Every Summer, my family drives from New Orleans to the beaches of Alabama or Florida, and we often drive through the tiny town of Robertsdale, AL. I never knew that was where Apple CEO Tim Cook grew up until I read this interesting article by Michael Finch of Al.com. The article includes some fun pictures of what Cook looked like in high school. There are equally silly pictures of me when I was that age, so I guess that means there is still a chance that I will one day be CEO of the largest company in the world. While we wait for that to happen, here are the news items of note from the past week:
Pennsylvania attorney Gina Rubel offers a few iPhone tips “for lawyers” — although frankly they are good tips for anyone — on the Avvo Lawyernomics blogs.
Missouri attorney J. Clifton Smith offers tips on preserving text messages for use in Court. The very few times that I have had to do this, I just took a screenshot by pressing the home button and the lock button at the same time. The Tacoma, WA attorney who pointed me to this article, Dan Montopoli, tells me that he has good experiences using the iExplorer program mentioned in that article.
John Edwards of Law Technology News recommends apps that you can use to protect confidential information.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune that, according to a study by the NPD Group, one-third of Apple’s U.S. sales in 2013 went to people making more than $100,000 a year. And among those who make $100,000 or more a year, Apple had a 65% share.
Kevin Tofel of GigaOm reports on the first hearing aid made to work with the iPhone and that doubles as an iOS headset.
All of your phones in the U.S., including your iPhone, have an area code. Megan Garber of The Atlantic wrote an interesting article on the history of the area code.
I updated my review of the Nimblstand, an iPad stand that also holds the Apple Wireless Keyboard, to note that you can use the free iPad Air Sustainability Kit to use the product with an iPad Air.
If you use multiple messaging apps — such as the built in Messages, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. — Rene Ritchie of iMore suggests putting them all into one folder so that you can see all at once whether you have any new messages, because a red number shows up on the folder icon. Good tip.
And finally, Chris Wong was skiing when his iPhone fell out of his pocket and into the snow, where it was lost. The battery died so he couldn’t find it with Find my iPhone, but he was able to find it the next week using a cheap metal detector he bought on Amazon. Here is a video of his discovery, and it is fun to watch. Jump to 2:30 if you just want to get to the part where he finds the iPhone, and then he subsequently dries it out and brings it back to life. (via The Loop)
Because you need to charge an iPhone and iPad almost every day, the power adapter and cable that came with your device is probably the most-used iPhone/iPad accessory that you own. Nice, Inc. created CableKeeps to improve upon that accessory. At home, CableKeeps can keep the extra cord out of your way. When traveling, CableKeeps can keep everything together. And best of all, CableKeeps has personality, which makes it fun to use and helps to identify your power adapter from the many others that might be, for example, plugged into a power strip in a conference room or into an outlet at an airport. They cost $16 each, and Nice sent me free samples to review for iPhone J.D. — two for the iPad charger and one for the iPhone charger.
Each CableKeeps is made of stiff rubber and resembles some sort of aquatic animal. The “face” of the CableKeeps holds your power adapter, with the prong coming out of the nose. The back of each CableKeeps has fins, around which you can wrap your cord while it is plugged in to the adapter. Wrap the cord all the way if you are traveling, or wrap the cord part of the way if you are just trying to shorten the cord and use a CableKeeps for cord management.
Each CableKeeps comes in six different colors: light blue, dark blue, red, green, purple and orange.
iPhone: Goldie
The CableKeeps designed for the iPhone charger is called Goldie, and it resembles a goldfish. The sample sent to me is light blue, but I suspect that the orange one looks even more like a goldfish. To use it, just slide the iPhone power adapter into the front of the CableKeeps.
Plug your USB cord into the back of the power adapter, and then wrap it around the fins as needed.
The Goldie CableKeeps for the iPhone advertises one unique advantage: you can also use it as a stand for the iPhone. If you are in a hotel room and using a power outlet on the wall, this means that you can keep your iPhone propped up on the CableKeeps instead of sitting on your floor, where you might step on the iPhone by accident — which has almost happened to me on more than one occasion. The CableKeeps website shows an iPhone 4S in portrait mode orientation on top of a CableKeeps. With the taller iPhone 5/5s, that seems slightly unstable to me, but putting the iPhone on its side works well.
iPad: Nibbles
There are two CableKeeps that work with the U.S. version of the iPad power adapter. First, there is Nibbles, which reminds me of a piranha.
Just like the iPhone version, you can wrap your cord around the fins.
iPad: Gulp
The other CableKeeps that works with the U.S. version of the iPad power adapter is Gulp. It looks like a whale, especially if you get the light or dark blue ones.
The Gulp model offers one advantage over Nibbles: the Gulp is advertised to work with the international adapters found in Apple’s World Travel Adapter kit. I don’t own any of those international plugs so I wasn’t able to test the claim, but based on the design of the Glup I have no doubt that it works.
Speaking of non-U.S. chargers, Nice also makes Spike for the European iPhone charger and Ink for the U.K. charger.
As noted above, all of the CableKeeps come in six different colors. If you have multiple iPhone and iPad chargers in your house, you could use different colors to prevent disputes over which charger belongs to which person.
CableKeeps has been around for a while — they were originally funded in a Kickstarter campaign back in 2011 — but they are new to me, and I really like them. They add very little extra bulk to an iPhone or iPad power adapter, and they give you a way to wrap your cable during travel so that it doesn’t cause chaos in your briefcase, plus they keep your power adapter and your cable together. And I also like the way that CableKeeps takes a boring power adapter and gives it a little personality — which is useful when you need to know which of many power adapters is yours, and just plain fun the rest of the time.
Some of the models and colors are available on Amazon, but to get the full selection, order directly from Nice.
As you may already know, Clio, a current sponsor of iPhone J.D., offers web-based practice management, time & billing and client collaboration services (including document management) for small and mid-sized law firms. As a company that helps lawyers make the most of out of their technology, Clio is obviously interested in the technology that lawyers use, so for the last four years, Clio has conducted an annual survey on the use of Apple products being used by lawyers. The 2013 Apple in Law Offices report is being released today, and I was interested to see what the survey reveals about iPhone and iPad use
Clio survey respondents are primarily attorneys at small law firms. 85% of the 835 individuals surveyed in 2013 work in law firms with 1 to 10 attorneys, primarily in the U.S. And two-thirds of the survey respondents use Macintosh (the rest use Windows), which is in part because many of the survey respondents are folks who attend the annual MILOfest (Macs in Law Office) conference.
The new report reveals that about 75% of the attorneys reported that they use an iPhone, and another 5% said that they plan to switch to an iPhone in 2014. Almost 18% use Android, and a very small percentage use Windows or Blackberry phones. This reflects an increase from the 2012 survey, when 62% were using an iPhone and more people were using Android (25%) and BlackBerry (7%).
The new report also reveals that about 71% of the attorneys reported that they use an iPad. This a slight increase from the 2012 survey, when about 70% reported that they used an iPad. The 2012 numbers were a huge increase from the previous years: in 2011 only 15% reported using an iPad, and in 2010 (the year that the iPad debuted) only 10% reported using an iPad.
Putting the numbers together, the Clio survey shows a greater percentage of attorneys using iPhones and iPads every year.
Even though the Clio survey speaks mostly to what attorneys in solo and small law firms are using, especially those who use Macs, the Clio data is consistent with data that I see from other sources, such as the annual ABA Tech Survey and the annual ILTA Survey, in that it shows more and more lawyers using iPhones and iPads every year. The main difference between the Clio survey and those others is that there is more iPad use in the population of attorneys responding to the Clo survey.
I’m tempted to suggest that the difference is a result of the large number of Mac-using attorneys in the Clio survey population, but frankly I see such a large number of attorneys who use a PC in their law office (often because they are not given a choice) but who also use an iPad and/or an iPhone (that they typically choose t0 purchase on their own) that I think that the iPad and iPhone are just as attractive to attorneys who use PCs and they are to attorneys who use Macs.
Apple releases minor security updates for the iPhone and iPad from time to time. When folks ask me if they should upgrade, I virtually always say yes. Why not have an iPhone that is more secure, and less likely to be hacked by bad guys? So this past Friday afternoon when Apple released iOS 7.0.6 and said that it was a security update, I updated my devices but otherwise did not think much of it. (And no, you did not miss an update if, like me, you went from iOS 7.0.4 to 7.0.6; 7.0.5 was only released for iPhones sold in China.)
But over the weekend, there were two posts about this update by John Gruber of Daring Fireball (Post 1, Post 2) that I thought were pretty interesting. According to PRISM documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA gained the ability to intercept encrypted iPhone traffic in October of 2012, and that’s apparently right after the bug fixed by iOS 7.0.6 was introduced. As Gruber notes, this could mean all sorts of things. It could mean that someone at Apple intentionally added a backdoor for the NSA. Or it could mean that someone at Apple made a simple coding mistake but the NSA found out about it and exploited it.
Or it could just be a big coincidence, but there is at least a chance that Apple has now found and fixed a security bug that had been exploited by the NSA.
Normally I think of security patches as being important ways to protect your iPhone and iPad from “bad guys,” the sort of criminals that we expect the government to prosecute. But iOS 7.0.6 may also give you a way to protect your device from the government itself.
When I think of secure information on my iPhone and iPad, much of the most confidential data is located in the 1Password app. Fortunately, the security flaw fixed in iOS 7.0.6 did not have anything to do with the security of 1Password data. Jeff Goldberg, the security guru at AgileBits (the company that makes 1Password) whose title is “Defender Against the Dark Arts,” wrote a great post that explains in plain English the details of the security flaw and why confidential 1Password data was not compromised. Unfortunately, the security flaw did affect the Mail app in iOS, which raises many red flags. Indeed, this is the very thing that many of us have been worried about with all of the recent NSA allegations — has the NSA been reading (or at least saving) our confidential emails?
If you haven’t updated to iOS 7.0.6 yet, you should do so. If you are still running iOS 6, Apple also released iOS 6.1.6 to fix the same bug.
Last week I linked to an article in which the author speculated that it might be a while before we see Microsoft Word for the iPad. For an alternative view, Mary Jo Foley — who has lots of inside sources at Microsoft — wrote on ZDNet that she hears rumors that Office for iPad will be out in the first half of 2014. Whenever it does come out, how good will the app be? John Gruber of Daring Fireball says that his sources tell him that the app will be impressive, and the main hold up on the app being released is internal Microsoft politics. But California attorney David Sparks predicts that the app won’t be that impressive. And this is why I probably should not talk about rumors at all … except that I will say that I hope that we see a version of Microsoft Word for the iPad soon, and I hope that it is a full-featured, useful app. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
I gave a presentation on using the iPad to a group of attorneys in New Orleans earlier this week, and afterwards I talked to someone who was looking to get her first iPad, and she couldn’t decide whether to get the full-size iPad Air or the iPad mini with Retina screen. My advice for most attorneys is to get the iPad Air. When you are reading documents on an iPad, it is nicer to have a larger screen, and the iPad Air is light enough that you no longer need to use an iPad mini to have an iPad that you can hold without your arm getting tired right away. Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac apparently agrees with me, because as he explains in this article, he actually stopped using an iPad mini to switch to an iPad Air.
When the iPhone first came out, it lacked the ability to select text to copy and paste it. Hard to imagine nowadays. Luke Dormehl of Cult of Mac talked to Bas Ording, one of the guys at Apple who invented the feature on the iPhone, to get some of the back story.
Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reports that the U.S. Postal Service is planning a Steve Jobs stamp.
And finally, Jerry Seinfeld appeared on the new Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this week to do a stand-up comedy routine, and his topics were smartphones and email. Funny stuff from one of the masters of comedy. (Direct link)
A stylus is one of the most useful accessories for an iPad. You can take notes (using an app like GoodNotes) or draw pictures (with an app like Paper). For a change of pace, it is sometimes nice to use a stylus to tap buttons during regular use of an iPad instead of using your finger. And if you are annotating a PDF file — such as highlighting and adding margin notes to a case you downloaded from Westlaw — I find that I am more productive with a stylus. One of the very first styluses for the iPad was the Pogo Stylus by Ten One Design, and I reviewed it in 2010 just a few weeks after I started using an iPad. I was never a big fan of that stylus because it was too small and light and it had an unusual tip which I never found as effective as a soft rubber dome.
All of that changed in late 2013 when Ten One introduced a completely redesigned version of the Pogo Stylus. Ten One sent me a free review sample of this $20 stylus and I’ve been trying it out for the last few weeks, comparing it to my current favorite stylus with a traditional rubber tip, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo. This new version of the Pogo Stylus is much, much better than the original Pogo, and while I still prefer the Bamboo Stylus duo for the reasons noted below, the new Pogo is an excellent stylus that I can recommend.
The new Pogo Stylus includes a lot of the features that I love on the Bamboo Stylus. First, it has the circumference of a normal pen and feels nice in your hand. Second, it includes a clip to make it easy to carry in a shirt pocket. And like the Bamboo Stylus, if you ever want to remove the clip, you can just unscrew the top and take it off. (I don’t understand why people do that — a stylus without a clip is not only harder to transport but it also tends to roll of a desk — but to each his own.)
Also like the Bamboo Stylus, the new Pogo has a small rubber tip, about as small as a tip can get and still have the iPad recognize it. I find it much easier to write with these smaller tips than with the larger tips that you find on cheap styluses. In the following picture, the new Pogo is at the top, and the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo is at the bottom:
Rubber tips can wear down after use, so it is nice to have an option to buy replacement tips. Wacom offers this for the Bamboo, and even offers a firm tip for those who prefer that feel (I don’t). The new Pogo has an ingenious tip that is connected to the stylus by a magnet. It is more than strong enough that the tip never comes off in normal use, but if you tug at it you can remove the tip. Replacement tips come in a set of two for $8. I should note that in my many years of using styluses I have never once worn down a tip to the point that I had to replace it, but I know from reports I’ve read on the Internet that others have found the need to replace a stylus tip. It’s nice to know that if you do wear down the tip, you don’t have to buy a whole new stylus.
The features of the new Pogo Stylus that differentiate it from the Bamboo Stylus are, frankly, the features that make me prefer the Bamboo. First, the Pogo is about a quarter of an inch shorter than the Bamboo. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but the length of the Bamboo is closer to that of a traditional pen and I find that it feels better in my hand. Having said that, the new Pogo is still long enough to work just fine, and you might actually prefer something that is slightly shorter and takes up less space.
Second, the new Pogo weighs less than the Bamboo. The Bamboo is about 0.9 ounces; the new Pogo is about 0.65 ounces. I prefer the weight of the Bamboo — it is certainly not too heavy, and feels like it has substance to it. The new Pogo weighs more than some cheap styluses that I have tried and quickly discarded, and the stylus certainly feels strong enough. It’s not like you are going to bend the Pogo or anything like that. My personal preference is just for something with a little more heft to it. If you feel the same way, you’ll prefer the Bamboo. If you prefer something lighter, you’ll prefer the Pogo.
Third, the new Pogo doesn’t include a real pen on the other end. That’s the “duo” part of the Bamboo Stylus duo. I like being able to carry a single stylus in my pocket and, for those rare occasions when I need a real pen (such as a sign-in sheet in court) I have that too.
In many ways, the new Pogo is more of a direct competitor to the Wacom Bamboo Stylus solo, the version of the Bamboo that doesn’t have a pen and is shorter and lighter, and now costs $17 on Amazon. You need to pay $29.95 on Amazon for the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo, so the Pogo is two-thirds the price at $19.95.
I understand that $20 versus $30 may seem like the difference between an impulse buy and a larger investment. Based on the price alone, the new Pogo may be the better purchase for you. Moreover, if your preferences are different than mine and you prefer a stylus that weighs a little less and is slightly more petite, although certainly not too short, then the new Pogo might be even better than the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo. For me, if both styluses are within reach, I always prefer the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo. But during my tests, when the Pogo was the one that I had with me, I certainly enjoyed using the Pogo. It’s a nice stylus. I think that most everyone would agree that the new version of the Pogo Stylus is a vast improvement over the original.
You can currently buy the new version of the Pogo Stylus directly from Ten One, so that is the link that I have below. I suspect that it won’t be long before the new Pogo shows up on Amazon.
Just a quick reminder that if you are in the New Orleans area tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 18), I’ll be presenting a one hour CLE with tips for getting the most out of an iPad in your law practice. The presentation is this month’s installment of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s TECH TUESDAY series. Lunch is from 11:30 to Noon, then the presentation is Noon to 1pm. The location is the Louisiana Bar Center, 601 St. Charles Ave. (across from Lafayette Square). You can get more information and register online at this page on the LSBA website.
Alan Cohen, a reporter for Law Technology News, published a very interesting article this week on iPad use at law firms including some lawyers prefering an iPad to a laptop. Apparently some law firms let a lawyer choose either a laptop computer or a desktop computer plus an iPad. That would be an easy choice for me. Although I have a laptop computer in my office, it might as well be a desktop — heck, it might as well be an old-style mainframe computer that fills a room and has spinning tape — because I never move it from my desk, and I just travel with my iPad. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
Dallas attorney Tom Mighell reminds you to recycle your old iPhones.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball, citing a report by Patrick Seitz for Investors.com, notes that last quarter Apple received 87.4% of the industry profit on cellphones while Samsung received 32.2%. And yes, that does add up to over 100% because every other company in the industry lost money last quarter.
I know that a number of companies, including law firms, use software by Good Technology on their mobile devices. According to Daniel Eran Dilger of AppleInsider, 91% of Good customers use an iPad as a tablet, and 54% of Good customers use an iPhone as their smartphone.
Last week, I mentioned a Wall Street Journal article based on an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook. The Journal has now posted the entire interview, and it is an interesting read.
Brian Chen of the New York Times reports that Apple has announced that the tantalum (a metal) it uses in its products does not come from areas engaged in warfare.
Back in 2012, I reviewed an app called Reader HD by a company called Naverage, created by German attorney Maren Reuter and her husband who is a software designer. I was very impressed with the way that the document displayed Microsoft Word .docx documents — better than any other iPad app — but at the time (and this is still true today) so much of my practice involved working with Microsoft Word files in the older .doc format that I didn’t use the app very much. Reuter has now updated her app to add a number of improvements that attorneys are going to love. First, the app now works with both .doc and .docx files, so you can use it with all of your modern Microsoft Word documents. Second, the app improved the way that it displays tracked changes, and as you will see below, I think that this is now the very best app you use to view the “redline” tracked changes in a Microsoft Word document. Third, the interface of the app was updated for iOS 7, and the name was changed as well; instead of Reader HD, the app is now called Reader 7.
Viewing Word Documents
Unlike other apps that work with Word files such as Apple’s Pages and Dataviz’s Documents to Go, Reader 7 is not a word processor. You cannot use this app to edit a Word document. The app only displays Word documents so that you can read them on your iPad. Of course, the iPad already has a built-in viewer for Word documents; simply tap a Word document attached to an email and you can read it without using another app. But when you do so, the formatting is often wrong, footnotes are not displayed, tracked changes are not displayed, comments are not displayed — suffice it to say that it is just a peek into the text of the Word document, not a good way to display the Word document as it was intended to be seen.
Many other apps give you more features than the built-in viewer when you view Word documents. For example, the latest versions of Pages and Documents to Go can both display tracked changes, footnotes and comments. But they still do not display documents perfectly, the same way that the document would look on a computer, and thus margins will sometimes look incorrect and you will sometimes see other quirks in the document. For example, in my 2012 review, I included some images to show you how a table of contents displays when viewing a Word file on a computer, using the iPad’s built-in viewer, in Quickoffice, in Office2, in Documents to Go and in Reader HD. At the time, Reader HD did the very best job showing you the document the way that it is supposed to look, and that still remains true today. Footnotes, indents, headers, footers — everything looks the way that it is supposed to look.
For example, I created a simple memorandum that has a header at the top with a privilege statement and my firm logo. The iPad’s built-in document viewer showed me the logo, but put it in the middle instead of the right where it is supposed to be, and messed up the formatting in the “TO” “FROM” “DATE” and “RE” lines. I could still read everything, but it just doesn’t look the way it is supposed to look:
In Apple’s Pages app, the firm logo isn’t shown at all. The formatting at the top is better than the built-in viewer, but the title “MEMORANDUM” is too high.
Documents to Go just removes the header completely. Not a big deal, but I’m not seeing the document the way that it was supposed to be seen:
Office2 does a great job with the document header, but still makes some mistakes in the formatting of the “FROM” and “DATE” lines at the top, and doesn’t display the line that is between the “RE” and the body of the document.
Reader 7 does an excellent job of displaying the memo the way that it was supposed to be seen:
The menu bar at the top of the screen is not very obtrusive, but if you tap the icon with the arrows you can hide it completely so that the document fills your iPad screen:
This is just one example of how a document displays better in Reader 7 than other apps, but I tested many other documents, and every single time, documents displayed best in Reader 7. Sometimes another app would be just as good, and even when I saw problems in other apps those problems were often just formatting quirks that didn’t stop me from reading all of the text in the document. Nevertheless, in all of my tests, Word documents in Reader 7 looked closer to the way that they are supposed to look.
Navigating Pages
When you are reading a document in Reader 7, you swipe up and down to view the rest of a page. To go to the next page, you swipe from right to left, and you swipe from left to right to go back a page. The app includes a nice animation when you move pages; the page rotates somewhat to the bottom right.
One thing that I do not like about this app is that when you change pages, you continue to view the same part of the page. Thus, if you are at the bottom of page 4 and you swipe to go to page 5, you are first presented with the bottom of page 5, and you need to swipe to get to the top of the page. I wish that there was at least an option to automatically go to the top of a page when you move forward in a document, and automatically go to the bottom of a page when you go backwards in a document.
Track Changes
Back when this app was called Reader HD it did a nice job showing tracked changes, but there is a new approach to redline edits in Reader 7 that is excellent. The main part of the screen shows the document as it would look with changes accepted, with new text underlined and with a small triangle indicating where text was deleted. A panel to the right gives you more details on the changes, with the new text underlined and the deleted text struck through. Comments are displayed at the bottom of the right panel.
If you tap in the main text near an edit, the panel on the right jumps to that spot. For example, you can tap next to a triangle to see the text that was deleted. If you tap on a word in the panel on the right (either an edit or a comment), the document darkens with a highlight on the line that contains that word. This makes it easy to look at changes or comments in the right panel and then quickly see where that change or comment occurs in the document.
Reader 7 assigns a color to each author’s edits. You can tap the word Settings to change the color assigned to an author. For example, Reader 7 assigned the color yellow to edits in one of my documents, and I found yellow hard to see, so I changed that author to red and another author to blue to make the changes more obvious.
Accessing Files
You can send a file to Reader 7 using the “Open in…” option in any other app. For example, just hold down on an email attachment to get the option to open the document in Reader 7. And Reader 7 can also send a document to any other app.
If you tap the word Files in the menu bar you see a list of all files you have opened in Reader 7. Tap another file name to view that file. Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to delete files from the file list. [UPDATE: Reuter tells me that an option to delete files will be added in an update.]
Speaking of files, in addition to Word .doc and .docx files, Reader 7 can also view PDF files. However, there are tons of apps that do a great job viewing PDF files and I didn’t see any unique advantage to viewing a PDF file in Reader 7. On the other hand, I did like that Reader 7 can turn a Word file into a PDF file, something that not many other iPad apps can do. In my tests the PDF files that it created were often quite large — as much as ten times the file size that I would get if I created a PDF file from from the same Word file using one of the many programs that can do this on my PC or Mac. Nevertheless, it is nice to offer this feature in an iPad app.
The app currently lacks built-in Dropbox support, but it is easy enough to use the Dropbox app to open a file in Reader 7. Having said that, Reuter says that built-in Dropbox support is already in the works and should be in an updated version of the app just a few weeks from now.
Etc.
If you use an IMAP mail server, Reader 7 can access your emails and display a list of emails that contain Word documents. I wasn’t able to test that feature because my law firm uses Exchange.
Reader 7 gives you the ability to assign hashtags to documents so that you can later use those hashtags to find documents. For example, you might assign #smith to all documents in the Smith case, and then you can later filter the file list to only show documents with that tag assigned. I didn’t test this feature much because it isn’t a feature that I see myself using.
I had a few problems with the app crashing. It did not happen very much, but once it did result in a file that could no longer be opened — I got an error saying that the file wasn’t closed properly. Because this is just a document viewer, this kind of crash is no big deal — just go back to wherever you got the file from and open it in Reader 7 again. I mention this only because app crashes are a pretty rare occurrence on my iPad, and apps like Pages have been rock solid for me. Hopefully the bugs will be ironed out soon.
Bottom Line
If you need to edit a Word document, you need to look elsewhere [UPDATE: at least you need to look elsewhere for now; document editing is planned for a future, paid update to the app]. I myself currently use Pages or Documents to Go, and sometimes Microsoft Office Mobile (an iPhone app but it runs on an iPad) to edit Word files on my iPad. But if you just want to view a Word file, Reader 7 does a better job displaying Word files than any other iPad app. Virtually every time, the document on my iPad looked the same as the document in Word on my PC and the same as the printed version of the document. This alone is a great reason to use Reader 7.
In addition, Reader 7 does a great job displaying redline edits in a document created using the track changes function. Some people might prefer the way that redlines are displayed in Documents to Go in which all edits are displayed in the text itself, with additions underlined and strikeouts for deletions. But I like the way that Reader 7 focuses on how the document will look with the edits made, while also giving you the ability to quickly see in the right panel exactly what was added and deleted.
Put is all together, and Reader 7 is the very best app for displaying Word documents on an iPad, including documents with tracked changes. Considering how important it is for attorneys to read Word documents on an iPad, especially Word documents with edits in redline, Reader 7 is an app that almost every attorney will want to have on their iPad. I suppose this should come as no surprise considering that the app was created by an attorney and her husband.
The app used to cost $2.99, but it is now free. I actually wish that Reuter would charge for this app to reward her for her efforts and give her an added incentive to continue to improve the app. [UPDATE: Reuter tells me that her plan is for this to be a free reader app, and then in the future she will add the ability to edit documents as an in-app purchase.] Considering that the best Word viewer app is free, I can’t think of any reason for you to wait to get this app.
The Notification Center in iOS 7 gives you the ability to allow apps to give you a banner style notification alert. I don't let many of my apps interrupt me, but usually I do like seeing banner notifications at the top of my iPhone screen when I receive a new email. It is nice to be able to quickly glance at the banner to decide whether the email needs my immediate attention, and if not, I can go right back to whatever I was doing on the iPhone. After about five seconds, the banner notification goes away. If you don't already have this feature enabled, open the Settings app and go to Notification Center to turn it on. For example, here is the screen to turn it on for a Mail account:
Most of the time, a banner notification is a great and unobtrusive way for you to receive a notification.
Most of the time, but not always. There are many times when I need to tap the top of my iPhone screen in an app — such as to tap a button at the top, or to tap at the very top of the screen to scroll up to the top of a long list — and right at that very moment that I was about to tap the top of the screen, an email banner notification shows up, covering up the very spot that I was about to tap. The five seconds that the banner stays on the screen, right on top of where I want to tap, seems to last an eternity.
Fortunately, there is a quick way to dismiss a notification banner. Place your finger on the banner and then swipe up. This gesture flicks that banner alert right off of your iPhone screen, so it is no longer covering up the top of your iPhone. Make sure that you don't tap the banner and lift your finger up — that will select the banner notification and bring you right to that email message (or bring you right to whatever other app sent you the notification). But if you just flick it off, it quickly gets out of your way. Before iOS 7, you had to pull down and then flick back up to do this; in iOS 7 you can now just flick up.
Learning that quick little action, a simple flick of a finger at the top of the screen, has saved me a lot of aggravation. If this tip is new to you, I hope that you find it as useful as I do.
