iPhone J.D. was inaccessible for most of the day this past Monday, as were lots of other great websites that use Typepad as a host. As Typepad’s General Manager explained in a post on Tuesday, the company was once again the victim of a criminal DDoS attack. (You may recall that there was a similar attack last month.) Meanwhile, as Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times reported, this week eBay announced that hackers had breached that website and gained access to the personal information of 145 million customers. And as noted by Kelly Hodgkins, two hackers in the Netherlands and Morocco claimed this week to have found a way to crack the activation lock that is supposed to stop a thief from using a stolen iPhone. The whole mess almost makes you long for the pre-Internet, halcyon days of the 1980s … although as California attorney David Sparks notes, back then it was much harder to solve a Rubik’s cube. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
- California attorney Scott Grossberg discusses Microsoft Word for iPad.
- GOkey is an interesting device on IndieGoGo, mentioned by California attorney David Sparks, that charges an iPhone, connects it to a computer, can help you find your iPhone, and includes Flash memory.
- California attorney and FindLaw writer William Peacock writes that 62% of lawyers using smartphones use an iPhone. However, I don’t think that is a new number based on current data. He bases his article on a MyCase infographic, and it appears that the infographic gets its information from my post from July of 2013, which was based upon the annual survey by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center, which collected its 2013 data earlier in 2013. So I believe that the 62% number is over a year old. My prediction is that the iPhone and Android percentages will be even higher in 2014 and the BlackBerry percentage will be even lower, but that’s just a guess and we’ll have to wait for the 2014 report from the ABA to see what the number looks like this year.
- John Edwards of Law Technology News recommends iPhone travel apps. He should have included the iExit app I reviewed earlier this week on that list.
- Han-Yi Shaw, who was in charge of the design of the new Microsoft Office apps for iPad, explained the design philosophy of the apps in an article on the Office Blog. For an interesting article on Han-Yi Shaw himself, check out this article by Lance Ulanoff at Mashable.
- PDFpen for iPhone and iPad just added Transporter support, letting you import and export to your Transporter directly from the app. In my tests, it works well, and I hope to see more apps add native Transporter support. (Transporter is a current sponsor of iPhone J.D.) My reviews of the PDFpen apps are now two years old, but they are here and here.
- If you fly Southwest Airlines, you’ll be interested in this report by Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac about how you can now use the Southwest app on your iPhone as a mobile boarding pass at 28 airports … including New Orleans, for any of you headed to my neck of the woods.
- If you have an iPhone 5s or an iPhone 5c, (or an iPad Air or a Retina iPad mini with LTE) and you use Verizon, you’ll be interested to know that you can use Verizon’s new XLTE network to get up to 2x the bandwidth. Derek Kessler of iMore has details. I have yet to see reliable reports on how XLTE works in the real world, but hopefully it will be an improvement for many.
- Dan Rubin of the British weekly newspaper The Observer wrote a good article recommending iPhone photography apps. There is an excellent video that accompanies the article and it is worth watching as it shows you what the apps can do.
- Lauren Crabbe of Macworld offers some more basic tips for taking pictures with an iPhone.
- And finally, if you like the sound of your iPhone ringing, then you are going to love the iPhone Remix by MetroGnome. The video is below, and you can download the song for free here. (via Cult of Mac)