In the news

Have you been waiting to update your iPhone (or iPad) to iOS 8 because you don’t have 5 GB free, which is required for an over-the-air update?  Remember that you can always plug your device into a computer running iTunes and update that way, even if you don’t have 5 GB free.  Apple provides info for doing so on this page.  And if you feel like your device doesn’t have as much free space as it should, there was an interesting article by John Moltz that I linked to in August in which he describes how he was able to get a lot more space on an iPhone by restoring it.  I encourage you to update to iOS 8; there are tons of cool new features, and many apps are starting to require iOS 8.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• For attorneys trying to decide between the big iPhone 6 and the bigger iPhone 6 Plus, I think that the iPhone 6 is the best size for most folks, especially folks who are upgrading from a prior iPhone.  California attorney David Sparks opted for the iPhone 6 Plus anyway just to experience the large size, but as he writes on his MacSparky blog, after about a week he returned to the Apple Store to exchange it for an iPhone 6.
• Oklahoma City attorney Jeff Taylor of The Droid Lawyer talks about built-in encryption on both iPhones and Android phones.
• South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer recommends some cool apps that have nothing to do with the practice of law.
• The 1Password app for iPhone became vastly easier to use under iOS 8 becasue you could use your fingerprint to open the app instead of typing your (hopefully long!) master password every time you start the app.  This week, the app was updated to version 5.1 to reduce even more the number of times you need to type your master password — now just after a device restart or when Touch ID authentication fails.  This post on the 1Password blog provides more details.  Hopefully we will soon have an iPad with TouchID so that 1Password will be just as convenient on that device.  One other security improvement in version 5.1 is that third party keyboards can no longer be used within 1Password unless you specifically enable them in the Advanced Settings.  I’m not (yet) aware of any third party keyboard being guilty of key logging, but better safe than sorry.
• Yoni Heisler of TUAW wrote an excllent article on the Apple Pay system that will start working later this month.
• If you type a word and then quickly want to capitalize the first letter or capitalize all of the letters, John-Michael Bond of TUAW offers a quick tip for doing so using the new iOS 8 predictive text feature.  Note that for the all caps feature to work, you need to have Enable Caps Lock turned on in Settings -> General -> Keyboard.  (I only rarely type words in all caps, so I typically keep that turned off.)
• Transporter, a prior sponsor of iPhone J.D., provided a great free upgrade this week.  The device now automatically saves prior versions of your documents so if something gets messed up, you can turn back the clock.  And it saves virtually unlimited prior versions, limited only by the size of your Transporter hard drive.  Click here for more information.  I haven’t had to use it yet, but going forward I feel even safer working with documents on my Transporter knowing that the feature now exists.
• Jony Ive of Apple was interviewed yesterday at a Vanity Fair event.  Steve Kovach of Business Insider was there, and wrote this article.  One of the things that Ive talked about was designing the iPhone.  For example, Ive said:  “Years ago we made prototypes with bigger screens. They were interesting features having a bigger screen, but the end result was a lousy product because they were clunky like a lot of competitors’ phones are still. Years ago we realized this is going to be important that we have larger screens but we need to do a lot of things to make it a compelling product.”
• Do you want to get a new Lightning cable for your iPhone or iPad, either a 1 m length like the one that came with it or a shorter or longer version?  Nick Guy of The Wirecutter looked at all the options and recommends the best ones to get.
• And finally, I had a fun app on my iPhone 5 and 5s called Cycloramic.  You set your iPhone on its edge on a flat table, and it uses the iPhone’s vibration motor to spin your iPhone automatically and create a panorama.  It’s a one-trick pony, but it’s a fun trick so I used it occasionally with friends and it always got a laugh, in addition to creating an interesting picture or video.  Soon after I got my iPhone 6, it occurred to me that with the curved edges, there was no way that the app would work.  And yet the very clever folks behind the app figured out a way to use it with the iPhone 6, just using one of the items that comes in the box with a new iPhone.  (It reminds me of the famous scene from the movie Apollo 13:  “We got to find a way to make this, fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that.“)  I couldn’t help but reward the developer’s ingenuity, so I bought new $1.99 iPhone 6-version of the app.  And I can confirm that it does work.  Here is a video that shows how: