I purchased my first Apple product shortly before my Sophomore year of college. I had used a Commodore 64 my entire Freshman year to visit BBS's, play games and type my reports for classes (and print them out on a Smith Corona TP1 printer – a letter-quality printer that was essentially an electric typewriter without a keyboard connected to a computer) but after making some money from a Summer job, I purchased a Mac Plus in 1988 with an external 20 MB hard drive. The Mac Plus was the computer that I started law school with, so I have been using Apple products in one form or another ever since I started my legal career. I mention all of this because John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to a fun story by software developer Jeff Keacher about how he had his mother send him his old Mac Plus, and through a LOT of work and persistence, he was able to get a (very slow) web browser working on it. Very cool. I think my old Mac Plus is still sitting in a closet a my parent's house. I can't even imagine how many orders of magnitude more advanced my iPhone and iPad are compared to that Mac Plus, but after reading Keacher's article, now I'm curious to see if my old computer will still boot up. That external hard drive probably still has my old 1L Contracts outline on it, not that I've had much need for that recently. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- As noted by South Carolina attorney Ben Stevens of The Mac Lawyer, Apple recently released its "12 Days of Gifts" app, an app that will give you free songs, movies, etc. every day from Dec. 26 to Jan. 6. Last year Apple had a similar app in other countries but it wasn't available in the U.S. Click here to download the free app.
- With our iPhones and iPads we have a very digital lifestyle, but in light of the NSA revelations, who is reading over your shoulder? California attorney David Sparks of MacSparky has an interesting post on electronic privacy.
- TechnoLawyer announced the TL NewsWire Top 25, a list of products reviewed in the TL NewsWire in 2013 for which there was the most reader interest. iPhone and iPad-related items on the list include the Transporter, TIMBS (an app that lets you track your time), Parallels Access (remote access to your computer), NoteSuite and Remarks (note-taking apps), the Clio iPhone app and LexisNexis TextMap,
- If you are having trouble with your iPhone 5s Touch ID fingerprint sensor, Serenity Caldwell of Macworld has some tips. I haven't had any issues at all with mine; it works great, and I wish I also had Touch ID on my iPad Air.
- Richard Devine of iMore reports that if you are flying Southwest and you want to send text messages from your iPhone using iMessage but you don't need full Internet access, Southwest is now offering a $2.00 in-flight iMessage plan. That's a very inexpensive way to keep in touch with folks on the ground.
- Jeffery Battersby reviews PDFpen Scan+ for Macworld and comes to the same conclusion as my recent review: scanning is just so-so, but the OCR features are excellent.
- Battersby also reviews Receptionist, an iPad app that replaces a full-time receptionist at your office.
- PDF Expert by Readdle is a great PDF app (my review is here). It was just updated to version 5.0, and Federico Viticci of MacStories has a comprehensive review of the new features.
- Viticci also wrote a great post on his must-have iPad apps, many of which would be useful for attorneys.
- Why yes, you do still have time to vote for iPhone J.D. in the ABA Journal Blawg 100. And yes, doing so does constitute admissible evidence that you are awesome. Voting is quick and easy; just click here to start. iPhone J.D. is in the Legal Tech category.
- And finally, Skew is a fun, 42 second video that recreates an iPhone screen using real objects. I've embedded the video below (or click here), but the "making of" video (click here) is even more fun to watch. Very clever.
