Month: May 2013

When I think of iOS, I think of iPhones and iPad, but of course there is also the iPod touch, aka the iPhone-without-the-phone.  I’ve heard of a few lawyers who used an iPod touch, but that was a while ago and was because they had to use another smartphone too (such as a BlackBerry back when some firms required that) and they wanted something to run iOS apps.  Nowadays, I suspect that virtually all lawyers would find an iPhone far more valuable than an iPod touch.  Nevertheless, it was interesting to see that this week Apple announced a new, cheaper version ($229, with of course no cell phone contract) of the iPod touch, a 16GB version that comes only in black and lacks a camera on the back.  I agree with Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that it looks like a great portable game machine for kids.  With the new iPod touch, Apple also announced that it has sold more than 100 million iPod touch units.  By my count, Apple has sold over 350 million iPhones and over 140 million iPads, so that means that historical iOS sales are about 59% iPhone, 24% iPad and 17% iPod touch.  That’s actually more popular than I would have expected for the iPod touch … but still doesn’t make me want to launch iPod J.D.  And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• San Francisco attorney Morgan Smith describes four apps that make his life easier.  I only use one of those myself (TripIt) but that app is essential for me when I travel.
• Earlier this month, Dallas attorney Tom Mighell compared four apps for annotating PDFs on an iPad, and I forgot to link to the article.  Better late than never.
• Eric Slivka of Mac Rumors reports that, according to research firm IDC, tablet shipments were surpass notebook computer shipments in 2013, and tablets will take over the entire PC market in 2015.
• Peter Cohen of The Loop reports that Apple hired former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to head up Apple’s environmental efforts.  Jackson grew up here in New Orleans, and after getting a B.S. from Tulane and a Masters from Princeton in chemical engineering, spent most of her professional life working for the EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
• I became a big fan of 1Password when I started using it late last year.  I still use the app every single day, and I like the app even more now than when I wrote my review four months ago.  If you haven’t tried it yet, now may be the time because, for a limited time, 1Password for iOS, Mac and PC is 50% off. 
• A few weeks ago, I ended In the news with the video of Candian astronaut singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the International Space Station.  The Economist has an interesting article on how copyright works in space. 
• And finally, how many times have you been frustrated that you couldn’t access a floppy disk from your iPad?  Okay, probably never, but did you know that you can actually use Apple’s iPad Camera Connection Kit to access photos on a floppy disk if they are organized the right way?  YouTube user “napabar” shows you how to do it in this video.  Useful?  Perhaps not, but interesting.

Attorneys frequently have to look up contact information for courts, whether it be to call a judge’s chambers, send an email to the court with a draft of a proposed order, or ask a question of a clerk of court.  By this point I presume that all of this information is available on court websites, but if you are out of the office using your iPhone that means that you still need to search for the website and find the part of the website with contact information — and many of these pages are not optimized for the iPhone’s screen so you may have to squint.  An easier solution is to use the Court Directory app from Bloomberg BNA.  This app contains detailed contact information for judges, clerks of course, and other courthouse personnel for federal and state courts.  The app doesn’t have contact information on every single judge, but it is darn close.  Bloomberg BNA says that the 2013 edition contains listings for 2,133 state courts, 216 federal courts, 16,025 judges and 5,319 clerks and court administrators in the 50 states, D.C., U.S. territories, and more.  In Louisiana, for example, I see all of the courts in which I practice, but I don’t see some courts of limited jurisdiction such as Justice of the Peace courts or traffic courts.

The app is not fancy, but it is quick and easy to use.  By default, when you launch the app it displays the state court information for the state where you are currently located, but you can change the home page to another jurisdiction of you prefer.  For states, the app divides up courts by level.  So here in Louisiana, the “1st Court Level” is our Supreme Court, the “2nd Court Level” is our five courts of appeal, and “3rd Court Level” is our trial courts. 

 

Tap on a court to see more information such as the list of judges.  There is typically also an entry called “Geographic Jurisdiction” that will give you a list of each county (or “parish” for Louisiana) covered by that court.  Tap on a judge (or clerk etc.) to see the contact information.  The information included varies from state to state but always includes a phone number and typically includes other information such as the public email address, address, fax number, etc.  You can tap on an address to see it on a map, and you can tap on a phone number to dial it.

 

The app lets you designate any court as a “favorite” to make it easier to access later.  The app also includes a simple search feature.

Bloomberg BNA tells me that the app will be updated over the next few months to add even more information including social media links for some judges who use services like Facebook or Twitter.  It will be interesting to see that added, especially considering that the use of social media by judges is such a hot topic of legal ethics right now.

The information provided in this app is information that you could find elsewhere, but it is very handy to have it all contained in one place.  Buying this app saves you from having to create (and update) contact entries in your address book for every single court that you might want to contact, not to mention the time that you would have to take to look up the information.  For attorneys who practice before many different courts, especially those who practice in many different jurisdictions, this is a very convenient app to have on your iPhone.  This is a universal app so it works on the iPad too, which is nice, but for me this app has been most useful on my iPhone.

Click here to get Court Directory from Bloomberg BNA ($9.99): 

People often ask me which carrier is best to use with an iPhone.  There certainly are a lot of choices in the U.S. now that all four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — offer the iPhone, as do many smaller carriers.  If you are like me, you don’t use your iPhone as a phone as much as you use it for data, so you might want to consider which carrier offers the best 4G LTE data.  For the second year in a row, TechHive has rated the speed of 4G LTE on
the four major U.S. carriers.  TechHive reports that, overall, AT&T is the fastest, although this varies
from city to city.  Here in New Orleans, for example, I regularly get speeds on AT&T far in excess of what TechHive saw in the cities where it ran tests; I just ran a test (May 23, 2013 at 10pm) and saw 25 Mbps and I’ve seen over 50 Mbps.  Verizon, on the other hand, has coverage in more
cities, with LTE available to 287 million people (486 cities) versus
AT&T’s 220 million (190 cities).  T-Mobile (which just started
selling the iPhone 5 this year) currently offers 4G LTE in only 7
cities, but that is supposed to expand substantially through the end of
this year when coverage should be provided to almost 200 million
people.  Click here for the full story, and click here for a useful infographic that accompanies the story.  The old rule of thumb was to go with Verizon if voice calls were the most important and go with AT&T if data was the most important, and at least on the data side, the TechHive research is mostly consistent with that.  And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• AgileLaw is a new service that I saw demonstrated at ABA TECHSHOW last month that lets you have paperless depositions.  Instead of making paper copies of all of the exhibits you will use in a deposition, you upload digital versions to AgileLaw and then, from a computer or iPad, you control when the documents get shared with other counsel at the deposition on their computers or iPads.  The cost is $100 a deposition.  It is an interesting idea, and you can get more information on their website.
• Eric Sinrod, an attorney in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris, discusses his transition from the BlackBerry to the iPhone in an article for FindLaw’s Technologist column.
• I frequently write columns for the TechnoLawyer BigLaw and SmallLaw newsletters, and sometimes TechnoLawyer posts older articles to its website.  You can now reach an article that I wrote last year which is still relevant today: Five Tips for Creating Your Law Firm’s Mobile Web Site.   To read new articles as they come out, you should subscribe (for free) to one or more TechnoLawyer newsletters.
• A new, free service called Law Ratchet launched this week.  It provides you with the latest legal news in an easy to read format.  It looks similar to an RSS reader but the service has already selected all of the law-related websites from which you might want to get news, although you can also customize it.  You can use it on a computer in a browser or in an iPad app. 
• TextExpander Touch is an iPhone/iPad app that lets you type small snipets of text and have them expand to larger snipets of text.  The app was updated this week to add support for rich text (bold, underline, font size, etc.) and to allow you to add fields so that you can customize the text that is automatically created.  California attorney David Sparks posted a video on his MacSparky website that shows you how it works.  I haven’t tried TextExpander yet, but it is one of those apps that I keep meaning to get around to one day when I have time to take it for a spin.
• I recently mentioned that Apple added two-step authentication to enhance the security on Apple IDs.  Twitter also added two-step authentication this week, as noted by Peter Cohen of iMore.  I set it up on my Twitter account and it was easy and quick to do.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress this week about Apple’s taxes.  Jordan Golson of MacRumors has a good summary of the testimony.  For a humorous take, see this video from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
• Apple retails stores continue to be incredibly successful.  The stores make more revenue per square foot than any other store; second place is Tiffany & Co., and Apple makes twice as much per square foot.  Horace Dediu of Asymco put together some great graphs which show Apple’s success.
• Three weeks ago, I mentioned Apple’s Photos Every Day ad, one of my favorite Apple TV commercials in years.  The latest installment is called Music Every Day.  It’s not quite as good as the first one, but it’s still a very nice commercial, and features more great music from Rob Simonsen.
• Neil Hughes of AppleInsider reports that the U.S. Air Force plans to purchase 18,000 iPads and predicts that it will save $5 million a year by doing so, including $750,000 a year in savings on fuel (the iPad is much, much lighter than a heavy paper flight manual) and enormous savings printing the flight manuals.  I may not save money when I travel with an iPad instead of binders full of case-related materials, but it sure is a heck of a lot easier to carry around.
• In a related story, AppleInsider notes that the Pentagon announced this month that it has officially approved use of the iPhone and iPad (running iOS 6 or later) for accessing secure government networks.  Previously, the Pentagon only approved BlackBerry devices.
• And finally, Christopher York of Huffington Post UK reports that the Burj Al Arab hotel, a luxury hotel in Dubai, now provides 24-carat gold iPads to guests when they check in to serve as a virtual concierge.  The hotel posted the following picture on its Twitter account:

There are more portable Bluetooth speakers for the iPhone (and iPad) then you can shake a stick at, but a few of them have caught my attention over the years because of their features, design and good reviews.  One such speaker is the DISCO 2 from SuperTooth.  Jeremy Horwitz, a former IP attorney who is now the Editor-in-Chief of iLounge, called the DISCO 2 “one of the best $100 wireless speaker systems we’ve tested” when he reviewed it in August of 2012.  Thus, I was interested when SuperTooth offered to send me a free review unit last month and I’ve been using it extensively for the last four weeks.  I’m very impressed with this product, and if you are looking for a portable Bluetooth speaker, I think you would be very happy with this product.

Design

One of the best features of the DISCO 2 is the design.  The base of the unit is almost 4.5″ x 2.5″ which is pretty close to the height and width of an iPhone, so just set your iPhone down on a table and you can see about how much space this speaker occupies on a desk, mantle, or wherever else you put it.  But the unit is tall, just over 7″.  (The official technical specs say 108 mm wide, 70 mm deep, and 182 mm tall.)  Put it all together and you get a product that takes up very little space on a table so you can place it just about anywhere, but it is tall enough to have some substance to it.  The unit weighs just over a pound, so it is very light to carry around.  It is a great design, and a big improvement over the first generation DISCO which was long and boring.

The top of the speaker contains six useful buttons, making it very easy to operate the unit.  The first row contains volume up and down buttons around a power button.  (You also hold down the power button for 6 seconds to pair with your iPhone, something you only need to do once.)  The second row contains back and forward buttons, which you can tap once to skip tracks or you can hold down to scrub forward or backwards through a song.  In the middle of the second row is a play/pause button.  That play/pause button also serves as an indicator light: it blinks red in pairing mode and it triple-blinks red when the battery needs to be recharged.

The buttons are back-lit making them easy to see even in a dark room.

Of course, you don’t have to use the buttons on the speaker.  I often keep my iPhone in my shirt pocket when I am using the DISCO 2, and you can use all of the normal iPhone controls.  But if your iPhone is on one side of the room and you are standing on the other side of the room next to the DISCO 2, it is nice to be able to control everything from the speaker.

The unit I tested is black, which is the color I would probably pick for myself, but SuperTooth also offers red, white, blue, pink and green.

Sound

I’m no audiophile, but the DISCO 2 sounds great to my ears.  Music sounds really nice and podcasts sound rich.  The speaker gets loud enough to be too loud in a room.  And this past weekend, I had the DISCO 2 sitting outside on a table while cooking some burgers on the BBQ and I couldn’t turn the volume all the way up for fear that I would annoy the neighbors.  If you want a truly loud speaker for a large party, this won’t be enough, but if you just want to hear some nice sound coming from your iPhone or iPad, the 16 watts put out by the DISCO 2 will be more than sufficient.  Bass sounds good for listening to normal music, podcasts, audiobooks, etc., but if you are looking for a speaker with a loud, thumping bass that will shake the room, you’re not going to find it in a unit this small.

The manufacturer’s website says that the DISCO 2 contains two speakers on the front and one bass reflex system on the back.  Note, however, that you do not hear stereo separation on this device. 

If you want to hear left and right channels coming at you from opposite sides of the room, I see that SuperTooth makes a similar product called the DISCO TWIN which looks like two DISCO 2 units where one provides the left channel and one provides the right channel.  I frankly prefer having one small unit that is easy to move around, but if stereo separation is important to you and you don’t mind having to deal with two different units, the DISCO TWIN might be what you are looking for.

Use

The DISCO 2 uses the latest Bluetooth 4 technology.  I had no trouble pairing the unit with both my iPhone 5 and my wife’s iPhone 4.  Obviously, you cannot pair with both devices at the same time, but the speaker can remember both profiles so you don’t have to go through a long re-pairing process each time.

The manufacturer says that the operating range is 10 meters.  I could move my iPhone even farther than that without losing a connection, but obviously that will depend upon you environment.

I’ve seen about 8 hours or so of battery life before getting an indication that I should recharge.  The manufacturer says that you can get up to 10 hours on medium volume or 3-4 hours on maximum value.  It takes about 2 hours to recharge the unit.

The DISCO 2 comes with a simple black bag that covers the speaker for travel, a wall charger and a 3.5 audio cable if you want to connect to something that doesn’t have Bluetooth.

Conclusion

I’m very impressed by the SuperTooth DISCO 2.  It sounds great, it is easy to use, it has a long battery life, and I really like the design.  Sound produced by an iPhone or iPad sounds much, much better coming out of the DISCO 2.  And it is light enough to make it easy to move around any part of the room, take it outside or pack it for travel.  The DISCO 2 costs $99 from the manufacturer, but I see you can currently get it for cheaper on Amazon.

Click here to get the SuperTooth DISCO2 from Amazon ($82.29)

I suspect that the top app that I use on my iPhone is the Mail app, but if you ask me about my favorite use of my iPhone, you’ll get a different answer.  I love using my iPhone to act as a sort of a second brain, helping me to remember things that I might otherwise forget and helping me to figure things out quickly.  This type of technology is often called virtual assistant technology, and its usefulness is enhanced with the excellent voice recognition that has been a part of the iPhone since the iPhone 4S in October of 2011.  There are actually two excellent virtual assistants on the iPhone today:  Siri and the Google app. 

Apple’s built-in Siri is fantastic because you can quickly access it by just holding down the home button, and it has great access to many built-in apps.  For example, I love being able to quickly say “send a message to my wife that I am running 5 minutes late” or “remind me when I get to work to call John Doe” or “add milk to my grocery list” and have the iPhone instantly obey using the Messages and Reminders apps.  I also love being able to say “create an appointment with Jane Roe” and not only have a calendar entry created, but also be told if that conflicts with another appointment on my calendar.  Very powerful, and very useful.

But Siri is not the only virtual assistant on the iPhone.  The free Google app has always offered virtual assistant technology, and thanks to the recent addition of Google Now technology it is even more useful.  Just launch the Google app and tap the Voice button at the bottom of the screen to get started. 

In some ways, the Google app on the iPhone is not as useful as Siri because it lacks access to built-in apps, so you cannot use it to send messages, create appointments, or add items to the Reminders app.  But if you are looking for information — such as the weather in a certain city, the name of the artist who wrote a song, the name of the star of a movie, etc. — the Google app is incredibly useful, and whether it or Siri give you better results just depends.  It has never been easier to settle a bar bet regarding trivia.

Sharon Vaknin of CNET created a pretty useful video that shows Google Now versus Siri in action at the same time.  Vaknin shows Google Now on an Android phone, and Google Now is more powerful on an Android phone than the Google app on an iPhone because, for example, on Android, it can access things like the calendar that only Siri can access on the iPhone.  Even so, many of the Google Now results in this video could also be produced in the Google app on the iPhone, so this video does a good job of showing off the two services.  The video is worth checking out:

Vaknin seems to be most concerned with the speed of the results, but since at most we are talking about the difference between 1 second and 2 seconds, I don’t see speed as a major difference.  In many cases I prefer Siri because it does a better job displaying the results in a form that is easy to read and useful to act upon.  Having said that, there are also some search results that are better in Google than on Siri.

Google Now and Siri can do a lot more than what I have described above.  For example, Google Now tries to offer you information that you might want without you even asking, based upon things like where you are, what it sees in your GMail, etc.  And both services get more useful every day as Apple and Google refine the results.

If you don’t currently use Siri and/or the Google app as a virtual assistant — a second brain — you are missing out on one of the best features of the iPhone.  Try it out.

Click here to get the Google app (free): 

On Wednesday, May 15, Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio decided to
download a free word game for his iPhone called Say the Same Thing. 
That happened to be the 50 billionth download from the App Store, and
so Brandon was the lucky winner of an iTunes gift card worth $10,000. 
As Marco Tabini of Macworld notes,
Apple just celebrated 40 billion downloads in January of 2013.  At this
rate, it won’t be long before Apple hits 100 billion downloads.  And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer identifies his 31 favorite apps for lawyers.
• Jessee Londin of Law Technology News reviews Retro List, a to-do list app that works much like a piece of paper.
• Tim Baran of Rocket Matter shares 7 iPhone tips.
• I’m a big fan of 1Password, which I reviewed earlier this year, and some new features were added this week.  David Chartier of AgleBits, the maker of 1Password, explains what is new.
• Google had a bunch of announcements at its I/O Conference this week, one of which was that the Google Maps app is coming to the iPad.  Casey Johnston of Ars Technica has information on all of the announcements.
• BlackBerry also had a big conference this week.  As Peter Cohen of iMore reports, one announcement was that its BBM messing service, long a signature feature of BlackBerry phones, is coming to iOS and Android this summer.  It sounds like this will be a cross-platform alternative to Apple’s Messages app.
• CBS released on its website a great, un-aired video from 60 Minutes in which Bill Gates talks to Charlie Rose about Steve Jobs.  Worth watching.
• Yesterday I reviewed a very short Lightning cable.  If you want a very long one, Nick Guy of iLounge has a first look at the BlueFlame 2M cable, a USB to Lightning cable that is twice as long as the Apple cable and uses tangle-resistant fabric.
• I mentioned last month that, to raise money for the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, a website was auctioning off coffee with Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.  The bidding started at $50,000 and ended this week with a $610,000 bid from an anoymous bidder.  Wow.
• Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal discusses ways to work with Microsoft Word documents on the iPad.
• And finally, if you have a guitar and an iPad with a copy of GarageBand, you have what you need to record a song.  But if you also happen to be Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and you are on the International Space Station, then you can record a fantastic cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity.  This video is amazing.  Ground Control to Major Tom…

The iPhone and iPad come with a USB to Lightning cable that is 1 meter long, almost 40 inches.  When you are far from an outlet, that is a good length, and sometimes I even wish it were longer.  But if your iPhone is right next to the USB port on your laptop or an external battery, you don’t need something that long.  Indeed, a cable that long tends to get tangled up with other items when you travel with it in a briefcase or purse.  The solution is a short USB to Lightning cable, and that’s exactly what the LightLinez from Kenburg Technology is.  I received a free review sample of this product, and it works as advertised. 

The LightLinez is only 12 cm long, just under 5 inches. But it is a high-quality, Apple-certified cable that works great for charging or syncing.  I used it with both my iPhone 5 and my iPad mini, and it works great.

I find that the LightLinez works especially well when you are using it at a desk and your iPhone or iPad is adjacent to an external battery, something like the iSound Portable Power Max Backup Battery, or next to the USB port on the side of a laptop.  And I love that the cord itself is so tiny, making it perfect for travel.

Apple’s 1 meter USB to Lightning cable sells for $19, and the LightLinez sells for $18.95.  At first blush it seems strange to pay the same amount for something that is shorter, but as noted above, less is more when you don’t want a long cable snaking all over your desk or getting tangled on things in your briefcase or purse.  If you are looking for an extra Lightning cable and you like the idea of something that is small and portable, the LightLinez is perfect.

Click here to get the LightLinez from CableJive ($18.95)

Thank you to Connected Data, creator of the Transporter, for sponsoring iPhone J.D. again this month.  I described the basic function of the Transporter in March, and last month I discussed the useful Transporter iOS app.  This month, I want to note the reason that you might want to purchase two Transporters: remote backup.

One advantage of an online document storage service such as Dropbox is that your files are somewhere else.  Thus, even if there is a fire, earthquake, flood, or other disaster at your office or home, you can rest assured that your files are safely located somewhere else.  A key advantage of the Transporter is privacy; the unit sits on your desk, and thus you don’t have to worry about a company that you don’t control having access to your data.  But if disaster strikes and the items on your desk are destroyed, you could lose access to the data on the hard drive in that Transporter sitting on your desk.

But there is a simple solution.  Purchase a second Transporter and keep it in another location.  If you have one in your main office, put the other one in your satellite office, or your home.  Then use the simple software to select which folders on your first Transporter to backup to the second Transporter, and then you are done.  Shortly after files are added and revised on your first Transporter, they are also added and revised on the second Transporter.

Connected Data sent me two Transporter units to review so I’ve had this setup for several months now, and it just works without any involvement by me after the initial setup process.  When I first started, I had a lot of files on my original Transporter, so I put the second Transporter on the same network for the initial backup.  This way, fast local Ethernet was used to move the files over.  (You don’t have to do this initial step, but I did so just to speed things up.)  Then I moved the second Transporter to another office and it has continued to update all of my files. 

 You can always access the secure portal on the Transporter website to check on the status of everything and make sure that both Transporters are working, which folders are being synced, etc.  Remember that, for privacy reasons, the Transporter website doesn’t have access to any of your data.  Instead, it just has status and statistical information so that you can easily monitor that everything is working as planned.  You can also use the website to give other people access to one or more of your folders, making the Transporter perfect for sharing files, even a large number of files, and for removing access if you want privacy again.

The smart folks behind the Transporter know that lawyers are a key market for this product, and they had a busy booth at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago lat month.  I know that they have also been hard at work on additional features, and while I don’t have any inside knowledge on what is coming, the company seems to be dropping hints on its Twitter feed.  For example, a few days ago, someone tweeted that Transporter “doesn’t offer public links,” and the company responded: “Stay tuned.  You are going to be pleasantly surprised later this month.” 

If you like the idea of online storage that is completely private and secure while also being sharable and accessible on your iPhone or iPad, and if you like the idea of paying one reasonable price and avoiding monthly service charges year after year, check out the Transporter.

Click here to get Transporter from Connected Data ($199 – $399).

Click here to get Transporter from Amazon ($299 for 1TB or $399 for 2TB).

It is rare for a post on iPhone J.D. to generate controversy, but one series of posts to do so has been my reviews of the Gogo airline internet service.  People often leave comments saying that the service has not worked well for them.  However, I was traveling most of this past week with day-long depositions and other meetings and often one of the few times that I could stop to take a breath was when I was above 10,000 feet.  I often found it useful to use my iPad mini — perfect for even a tight seat on a plane because it is small and light — to connect to Gogo and catch up on emails.  I even saw a plan that I had not seen before, a 30-minute plan for only $4.00.  You can make it through a lot of emails and download a lot of files in 30 minutes, and then use the rest of the time on your flight to read and revise the documents that you downloaded.  That productivity was well worth $4.00, and I hope that Gogo continues to offer this plan.  One complaint about Gogo is speed, but for simple emails and downloading documents, it has always been fast enough for me.  And this may improve substantially in a few years; Edward Wyatt of the New York Times reported this week that the FCC is paving the way for faster Wi-Fi on planes.  Sounds great to me.  And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• If you want to maximize your productivity on your iPhone or iPad and don’t mind getting a little geeky to do so, check out the latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast.  Florida attorney Katie Floyd and California attorney David Sparks discuss some great apps and tricks for automating tasks on iOS.
• Julia Love of The Recorder reports on law firms creating useful apps as a form of self-promotion.
• 
  
  Maria Kantzavelos of the Illinois Bar Journal wrote an article on using iPads in a law practice.
  
  
• Apple always has great photographs of its products in its ads, and a lot of the credit for that goes to photographer Peter Belanger.  Michael Shane of The Verge has a great interview with Belanger in which he explains how he produces those great photographs.
• The camera on the iPhone is great and keeps getting better with each new version of the phone.  Photographer Lisa Bettany, one of the brains behind the great Camera+ app, posted some great comparison pictures that show pretty dramatically how much the camera has improved from the first generation iPhone to the current iPhone 5.
• And finally, the following video showing 10,000 iPhone 5s as dominoes is fake, and was created by Aatma Studio using computer graphics, but it is still really cool to watch:

Nobody wants to have their username and password hacked on any service, and this includes your Apple ID.  If a bad guy can log in with your ID, he might be able to buy music, apps, movies, books, and other items and make you pay for them.  Apple recently added two-step verification as a free, optional security enhancement for your Apple ID username and password.  I’ve been using it for the last few weeks, and it works well and I can recommend it.

Apple calls it “two-step verification” but I usually see this type of protection called “two-factor authentication.”  Whatever you call it, the idea is that even if someone knows the password for your username, he still cannot log in unless he also has something that only you should have.  For example, some companies protect their secure websites by requiring that users have not only a username and a password but also be able to type in the number displayed on an RSA SecurID Hardware Authenticator, a number that changes every minute.  A bad guy might somehow get or guess your username and password, but he presumably won’t also have the SecurID that is on your keychain.

Apple implements this by making your iPhone your hardware authenticator, which makes sense because presumably only you have your iPhone.  A bad guy in another country might somehow guess or hack your username and password, but he won’t have your iPhone … and if he does, you have bigger fish to fry.

To turn on the service, you need to first sign in to your Apple ID on the Apple website.  Select Password and Security, and under “Two-Step Verification” click get-started.  If your current password isn’t sufficiently complicated (not long enough, lacks upper and lower case characters, etc.) Apple will ask you to change your password and imposes a three-day waiting period before letting you make additional changes … long enough for Apple to send you an email and to ensure that it is really you making the changes.  Then you can sign in again, select Password and Security, and get started with two-step verification.

There are two ways to use your iPhone for verification.  First, you can use the Find My iPhone app.  I wasn’t able to use this option because, like many long-time Apple users, I have two Apple IDs — one that I use to buy things on the iTunes Store and the App Store (an ID that I have used since the iTunes Store opened 10 years ago and long before I had an iPhone), and one that I use for services like Find My iPhone, iCloud, etc.  If you only have one Apple ID, then this option can work for you.  Second, you can have Apple send you an SMS text message for verification, and this is the option I chose.

Now that I have configured two-step verification, if a bad guy were to try to log in to the Apple website with my username and password, he would encounter this screen telling him that he needs to verify his identity:

Similarly, if a bad guy tries to download something from the iTunes Store, App Store or iBookstore on his iPhone or iPad, he’ll encounter a screen like this one:

Of course, if it is you trying to access your own account, you simply tell Apple to send you a code.  For the text message approach, in about five seconds you’ll get a message with the code.  Then simply enter that code to confirm your access to the Apple website or to continue your purchase from the iTunes Store or App Store.

 

I was able to test Apple’s two-step verification in two different ways.  First, I tested using it to access the portion of the Apple website that manages my Apple ID.  Second, I recently had a problem with my iPhone so I brought it to an Apple Store and they swapped it out for a new one.  When I tried to start buying apps on the iPhone using my Apple ID username and password, Apple wouldn’t let me do so until I verified my identity via the text message.  Since this iPhone had my own AT&T SIM card, of course I got that text message, but if I were not me, I wouldn’t have received that message.

Note that once you authenticate hardware (iPhone, iPad, etc.) as yours, you won’t have to use two-step verification again.  But the first time that you use a new piece of hardware, Apple will verify that you are who you say you are.

What happens if you lose your iPhone and still need to access the Apple website to change something on your Apple ID?  When you first configure the two-step verification service, Apple gives you a unique recovery key that you are told to print out.  Store that recovery key someplace safe, such as a safe deposit box.  If you ever lose your iPhone, you can still access your account so long as you have your name/password and that recovery key.  Similarly, if you ever forget your password, you can still access your account so long as you have your iPhone and your recovery key.  Note, however, that if you lose access to two of these three items at the same time — (1) password, (2) iPhone and (3) recovery key — then you will be permanently locked out of your account.  This makes sense because the whole point of two-step verification is that a bad guy might gain access to one of those three (such as your password or your iPhone) but he wouldn’t have access to two of those three, let alone all three of them.

If you want to learn more, Apple has a good article with all of the nitty gritty details on two-step verification.  It takes a short amount of time to configure, and it is a slight nuisance every time you log in for the first time from a new device, but I think that it is well worth it to protect your security.  It has worked well for me, and if you want additional security, I recommend that you check it out.