If you are interested in hearing me talk about the iPad and iPhone, here are some of my upcoming speaking engagements.
The New Orleans Bar Association is currently hosting the Free on Fridays CLE, a series of one-hour CLEs that address the latest technology issues and cutting edge topics relevant to lawyers. If you are in New Orleans this Friday, August 9th, I’ll be giving an iPad for Lawyers presentation from 10 am to 11 am. The CLEs are free for New Orleans Bar Association members; non-members pay $35.00. To register, you can email Rebekah Burg or call NOBA at (504) 525-7453.
If you practice employment law, consider attending the 7th Annual Labor & Employment Law Conference, sponsored by the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law. The conference is in New Orleans November 6th through 9th, and on Thursday, November 7 at 2:15 pm, I’m on a panel to discuss Apps for Employment Lawyers along with James McKenna of Morrison & Forester in San Francisco, Natalie Kelly of the Georgia State Bar in Atlanta (and Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2014) and Jeff Taylor of Absolute Legal Services in Oklahoma City (and publisher of The Droid Lawyer).
And finally, if you are a member of the Product Liability Advisory Council, I’ll be talking about using the iPad as a litigator at the Fall Conference in Las Vegas.
If any of those work into your schedule, I’d love to see you. Otherwise, you can find me here on iPhone J.D.
I work with a large number of PDF files in my law practice, and I’m sure that I’m not alone. All federal court pleadings on PACER are in PDF format and many state courts are moving to PDF electronic documents, other counsel frequently send me files in PDF format, when I do legal research I download the cases in PDF format, exhibits are in PDF format, etc. Perhaps most importantly, when I know that I’m going to work with a document on my iPad, I usually prefer that it be in PDF format. The iPad has the built-in ability to view PDF files, and the free Adobe Reader app offers even more options, but for professional work with PDF files it is nice to have a more powerful app. A few weeks ago, Branchfire sent me a free review copy of their $9.99 app iAnnotate, and I am incredibly impressed. This seems to be the most powerful and sophisticated app that I’ve seen for working with PDF files on the iPad. I am not sure that I would recommend this app to a mere casual iPad user because it is going to be overkill, but for those who want all of the tools at their disposal, this is a fantastic app.
There is typically a tension with PDF apps. On the one hand, you want to have access to lots of tools to annotate a document. On the other hand, you don’t want all of those tools cluttering up the screen when you are just trying to read a document. iAnnotate strikes a perfect balance by providing tools on both the left side of the screen that you can easily make disappear with only a tiny tab remaining so that you can access them again when you need them. Similarly, you can tap in the middle to make the tools at the top disappear, or tap again to see them.
Let’s talk about those tools at the top. The top left tab brings you to the main screen (more on that in a moment) but most of the tools at the top are tabs to your open PDF documents. Keeping multiple PDFs open at a time is incredibly useful, making it easy to switch back and forth between several documents. The gear at the far right brings up app preferences, and right next to it is a Dropbox circle. If you are reading a document that you accessed from your Dropbox account and you have modified the document on your iPad, the circle turns red to warn you that you are working with a changed version of the document. But if you tap that circle (or close the document) the changes are synced back to Dropbox. It is a great Dropbox integration that works really well.
On the right there are tools to work with the document. All of the common tools are there in the default toolbar, but what makes this app truly useful is that you can both modify the default toolbar and create your own additional toolbars. A simple flick from the right side of the screen switches between your active toolbars, so you can create toolbars with different tools for different types of tasks.
And boy are there a lot of tools to choose from. Here is a picture showing all of them, which I had to stitch together from three different screen shots on the iPad:
The tools include, for example, two instances of the pencil tool so that you can use one set by default to drop thin black lines and another set by default to draw thick, translucent yellow lines (useful for highlighting a scanned document). There is also a true highlighting tool which works great with OCR’d documents. There are tools for navigating within the document, tools for rotating the document, and tools for adding and working with bookmarks. You can use the standard pencil tool to sign a document, or you can use a specialized signature tool that makes it easier to sign and create a stamp of your signature that you can quickly and easily apply in the future.
Speaking of stamps, the app comes with a lot of built-in ones, and you can add any picture as a stamp. I created a picture of an Exhibit sticker and made a stamp out of it so that I can easily place virtual exhibit stickers on documents. For a stamp you use frequently, you can even create a custom stamp tool for the toolbar on the right that applies that specific stamp; the icon on the stamp tool even changes to a picture of that stamp.
If you ever need to save a copy of a website, iAnnotate does a better job than any of the browsers on my computer. And there is even a tool icon that brings up the full list of tools so that you can quickly select one that isn’t normally on one of your toolbars.
And those are just the tools on the right side of the screen. On the left side of the screen, there are five sets of tools such as Thumbnails and Actions that give you even more options for editing aspects of the document, copying a document, etc.
On the main screen, you can view a list of files that are local on the device (either in list view or in icon view) or tap Connections to access cloud-based storage such as Dropbox.
When it is time to export documents, you can either keep your annotations intact or export a flattened PDF document.
iAnnotate also has the ability to annotate Microsoft Word documents. This is a really neat and useful feature. Simply open a Word document in iAnnotate and as you start to annotate the document, the app will create a PDF version of the document. You can then highlight, markup in a red pen, etc. all over the document and then you can email that PDF file to someone else. If you want to markup a brief for another attorney or secretary to make the edits, iAnnotate is a powerful tool for doing so.
Even after a few weeks of using this app, I know that I am still just scratching the surface of what it does. Suffice it to say that if you want a sophisticated tool for working with PDF files on your iPad, and if you don’t mind a slight learning curve to figure out everything that this app can do, iAnnotate is an excellent choice.
I’m reading a great novel by Patrick Rothfuss called The Name of the Wind. Much of the book involves the main character, Kvothe, recalling the (exciting) events of his life with great detail. At one point he notes that his most defining attribute is his memory, and I’ve always been jealous of people (like my wife) who are great at remembering things. It always seemed that they barely needed to study in school; they hear or read something once, and then they know it. Fortunately, my iPhone does a perfect job of remembering things so that I don’t have to. I jot down something in a Notes app or tell Siri to remind me of something, and the iPhone never forgets, freeing up my brain to focus on analyzing issues instead of worrying about rote memorization. New York Times columnist David Pogue (the keynote speaker at ABA TECHSHOW earlier this year) wrote a great article in Scientific American discussing how smartphones are starting to make memorization obsolete. It’s a good read. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson told me that he encountered a strange bug that was preventing him from updating apps on his iPad. He pointed me to this thread on Apple’s forums to show that he is not alone. But I see that the very latest posts on the forum indicate that Apple may have finally done something on its end to fix it, so if you are having the same problem, hopefully you won’t have it for much longer.
Readdle is celebrating its sixth birthday by reducing the price of six apps by up to 70%. This includes the great Scanner Pro for $1.99 instead of $6.99 (my review) and PDF Expert for $4.99 instead of $9.99 (my review).
Serenty Caldwell of Macworld offers advice for traveling overseas with your Apple devices. One suggestion: bring an iPad instead of a laptop. I agree; I travel a lot within the U.S., but I can’t even remember the last time I brought a laptop.
Jeff Gamet of The Mac Observer shares a neat trick that was new to me for selecting multiple photos in the Photos app that involves using two fingers at once.
Rene Ritchie of iMore shares a few more tricks, gestures you can use in Siri, Mail, Safari, Calendar and the keyboard.
Brad Nicholson of Touch Arcade notes that Bad Piggies, a game from the folks that brought you Angry Birds, is Apple’s app of the week. Meaning it is free. I’ve never played it, but my seven-year-old son likes it.
And finally, here’s a product that is still in development but looks promising: Egg Minder, an egg tray that holds your eggs in your refrigerator and tells your iPhone how many eggs are in the tray. No more sleepness nights wondering how many eggs you have left!
