to see that Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg of the New York Times wrote this article and the end of 2012 explaining that working conditions are now improving in Chinese plants that make Apple products, thanks to Apple’s efforts.  There are still problems, but things are headed in the right direction.
• And finally, as far as my seven-year-old son is concerned, by far the best Christmas presents this year were Lego kits.  He is especially fond of the Lego Space series, including the Space Shuttle.  And I have to admit, I enjoyed helping him put them together too … not that he really needed my help.  Perhaps because I have Lego on the brain, I was amused to see this article by Ray Basile of iPhone Savior linking to the BrickCase by Smallworks, a Lego-compatible case for your iPhone 5.  Cute.

Last month I noted that Apple finally added the track changes features to its Pages app, and since then, Pages has become my go-to app for working with Microsoft Word files on my iPad.  But there are still some things that Pages does not do, or does not do well, which causes me to sometimes use another app for working with documents on my iPad or iPhone such as Documents to Go, Quickoffice or Office².  Jeeyoung Jung, an app developer in South Korea with the company Infraware, recently sent me a free review copy of Polaris Office, a $12.99 app that can view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (in both the old .doc format and the new .docx format).  I haven’t spent much time using Polaris Office with Excel and PowerPoint files, so this review will focus on Word files.  Polaris Office does a very good job viewing Word documents, and a decent job editing Word documents. 

If you receive a document as an email attachment, simply hold down on the attachment and you will be given the option to open the file in Polaris Office.  Documents recently added to Polaris Office show up on the main screen, and you can also connect Polaris Office with the cloud services Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and ucloud to download a document.

Polaris Office is a great document viewer.  You can flick your finger up and down to scroll through a document, or use a tab on the side to quickly move through a long document.  Polaris Office displays a wide variety of fonts, and displays footnotes.  I did notice one quirk in many of my documents:  numbers would sometimes appear in blue and underlined, as if they were hyperlinks, even though there was no such code applied to the text. 

One other problem that I noted was that, when working with large files, the app would sometimes have problems displaying text.  Scrolling up or down a little bit would often (but not always) quickly solve the problem, before doing that I would sometimes see screens like this:

If a document has redline track changes in it, Polaris Office will show those edits.  Unfortunately, the app does not let you accept or reject those redline edits.

Unlike Apple’s Pages app, Polaris Office can show comments in a document, although it does not do so by default.  The only way to know that a comment exists is to first tap the icon at the top right and select View Comment.  Text with a comment attached will then show up in yellow with a small box near it.  Tap the text, then tap “more” in the pop-up menu, then tap Comment to see the comment.

By default, Polaris Office uses a page view that approximates what the document will look like when printed.  However, the app also offers a useful “Reflow text” view that lets you pinch to zoom text with text reflowing on the line below.  This feature is especially useful on the iPhone because you often cannot read text in a normal page layout mode.  Documents to Go uses reflow text by default, and this feature is the main reason that Documents to Go has long been my favorite iPhone app for viewing Word documents.  The first picture below shows a document viewed in Polaris Office on the iPhone in the normal page view, and the second screen shows the same document with the Reflow text option enabled.

 

I’ve been talking about using Polaris Office as an app to view Word documents, but it can also edit documents.  The app is rather sophisticated in its features and offers lots of ways to reformat text, insert shapes, graphics, tables, bookmarks, etc.  Unfortunately, the app does not provide a way to create redline track changes edits, nor does it give you a way to insert comments.

Presumably as a result of Polaris Office being developed in South Korea, the text in the app and in help files is sometimes a little confusing or odd.  I realize that these are just translation issues, but it does jump out at you from time to time.  For example, the section of the FAQ that shows you how to rename a file is called “Do you have any idea to rename document?”  The website for Polaris Office states:  “Polaris Office is a premium mobile office product that enables the user to use MS Office documents conveniently, based on emotional experiences.”  I’m curious what phrase in Korean translated to “emotional experiences” in English.

I think that every attorney who works with Microsoft Word files on an iPad — which is essentially every attorney — should have a copy of Apple’s $9.99 Pages app.  That app is incredibly stable and offers a great way to view and edit documents plus it gives you the ability to view and approve or reject redline edits.  Unfortunately, Pages has some shortcomings, such as the fact that it cannot display comments and indeed it deletes all comments in a document, and the fact that Pages only has a page view mode which makes it hard to zoom text on a tiny iPhone screen.  Thus, while every attorney should have a copy of Pages, I think it also makes sense to have at least one other Office-compatible app.  The question is, shoud that app be Documents to Go, Quickoffice, Office² or Polaris Office?

Quickoffice has a fantastic interface — for example, the best in class for reviewing and approving/rejecting redline edits in a document — but still doesn’t handle footnotes, which is a huge shortcoming for many attorneys.

Office² was the first app to offer the ability to add redline track changes to a document, but now that Pages does the same thing this is no longer a unique advantage.  Office² also crashes a lot for me when I work with complex documents, and I don’t like the way that it displays track changes in very tiny text on the side.

That leaves Documents to Go and Polaris Office, and both are decent options.  If you are working with a file containing comments, I prefer the way that Documents to Go shows you the comment by default, whereas in Polaris Office you need to first turn on that feature.  That means that you may miss a comment if you didn’t know that it was there in the first place.  Documents to Go and Polaris Office both offer the useful option of reflowing text, helpful when you want to make the text larger on the iPad and essential on the iPhone because you will almost always want to make text larger.  If a document has footnotes and you just want to view the document, Documents to Go works better becuase you can tap on a footnote reference to see a pop-up window with the text of the footnote.  When Polaris Office is in the reflow text mode, you just see the reference number but you need to switch back to the page layout view to read the footnote text.  On the other hand, Polaris Office (like Pages) gives you the ability to edit or select text in a footnote, something that you cannot do in Documents to Go.  Documents to Go also supports the longer screen on an iPhone 5, whereas Polaris Office currently does not, wasting screen real estate with black bars on the top and bottom (see above pictures) instead of displaying more of the document.

For now I have a preference for Documents to Go, but I admit that this is in part because I have been using Documents to Go for many years now and I am just now starting to work with Polaris Office.  With just a few more features, such as support for the iPhone 5’s longer screen, I could see Polaris Office becoming my prefered app.

I’m glad to see that there is another option for viewing Microsoft Office files on the iPad and iPhone.  Polaris Office does a lot of things very well.  It is a universal app that works on both the iPhone and iPad so you don’t have to buy the app twice.  In its current form, I don’t see myself using this app more than Pages or Documents to Go, but that may change if more features are added to the app in the future.

Click here for Polaris Office ($12.99): 

The other apps that I discussed above:

Click here to get Pages ($9.99): 

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 Quickoffice Pro HD [for iPad] ($19.99): 

Click here for Quickoffice Pro [for iPhone] ($14.99): 

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

Click here for Office² [for iPhone] ($5.99):