Folks who pre-ordered an iPad Air 2 last week started to receive them this week. I received mine yesterday. I’ll post my review after I have put it through its paces, but — spoiler alert — I can already tell you that this is an amazing device. If you want to read other reviews, I recommend this one by John Gruber, plus there are good roundups of the early reviews (by those who received review units from Apple) on MacRumors and 9to5Mac. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Attorneys using iPads and iPhones need to think about when it is ethical to store confidential information using a cloud-based service. New York attorney Nicole Black wrote about the latest New York ethics opinion on this topic in this article for The Daily Record.
- Last week, I provided tips for making sure that your iPad doesn’t ring in court, or any other time you want it to be quiet. Utah attorney Peter Summerill has another recommendation — turn on do not disturb.
- GoodReader, one of the most useful iPad apps for any attorney, was updated to version 4.6 this week to support both iCloud Drive and Touch ID.
- Bill Roach of ExhibitView Solutions tells me that his ExhibitView iPad app, which you can use to present and annotate documents in court, was updated to version 5 this week. This page of the ExhibitView website has a video that shows off the new features.
- Benjaim Mayo of 9to5Mac writes that the Dropbox app was updated this week to support the resolutions on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus and to add support for Touch ID.
- Fantastical is my favorite calendar app for the iPhone and iPad, and I use it about 10x more than I use the built-in Calendar app. The app received a big update this week to version 2.2, adding interactive notifications and a great today widget that works in the pull down Notification Center. Federico Viticci of MacStories wrote a good review of the new features in the app, which has a come a long way since I reviewed it in 2012. Indeed, the new Fantastical widget quickly became my favorite iOS 8 widget. I love that I can always just swipe down from the top to see my calendar.
- Judith Newman wrote a touching story in the New York Times about how her autistic son uses Siri. A great read.
- In iOS 8, there is an option in Settings -> iCloud to turn on iCloud Photo Library (Beta). The idea of the service is that all of your photos are uploaded and stored in iCloud, and then only the most recent photos live on your iPhone or iPad (to save space) but any photo is available to you if you have a network connection. It’s a neat idea. However, for now at least, if you turn it on, you will no longer be able to sync with photos on your computer. If you only take photos with your iPhone, this is no big deal. But if you are like me and you take photos with another camera, sync those photos to your computer, and then use iTunes to get those photos over to your iPhone and iPad, then you won’t want to turn on the iCloud Photo Library yet. Early next year, Apple will have a new Photos app for the Mac that will work with the iCloud Photo Library. (I’m not sure if Apple will ever offer a solution for Windows.) Serenity Caldwell of iMore talks through all of this and even shows a few tricks for getting photos on your computer synced to your iPhone/iPad if you do have iCloud Photo Library turned on. I look forward to using iCloud Photo Library, but I’m going to wait until the Photos app is available for the iMac I use at home before I turn on the service.
- Speaking of photos on the iPad, yesterday the $4.99 Pixelmator for iPad app was released. If you watched the keynote at which Apple showed of the new iPad Air 2, then you saw a preview of this app. It looks to be the most sophisticated photo editor on the iPad. Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac wrote a good review of this app.
- John Brownlee of Cult of Mac writes that with the Simpsons Portal on the new FX Networks app, you can now watch any episode of The Simpsons — as long as your cable company is on board. Unfortunately for me, DirecTV, my service provider, is not on board yet. D’oh!
- On Wednesday, I wrote about using Apple Pay, a service that has continued to work really well for me this week. Harry McCracken of Fast Company shared his experiences on using Apple Pay to make almost all of his purchases this week.
- Speaking of Apple Pay, David Pogue of Yahoo Tech wrote a great article on Apple Pay and, at the top of the article, provides the best video I’ve seen yet on how Appple Pay works. Worth watching if you are curious about this new service.
- Another good Apple Pay article is the one written by Molly Wood of the New York Times. She says that using the service is “convenient, problem-free and even fun,” and I totally agree. She had less success using it to purchase items from within an app, which is something that I haven’t tried yet, and I presume will take some time before it starts to work flawlessly and in lots of different apps.
- The Joy Of Tech comic considers what it would be like if Apple products had online dating profiles.
- And finally, Dorothy by iStrategyLabs is an interesting, and certainly amusing, concept for an iPhone accessory. You put a small device, the Ruby, in one of your shoes. Then you use an iPhone app to configure what happens whenever you click your heels three times — such as sending a text message to a friend, triggering a fake call from your boss (to let you excuse yourself from an awkward situation), call a Uber vehicle to your current location, etc. This video shows how it works: