Month: February 2014

We are only in the second month of the year, but I’m already looking forward to this Fall to find out what new product Apple has been working on.  Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke to Daisuke Wakabayahi of the Wall Street Journal yesterday.  The focus of the story is Apple repurchasing $14 billion of its own shares, but what especially interested me is that Cook also confirmed that Apple will be releasing a new type of product this year.  Cook said:  “There will be new categories. We’re not ready to talk about it, but we’re working on some really great stuff.”  Most expect this to be an iWatch, and I look forward to learning what it is and what it does.  Apple seems to be pouring a ton of resources into this new product, and the last two times that they did something new, we got the iPhone and the iPad.  And now, the news of note from this week:

• If you are in or near New Orleans and you don’t have lunch plans on Tuesday February 18, then why don’t you join me for this month’s LSBA Tech Tuesday CLE?  For $25 you get lunch from 11:30 to 12:00 and then I’ll present a 1 hour CLE on using an iPad in the practice of law.  Click here for more information and to sign up.
• No matter where you are, I’d love to see you at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago March 27 to 29.  I talked about why you should considering attending TECHSHOW last month, and I mention it again today because early bird registration discounts end on Monday, February 10th.  So if you want to come and you want to save $200, register now.  You can download the full conference brochure in PDF format by clicking here.
• South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer updated his iPad app recommendations for lawyers.
• Texas attorney and e-discovery expert Craig Ball discusses mobile device discovery in this article for Law Technology News.
• South Carolina attorney Ben Stevens of The Mac Lawyer reviews the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad mini.
• Jeff Abbott of The Sweet Setup interviewed California attorney David Sparks to find out what is on his iPad.
• Nick Heer picked VSCO Cam as the best iPhone photo editing app in an article for The Sweet Setup.  I take lots of pictures on my iPhone but I usually edit them on my Mac at home using Photoshop Elements, not on my iPhone, so I myself don’t have a favorite iPhone photo editing app.
• And finally, Apple recently released an amazing video called 1.24.14 that honors the 30th anniversary of the Mac by showing people around the world using Apple devices.  The video itself is worth watching, and you can click here to do so, but the story-behind-the-video is even better.  First, I suspect that Apple considered making this a Super Bowl commercial, for the reasons noted by Ina Fried of Re/code.  Remember that the Mac debuted with a Super Bowl commercial in 1984 that many consider the best commercial of all time.  Second, the making of this video is a great story.  The entire video was shot by 15 camera crews around the world, all on the same day, all taking video with an iPhone, all orchestrated by director Jake Scott, the son of Ridley Scott who directed Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial.  This video explains how it was done.  Very neat:

Josh Adams is an immigration attorney in San Francisco.  Before he went to law school, he was a software developer, so he knows a thing or two about computers.  As a practicing attorney, he was frustrated with existing methods for accessing resources used by immigration lawyers.  Books are heavy to carry around, and websites can be difficult to use when you are on-the-go and don’t let you easily jump to specific parts of the statutes.  Thus, he decided to make an app.  He took advantage of Apple’s free iTunes U to take a Stanford class on making iOS apps, he created the code for his own iPhone app, he hired a graphic designer to help him create some icons, and the result is the new Immigration app.  The app costs $24.99 and contains the text of the Immigration & Nationality Act and 8th Code of Federal Regulations, presented in a way that makes it easy to search each individual subsection of the INA and CFR, jump between corresponding sections of the INA and CFR, and bookmark specific subsections — all in an app that works even if you don’t have Internet access.

There are five buttons at the bottom of the screen that you use to navigate the app.  The first button, INA, contains the text of the INA.  Slide your finger up and down the left side of the screen to scroll through sections.  When you find the section you want, tap the plus icon to see the subsections.  The window containing the text of each subsection stays the same size, so to see all of the text, you slide your finger up and down in the middle of the screen.  With the default text size, you can see about 3.5 lines of text at a time.

 

This is the first time that I have seen an app that doesn’t display all of the text of a subsection of a statute at once, and to be honest, at first I had serious reservations about the need to scroll up and down just to see all of the words.  However, after playing around with the app for a while, the approach does grow on me a little.  One advantage is that it is very easy to see where a particular subsection lives in the context of the statute as a whole.  In other words, it helps you to see both the forest and the trees at the same time.  Having said that, sometimes you just want to see all of the words, and Josh tells me that in the upcoming version 1.1 of the app, you can long press on any subsection to cause that subsection to come up in a full screen scrollable window of its own.  He showed me a video of how it will work, and I like it.

If you tap on the text of a subsection, a menu lets you copy the text in that subsection, create a bookmark for that subsection, or jump directly to the corresponding section of the CFR.  Jumping to the CFR brings you to the second area of the app, which works the same as the first area but which contains the CFR instead of the INA.

 

If you want to search the INA and CFR, use the search box at the top of the screen.  The app will then take you through each subsection in which the word is found, with large arrows at the top to navigate through search results.  The individual search term is not highlighted in the subsection so you just need to scroll up and down until you find your search term in the text.

Tap the Settings button and you can change the font size.  You can also turn on Dynamic Type, which is helpful if you previously established a default preference for the text size in apps, a process that I discussed in this post from last October.  You can also turn sounds on and off in the app.

 

The above screenshots show the app running on an iPhone 5s, but this is a universal app so it will also work on your iPad.

I think it is a great idea for attorneys to have an iPhone/iPad app that contains the text of the law that is important to your practice.  As a litigator, I frequently use apps that contain the text of applicable rules of civil procedure, both when I am in court and when I am working at my desk.  This Immigration app is a perfect example of the type of app that I consider so useful.  My only reservation about this app was the use of fixed-size windows for displaing text, and as noted above, this will be addressed in an upcoming update.  I particularly like how easy it is to jump back and forth from the INA to the CFR.  If you are an immigration attorney, I suspect that you would find this app to be quite useful in your law practice.  Kudos to Josh Adams for seeing a need, learning how to address it, and then coming up with a solution — a workflow utilized by good lawyers every day.

Click here to get Immigration ($24.99):  

Thank you to Clio for sponsoring iPhone J.D. in 2014.  Clio offers web-based practice management, time & billing and client collaboration services (including document management) for small and mid-sized law firms.  When you use Clio, your important client data is securely accessible anywhere that you have Internet access.  You can access Clio in a browser, or you can use the Clio app to access Clio from your iPhone. 

I discussed the Clio app when it was introduced last year.  Not only is it useful, but it also has a beautiful design that matches the aesthetic of iOS 7. 

 

If you swipe the screen from right to left you access the Awesome Dashboard, which shows your upcoming events and tasks.  It also has a timer at the top to make it easy to track your billable hours even if you are away from the office.  A recent update to the app added a Document options menu.  When viewing an image, long press to bring up the menu; for other document types, tap the bottom of the screen.

Clio also helps lawyers by offering regular webinars.  For example, Joshua Lenon of Clio recently teamed up with the amazing Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, to provide some advanced legal research tips.  You can read about it, see the slides and even watch the entire webinar here.

Thanks again to Clio for supporting iPhone J.D., and for everything else that the company does to providing cutting edge assistance for lawyers.

This weekend I was listening to California attorney David Sparks and Florida attorney Katie Floyd on their great podcast Mac Power Users.  They were discussing the 1Password app, which is one of those rare apps that has completely changed how I use my iPhone, iPad and computer and which I recommend to everyone.  (My review is here.)  1Password makes it easy to have different, complex passwords without you needing to worry about remembering them, plus it also provides a secure vault on your iPhone (synced with your iPad and your computers) in which you can store any confidential information that you want — personal medical information, sensitive information related to your representation of a client, the password for the Wi-Fi at your Mom’s house, etc.

Katie Floyd mentioned one tip on the podcast that I thought was brilliant, and now I see that she blogged about it last year:  creating a digital wallet.  The idea is to scan the front and back of all of the important cards that you keep in your wallet such as your driver’s license, credit cards, medical cards, car insurance, etc.  You can use a scanner if you have one attached to your computer, or just take pictures of your cards with your iPhone and sync those to your computer.  You are likely to have entries in 1Password for all of those items anyway (create one if you don’t) and then attach the images as file attachments for each entry.  Note that you need to use 1Password on your Mac or PC to add attachments; the current version of the iPhone and iPad apps can view attachments but cannot add them.

Because these images are stored in 1Password, they are incredibly secure, so you don’t need to worry about someone picking up your iPhone and looking at all of your card images.  Indeed, those images in 1Password are going to be much, much more secure than the cards in your wallet which could be swiped by a pickpocket.

 

Next, create a folder in 1Password called Wallet.  Finally, go to each of your entries to which you have attached an image from your wallet and tap the button at the top to add a shortcut to the entry in your Wallet folder.

Once you have created this digital wallet, if you ever lose your real wallet, you have easy access to a copy of every important card that was in your real wallet in the digital wallet folder within 1Password on your iPhone and iPad and computer.  Plus, just looking at the list of items in the Wallet folder will remind you of what was in your wallet.  Depending upon the card, the image may or may not be sufficient to use in lieu of the card, but at least you will have all of the information on the card, and having the images will help you to replace your lost cards quickly.  For example, the back of credit cards will tell you the number to call to replace a lost card.

After I heard this tip, I immediately went to my computer and scanner and did the same thing.  The whole process took me only about 20 minutes, and most of that time was because I was trying to be fancy and put the front and back of the cards in a single file.  That wasn’t really necessary because 1Password lets you attach multiple files to a single entry.

Thanks to Katie and David for the useful tip.  If you use 1Password, I encourage you to create your own digital wallet.  And if you don’t use 1Password or another password management app, now you have yet another reason to do so.

Click here to get 1Password ($17.99):