Earlier this week, I encountered my first problem with the Apple Watch, but fortunately I discovered a quick fix for it. The problem was that my Apple Watch didn’t see my iPhone. The solution was to reset Bluetooth. Here are the details in case this happens to you.
The Apple Watch works best when it is in constant communication with your iPhone — preferably via Bluetooth, but if your iPhone and Apple Watch are too far away for Bluetooth (e.g., your iPhone is upstairs in your bedroom, but you are downstairs), they can also communicate if they are on the same Wi-Fi network. If your Apple Watch doesn’t have that Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection to your iPhone, there are some things that it can still do all on its own, such as:
Operate as a watch
Use the alarm, timer, stopwatch
Play music, if you have previously synced a playlist (up to 1 GB of music) to your Apple Watch
Track your activity (stand, move, exercise) with the Activity app
Track workouts (e.g., you can go for a run with your Apple Watch and leave your iPhone at home)
Display photos that you previously synced to the Apple Watch
Use Apple Pay to make purchases
But for most of the rest of the features of the Apple Watch — such as work with apps on your iPhone, display your text messages and emails — you need to have that connection to your iPhone.
The problem that I experienced was that I wasn’t getting emails on my Apple Watch, and I looked at the display and saw that there was a red icon at the top center of the watch showing an iPhone with a line through it:
Here’s a close up view of that icon:
This icon was an indication that my Apple Watch lost its connection with my iPhone. And similarly, when I swiped up on my Apple Watch to get to the Glances view and looked at the Settings Glance, I saw an indication at the top that the iPhone was disconnected:
I knew that this should not be happening because my iPhone was in my shirt pocket — just a few feet from the Apple Watch on my wrist. They were more than close enough for a Bluetooth connection. But on my iPhone, when I looked at the Bluetooth settings, I similarly saw that my Apple Watch was not connected, even if I tapped on the entry for the Apple Watch to try to force a connection:
Fortunately, there was an easy fix. I flipped the switch at the top of the screen shown above to turn off Bluetooth, then I waited a few seconds, then I turned Bluetooth back on again. Suddenly, my Apple Watch and my iPhone found each other again.
All of this happened on Monday morning, and in the several days since then, it has not happened again. Hopefully that was just a one-time bizarre problem for me, but if it happens to you too, now you know what to do.
Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2015 fiscal second quarter (which ran from December 28, 2014 to March 28, 2015) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. Apple always sees a big decrease in revenue from its first to its second fiscal quarter because Q2 comes right after the holiday quarter. Nevertheless, Apple reported quarterly revenue of $58 billion and net profits of $13.6 billion, which is a record for Apple’s second fiscal quarter. If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha. Apple’s official press release is here.
As always, however, I’m not as interested in the financial details as I am the statements of Apple executives during the call that are of interest to iPhone and iPad users. Here are the items that stood out to me:
iPhone
During the past quarter, Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones. That was the second highest quarter ever of iPhone sales. The most ever was the prior quarter — the late 2014 holiday season — when Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones, but the record before that was 51 million (during the prior year’s holiday quarter). So Apple sold more iPhones in a non-holiday quarter than they did in the holiday quarter just over a year earlier. That certainly tells you something about how interested people are in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple is seeing a higher rate of people switching from another brand to the iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus than Apple has seen with previous iPhone models. So a lot of BlackBerry, Android, etc. are users are switching to the iPhone.
About 20% of people who had been using a previous version of the iPhone have now upgraded to an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus.
By my count, as of March 28, 2015, Apple had sold over 726 million iPhones since they first went on sale in 2007.
iPad
The iPad turned five years old this month. Although Apple did see impressive iPad sales in some parts of the world, such as Japan and China, overall Apple sold 12.6 million iPads in the 2015 fiscal second quarter. That’s a big number, but to put in in context, one year ago in the 2014 fiscal second quarter, Apple had sold 16.3 million. There was a similar story last month, so it seems that, so far at least, Apple is selling fewer iPads in 2015 than is did in 2014.
Cook said that part of the reason for the decline is that folks who might have previously purchased an iPad are now purchasing a Mac or an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple CFO Luca Maestri noted that the iPad has consistently been the #1 tablet in companies, and cited a recent Changewave survey that found that among corporate buyers planning to buy a tablet in the next six months, 77% plan to buy iPads. In light of Apple’s partnership with IBM on the iPad (announced in July of 2014), Cook says that he remains a big believer that the iPad will play a major role in companies.
By my count, as of March 28, 2015, Apple had sold over 271 million iPads since they first went on sale in 2010.
Apple Watch
The Apple Watch did not go on sale until after the 2015 fiscal second quarter ended, but Apple still had a lot to say about the Apple Watch yesterday.
Pointing out the obvious, Cook stated that Apple Watch demand is outstripping supply, and he said that Apple is working hard to remedy that.
Cook did not say how many Apple Watch shipments took place since this past Friday when the first deliveries occurred, but he did say that Apple was able to deliver more customers an Apple Watch since Friday than Apple had originally anticipated.
Cook also said that Apple is continuing to notify customers that their Apple Watch will arrive earlier than originally estimated. So if you ordered an Apple Watch and think that you still have a long wait, perhaps it will come earlier than you are expecting.
By late June, Apple plans to start selling the Apple Watch in additional countries, although Apple did not identify which ones. Right now, the Apple Watch is on sale in nine countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, the UK and the US. If Apple is planning to sell to more countries in June, that is some indication that Apple believes that it can start to catch up to demand by then.
Cook announced that there are now more than 3,500 apps for the Apple Watch. That compares to about 500 apps when the App Store for iPhone was launched, and about 1,000 apps for the iPad when the iPad launched.
The Apple Watch is the newest product from Apple. It requires an iPhone and thus can be viewed as an iPhone accessory, much like you might have Bluetooth headphones that work with your iPhone. But it has so much computing power that it can also be considered an independent device, alongside the iPad, iPod, etc. After three days with the Apple Watch, I am incredibly impressed. For those of you wondering whether you should get one, hopefully my initial experiences will help you to make a decision for yourself.
The model that I have is the Apple Watch 42mm Stainless Steel with Black Classic Buckle. I ordered it just a few minutes after Apple started taking pre-orders on April 10, 2015, and my Apple Watch was in my hands around 9:30 a.m. on Friday, April 24. My first three days with the Apple Watch have been different types of days. Friday was a work day, so I was mostly in the office. Saturday I was mostly at home, doing errands and playing with my kids. On Sunday I was at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, so I was outside most of the day and doing a lot of walking around and receiving and sending a lot of text messages to make plans with others at Jazz Fest. These three very different days gave me the opportunity to really understand how the Apple Watch excels and what its limitations are.
The Apple Watch is not an iPhone
It definitely takes some time to get used to the Apple Watch, much like the first time that you ever used an iPhone when you had to get used to gestures such as pinch to zoom and swiping left and right, up and down. Many of those iPhone skills that we all now take for granted don’t work on the Apple Watch, so you need to get used to a new set of skills. For example, there is no pinch to zoom, nor would such a gesture even make sense on a screen this small. And even though you can flick up and down on a screen to scroll much like you can on an iPhone, you quickly learn that it is better to use the Digital Crown because that way your finger does not obscure the entire screen while you swipe, plus the Digital Crown is a more precise way of scrolling. And you need to learn that if there is a red dot at the top of your watch face, that indicates a new notification. You can swipe down from the top of the watch app to see those notifications (like an iPhone), but you can also swipe up from the bottom of the watch app screen to see Glances, from apps that provide them.
The Apple Watch also has force touch, the ability to touch the screen and then push a little harder to cause some secondary function. There is no on-screen indication of when you can force-touch so you just need to experiment to see when it works, but you quickly learn when to do so, such as force-touching on the clock face to change the clock design, or force-touching on the list of notifications to see an option to clear them all.
But it is not just the way that you interact with the Apple Watch that is new. My first instinct was to treat the Apple Watch like a small iPhone, one that I would use to run lots of neat apps and to consume information. But I quickly learned that the Apple Watch is not a small iPhone, but instead is a different type of device, one that excels at providing you with small bits of relevant information, and can also be a very useful remote control. Let’s explore those functions a little deeper.
Small bits of information
I stopped wearing a watch a few years ago because I was looking at my iPhone all of the time anyway and, in doing so, I could always see the time on the iPhone. But before the iPhone, I had worn a watch every day for around 25 years. As I think back to how I used that watch over the years, it would always be for quick glances to get small bits of information; a quick glance would give me the time, or the date, and then I could go back to whatever else I was doing, armed with that information.
When I was in high school, I wore a Casio calculator watch. I would occasionally do more than just glance at that watch — sometimes I would use the calculator to perform simple math — but even then, I only used the watch for a short period of time, maybe 15-20 seconds, to get information. Once I got that information, I was done with the watch.
This is where the Apple Watch excels. You can quickly raise your arm to look at your watch, which causes the screen to come on, and then you can get information. Often the default is for my Apple Watch to display a clock, so a quick glance gives me the time and date and any other small bit of information that I choose to display on that customizable watch face, such as my next appointment, or the weather.
But unlike a traditional watch, with the Apple Watch you are not limited to glancing at the time and perhaps the date. The information that the Apple Watch can provide with that quick glance is infinitely customizable. Of course you can modify the watch face itself, adding what is called “complications” in the watch world — the additional information displayed such as the date, or the weather, etc. But with that quick swipe down from the top of the watch I can also quickly see recent notifications. Those are the same types of notifications that I can see by swiping down from the top of my iPhone screen, but to do that I need to first take my iPhone out of my pocket and unlock it. The Apple Watch is so much faster and more convenient; just raise my wrist and swipe down.
This is a good point to mention that there are two types of settings on the Apple Watch that I really like. First, there is the Brightness and Text size setting. From here, you have the option to increase screen brightness, increase the font size and make text bold. I quickly made my text as bright, large and bold as possible, which makes it so much easier for me to see read words on the screen. (I wear glasses; for those of you with better eyesight, you might be comfortable with the default sizes, or something between the default and my setting.)
But the setting I really want to focus on right now is located under General and is called Activate on Wrist Raise. Here, you can choose to have your screen come on when you raise your wrist (which is the default option, and the one that I recommend that you use) but you can also choose what happens when you lift your wrist: either display the clock app (to see the time etc.) or display the last used app. I typically keep it set to clock, but at various times during the day I will change it to Last Used App. That way, raising my wrist and a quick glance shows me information other than the time.
For example, this past Saturday night I was doing other activities with my family so I wasn’t watching the game, but I was curious to see how the New Orleans Pelicans were doing in the NBA playoff game against the Golden State Warriors. The ESPN app on the Apple Watch is perfect for this function. The watch app already knows my favorite teams (because I have that entered in the iPhone app), so when I launch the clock’s ESPN app it shows me the current score for the game that my favorite team is playing. By changing the wrist raise setting to the Last Used App, every time I raised my wrist, I quickly saw the current score of the game. This was much, much faster than having to take out my iPhone, unlock the iPhone, and then look up the score. Unfortunately for those of us in New Orleans, the Pelicans lost, but the ESPN Apple Watch app worked like a charm.
I haven’t yet traveled with the Apple Watch, but I look forward to using some travel related watch apps when I do travel. For example, I have a Delta flight next month, and I look forward to seeing how that app gives me the key information that I need for my trip. A TripIt app may also be useful, and similarly faster to use as I am walking through the airport versus fishing out my iPhone. I suspect that I will pick the most useful travel app and choose to have my Apple Watch show me that app when I raise my wrist so that, for example, I can quickly see my upcoming flight status, gate, etc.
I have no doubt that in the future I will find additional useful apps, apps that quickly show me whatever information I need at that very time, simply by lifting my wrist.
Push notifications
Lifting my wrist to get small bits of information is useful and nice, but even better is the push notifications feature on the Apple Watch. Instead of me deciding that I want to raise my wrist to glance at information, with push notifications, my watch tells me that I should raise my wrist now to see something.
I don’t like it when my iPhone makes noise so I always keep it muted, and on Friday and Saturday I also muted my Apple Watch. (On Sunday, at Jazz Fest, I turned on noises — there was enough sound around me that the pings didn’t bother anyone else, and they helped to make sure that I noticed every notification.) I love that, even when the Apple Watch is muted, the watch has another way to grab your attention: the Taptic Engine, which produces haptic feedback. What this means is that the Apple Watch taps your wrist when it wants to get your attention. These notifications are discrete enough that nobody else will notice or hear them, so you won’t have to worry about being embarrassed by a notification while you are in court.
I found that I preferred for the tap notifications to be a little more obvious, and there is a way to adjust this. In Settings -> Sounds & Haptics, you can dial up the Ringer and Alert Haptics and can turn on Prominent Haptic.
Notifications could drive you crazy if you have too many of them, but I already had my notifications tamed on my iPhone, and they are similarly tamed on my Apple Watch. Thus, my watch doesn’t tap me every time I get an email, but instead only when I get an email from a person who I have designated as a VIP — which is a very small group of people. My watch does tap me every time I get a text message, but that works fine for me because on most days I get texts pretty infrequently, and when I do get one it is often my wife, in which case I virtually always do appreciate knowing right away that she was trying to tell me something.
But yesterday at Jazz Fest, I received lots of text messages throughout the day. It was wonderful to be walking from one stage to another, feel the tap on my wrist, and then raise my wrist to see that I was getting a text from a friend, and a second later see the text itself — such as a message that someone just got to a certain spot and will meet me there. It was much easier to notice the notification when there was a tap on my wrist versus my iPhone buzzing in my pocket. And it was much easier to read the notification by raising my wrist and glancing versus pulling my iPhone out of my pocket — especially if my hands were full because I was carrying food or drinks in both hands.
I also have notifications turned on for Twitter. I’m still trying to decide whether I want to let my notifications be handled by Tweetbot or Twitterific, both of which seems to be useful on the watch. I like that my watch taps my wrist to let me know that someone has sent me a reply or mentioned my username on Twitter. I’ll rarely act on that information right away, but it is nice to get immediate notification that it happened.
I’m still trying to decide the other apps to which I will grant permission to send me notifications on my watch, but even after just a few days, I really love this feature. For example, I mentioned how easy it is to receive a text message on the watch, but it is also easy to respond to a message on the watch — especially if one of the default responses like “OK” or “Thanks” suffices. When it doesn’t, I found that tapping the microphone icon and dictating a short response for Siri to turn into text worked quite well. There was one time at Jazz Fest when I intended to text someone to say that I was headed to the Blues Tent and instead my watch thought I said Blues 10, but the other person had no problem understanding what I meant. Other than that minor hiccup, Siri’s voice-to-text translation worked incredibly well for me. I was especially impressed how well that Siri on the watch worked even when I was in the crowded and loud environment of an outdoor festival.
Remote Control
Another feature that I’ve quickly grown to love on the Apple Watch is the ability to have apps that let you control other tasks, working as a remote control of sorts. For example, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my favorite app for doing so is Overcast. If I’m alone in a room, I’ll often just set down my iPhone on a table and listen using the iPhone’s built-in speaker or using a Bluetooth speaker. Other times I’ll listen using Bluetooth headphones or I’ll have my iPhone in my shirt pocket and use the white Apple headphones.
If I am listening to a podcast and I realize that I missed something, the Overcast app on my iPhone includes a button to rewind, which I have set to 15 seconds. Another button skips 30 seconds forward, useful for skipping a commercial. But it is not always convenient to reach over the to my iPhone to use those buttons — especially if it is on a table across the room. But with the Overcast app on the Apple Watch, I can just lift my wrist and tap those buttons, which then tells my iPhone what to do. I can also lift my wrist to glance and see how much longer the podcast will last, or to play/pause.
This is another example of a time that I often set my Apple Watch to show the last used app, instead of the clock, when I lift my wrist. That way I see the Overcast app every time I lift my wrist. But even if I forgot to change that setting, you can always quickly switch from the clock to the last used app by pressing twice on the Digital Crown.
Similarly, it is nice to use the Remote app on the Apple Watch to control my Apple TV, especially if I am sitting on the coach and I realize that my kids have left the Apple TV’s physical remote somewhere else in the room.
Also, while I have only started to play around with this app, I see that there is a Camera app on the Apple Watch that controls the Camera app on my iPhone. I can prop up my iPhone somewhere to take a picture of me and others, then I can walk away and use the watch app as a remote viewfinder, so that I can make sure that we are all in the shot. When everyone is in place, I can either press one button on the watch to take the picture right away, or another button to wait three seconds and then take the picture. My iPhone then quickly takes a burst of 10 pictures, useful if someone is blinking during one of the pictures.
Because my Apple Watch is always on my wrist, this means that I always have easy access to any of the apps with a remote control type of function. I look forward to trying out other apps that let my Apple Watch act as a remote control.
Interact with others
I’ve already talked about some of the ways that the Apple Watch can help you to interact with others, such as the notifications of emails and texts, and the ways in which you can quickly respond to text messages. The Apple Watch also has some unique ways that you can interact with others who also own an Apple Watch, such as by tapping on your watch, which causes your friend to feel the same taps on their wrist, or by drawing a very simple picture on your watch that then displays on your friend’s watch.
In the future, I can see this being useful and fun, but at this point so few people have an Apple Watch that I haven’t been able to test the feature very much. I did annoy Florida attorney Katie Floyd on Friday afternoon by sending her some silly finger drawings, and she drew me a smiley face in response. I look forward to the day when I can be in court and someone can send me a quick tap to alert me to something, such as the need to object as soon as opposing counsel finishes answering a question. Another often-cited example is a previously agreed upon sequence of taps during a party that allows one person to tell another person something like I’m ready to go, or please come rescue me from this conversation that I’m having. Suffice it to say that I can envision this feature being useful in the future as more folks get an Apple Watch.
Fitness
Another feature of the Apple Watch that I haven’t tested out yet is using it for fitness. Right now I just have the leather band that came with my model, and that’s not a good band to use when sweating. But I ordered a Sport Band as an accessory the same day that I ordered the watch, and I may receive it as soon as this Friday. I’m encouraged by the initial reports from others, such as Katie Floyd’s take in the post she wrote after her first 24 hours with the Apple Watch.
I will say that the Apple Watch seemed very impressed with all of the walking around that I did yesterday at Jazz Fest. I haven’t had the heart to break it to my watch that (1) I don’t walk nearly that much every day and (2) the food and drink I had yesterday made up for much of that walking around.
The Apple Watch as Jewelry
I realize that I am still in the honeymoon period with the Apple Watch and thus it is still the shiny new toy, but something else that I really like about the Apple Watch is how it looks and feels. Much like any other nice jewelry, the Apple Watch looks very nice, both to others and the person wearing it. (And much like other jewelry, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I recognize that others might disagree that it looks good. But I certainly like the look.)
I’m really glad that I spent the extra money on the stainless steel model, which I think looks and feels nicer than the aluminum model. (Although I will say that the Space Gray version of the Apple Watch Sport has a certain appeal to it.) You can tell that an incredible amount of craftsmanship went into the Apple Watch. It feels like a well-made device, with amazing fit and finish. This is something that is likely to be on my body all day long, every single day, so it is nice to have something that I like.
And I’m not just talking about the physical features of the watch, although I really like those. I also love the display. While small, it is really beautiful and fun to look at, no matter what the watch is dispaying. Indeed, the watch face that I mostly used on Friday and Saturday was the Mickey Mouse one. The first watch that I ever remember using was a Mickey Mouse watch, and there is something about seeing Mickey smiling and tapping his foot (to count the seconds) on my wrist that makes me smile. And unlike the watch I used as a child, it is fun to see that Mickey shifts his position and the way that he is facing depending upon the hour that his hand is pointing at.
When I was at Jazz Fest yesterday, there were parts of the day when the sun was very bright. Thus, I switched to the X-Large display, which has numbers that are comically large, but when you are outside on a bright day and it would normally be hard to see the Apple Watch, you can always easily see the numbers on this display.
My only small complaint about the Apple Watch is that I might consider getting a different band for the watch. The Classic Buckle feels really nice, but right now one of holes sometimes feels a little too tight, and the next hole sometimes feels just a little too lose. I’m going to wait and see if I get used to this over time (and perhaps as the leather stretches) — I liked it a lot more on Sunday than I did on Friday and Saturday. But I can see myself down the road getting one of the bands that uses magnets and can be adjusted to any size at all, such as the Milanese Loop or the Leather Loop. And I also look forward to receiving my Sport Band, which I would have used instead of the leather band at Jazz Fest yesterday had mine arrived because it was a hot and sweaty day.
Other thoughts
There is so much more that I have to learn about the Apple Watch, so I’m sure I will have more to say in the future. But for now, here are a few more thoughts.
First, I was concerned about the battery life on the Apple Watch, but so far it has been fine. As much as I used the Apple Watch yesterday at Jazz Fest — not only because it was useful, but also because folks kept asking to see it — I still had 40% power left at 10pm last night. Three days is not enough to reach a definitive verdict on how long the battery lasts each day, but so far I’m very impressed. And it is easy to charge the watch at night by placing it on the charger; a magnet causes it to snap into the right position, and the watch is fully charged every morning.
Second, while there are already a lot of Apple Watch apps, and you know that we will have thousands more in the near future, I’ve discovered that only a small set of apps make sense on the Apple Watch — especially those for whom glances, notifications and remote control functions make sense. For example, I have a useful app on my iPhone that displays a weather radar, and while it also works on the Apple Watch, looking at a weather radar on the tiny Apple Watch screen seems sort of pointless. For this task, I’ll want to use the larger screen of my iPhone, or maybe even my iPad. Of course, developers are also just now getting an Apple Watch to use, so over time I’m sure we will see more apps that make sense given the advantages and limitations of a device on a wrist with a small screen.
Third, I have found that the raise your wrist to glance at the Apple Watch feature works great most of the time, but every once in a while it doesn’t turn on the screen. At first my instinct was to raise my wrist again more violently, which did work but made me look like I, or at least my arm, was doing the robot dance. I quickly learned that you can also just tap the watch screen to turn it on.
Fourth, I haven’t had a chance to try Apple Pay on the watch yet. It works so well on my iPhone that I’m sure that it will work on the watch. Having said that, it’s not really that inconvenient to pull out my iPhone to pay, so I’ll be curious to see how much better it is to pay with my wrist without having to reach for my iPhone at all.
Conclusion
Over the coming weeks and months, developers will come up with even better apps for the Apple Watch. Not every app makes sense for the Apple Watch, but for the ones that do, it is often so much nicer and more convenient to use the Apple Watch version of the app. And as I use the watch even more both in and away from the office, I’m sure that I will find new ways to use the watch that I’m not even thinking of yet.
But even with just what I know and what I can use the Apple Watch to do right now, I can see that I’m going to be a big fan of this product. What it does is often something small, but it does it so darn well, giving me exactly the information or controls that I need with extreme efficiency and minimum fuss. Apple created a really impressive device, one that a lot of people are going to really enjoy using.
Today, Apple begins a new chapter in its history, with the Apple Watch going on sale and being delivered to the first customers. Sure, it is just an iPhone accessory, but it is also a new type of device, one with a different kind of interface, different input methods and different ways of acquiring and presenting information. Will the Apple Watch become a significant new product, or is it instead destined to enter the history books next to the Apple iPod Socks? My hunch is that the Apple Watch in particular, and wearable devices in general, will indeed be an important new type of product for Apple, and as Apple learns from the first generation Apple Watch and issues software and hardware improvements, we will one day look back and be amazed at how interesting the product is and how far the product category has come, much as we look back now at the progress since the first Mac, the first iPod and the first iPhone. This could be pretty exciting, and it all starts today. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Last year, I reviewed an app called DkT that you can use to access PACER on the iPhone or iPad. The developer of the app tells me that some folks are now experiencing login errors with the app, but he needs more information to fix the problem. If you have noticed this problem with the DkT app, please contact Matt Zorn (matt@zorn.is) to help him to troubleshoot.
Whether you get notifications on your iPhone, your iPad, your Apple Watch, are all three, you need to effectively manage those notifications so that you are only interrupted by the stuff that really matters. New York attorney and TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante shares some good advice on notifications in an article that was published in the SmallLaw newsletter a few months ago but was just recently posted online.
California attorney Scott Grossberg discusses the excellent GoodReader app.
Even if you don’t yet have an Apple Watch, you can get a sense of how it works with some new items on the Apple website. First, you can now watch ten guided tour videos. Second, you can now read the Apple Watch User Guide online.
John Gruber doesn’t think that Apple will allow custom watch faces, except for a few hand-selected by Apple. He explains why in this article, and he makes a pretty compelling argument.
If you are wondering what it is like to try on the expensive Apple Watch Edition with the gold face, Caitlin McGarry and Leah Yamshon describe the Edition experience in an article for Macworld.
If you are wondering how durable the Apple Watch is likely to be, Greg Koenig wrote a detailed article on the subject for iMore.
Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that you have 14 days to exchange an Apple Watch band for another one. Many folks (like me) ordered an Apple Watch before they even saw the bands in person, so if you now wish that you had selected a different band, it may not be too late.
If you use a Mac, the new Photos app has the amazing ability to store every single one of your photos on the cloud so that all of the photos are available to you on your iPhone and iPad. I love that I can now find that picture from many years ago on my iPhone or iPad, and when I tap the picture my device loads a better quality version from the cloud. It works great. However, please be aware that you need to pay Apple for storage space in the cloud, and that cost can add up. For my library of almost 50,000 pictures and a lot of videos, I needed to sign up for the 500 GB, $10/month plan to have enough space online. Second, and especially if your library is large, it takes a while to upload all of your data, and as Glenn Fleishman of Macworld notes, your Mac will flood your broadband to upload as fast as possible.
Microsoft debuted a new service called Office 365 Video that lets companies upload and share videos to their employees. There is an iOS app for the service, and Harish Jonnalahadda of iMore explains some of the details.
Caleb Melby of Bloomberg raves about Apple CEO Tim Cook in this article.
Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of Environmental Initiatives, and Larry Selzer of The Conservation Fund talk explain how and why Apple is now working to protect forests.
And finally, Ben & Jerry’s introduced a new ice cream product this week, one which plays off of the 420 theme. Ice cream and pot are usually not things that I discuss on iPhone J.D., but I was amused at how they created a video for the new product that is a parody of the famous ad that Apple used to introduce the Mac in 1984:
I didn’t take a lot of pictures at ABA TECHSHOW 2015 this year, but I thought that I would share a few of them that I did take with my iPhone as well as a few reflections on the show from the iPhone and iPad perspective.
Before the show began, I dashed down Michigan Ave. to check out one of the largest Apple Stores in the country and to try on the Apple Watch again, since I knew that I would be talking about it throughout TECHSHOW. Here is the model that I ordered, which hopefully I will have soon. (As I type this, the Apple website says that it is preparing my Apple Watch for shipment, with delivery expected at some point between tomorrow and May 8.) [UPDATE: Using the UPS trick described by Buster Hein on Cult of Mac, it looks like my Apple Watch is being shipped Thursday with UPS Next Day Air delivery for Friday afternoon.]
Overall, this was one of the best TECHSHOWs that I have ever attended. A lot of the credit for that goes to the great TECHSHOW board, and especially this year’s TECHSHOW Chair, Brett Burney. I’ve presented with Brett in the past and he really knows his stuff, especially when it comes to the iPhone and iPad. Here’s Brett at the start of the conference:
On Thursday, April 16, one of the eight tracks was the iPad track. That track had four sessions that were full of information for any attorney looking to integrate an iPad (and iPhone) into their practice.
The first session was Introducing Your iPad Into Your iPractice, by Ohio attorneys Joe Bahgat and Paul Unger. This was an introductory session that hit the highlights such as how to work with documents, take notes, and do legal research with an iPad, plus how to use an iPad in litigation.
The second session was called iLitigate on the iPad — Essential Litigation Workflows From Beginning to End, by D.C. Judge Herbert Dixon, New Jersey attorney Jonathan Lomurro and Dallas attorney Tom Mighell. The session covered more advanced techniques for using an iPad in litigation, and it was quite good. I’ve presented with Dixon and Mighell before and so I knew that they know their stuff, but this is the first time that I have heard Lomurro speak and he was excellent. I’d love to hear him speak again.
At the luncheon, I met up with some old friends and met new ones. This was the first time that I had met Florida attorney Katie Floyd in person, although after listening to her speak on hundreds of episodes of Mac Power Users, I felt like we were old friends.
The third session in the iPad track was Easy & Effective Presentations From Your iPad, a presentation that I gave with Canadian attorney Bjorn Christianson. We started by discussing general techniques on giving effective presentations with an iPad. Then for the last 20 minutes or so I gave some very specific power user tips for using the Keynote app on an iPad. I’ve never before given a presentation on giving a presentation, and I hope that we disproved the old adage that those who cannot do, teach — at the very least, we got some great feedback from the audience. Speaking of which, here is a picture of the audience that I took before we started (and before the room filed up), so if you were there early, here is what you looked like. (As always, you can click on these pictures to enlarge them.)
For a view from the other side, Detroit attorney Randy Juip was using a selfie stick to take pictures at approximately the rate of one every 10 seconds throughout TECHSHOW. In this picture that Randy took, Randy is at the bottom left, and I see that Jeff Taylor of The Droid Lawyer was in the back of the room as well (bottom right):
The folks at MyCase were nice enough to once again hire Stephanie Crowley to produce live murals based on what was being discussed during some of the presentations. She was there for the presentation that Bjorn and I gave, and here is her graphical interpretation of what we said:
The final session of the iPad track was a presentation that I gave solo called iUse Microsoft Office on My iPad. You should know that the TECHSHOW board picks the titles and subjects before speakers are even invited, so it was not my decision to try to cover all of Microsoft Office for iPad in only an hour. Instead, I gave the briefest of mentions of the Excel and PowerPoint apps and then I jumped into the nitty gritty details of the Word for iPad app, which I think any lawyer would agree is the most important part of Office for attorneys. I had also planned to discuss the Outlook for iPad app, but the Word discussion ended up taking the entire hour. (If you do want some of my thoughts on Outlook for iPad, check out this post.)
Throughout the day, I met up with countless attorneys who use iPads and iPhones, and really enjoyed hearing about some of the interesting ways that they use their devices. It gave me lots of ideas for future iPhone J.D. posts.
I also got a chance to catch up with Ian O’Flaherty, who makes two of the very best apps for litigators who use an iPad: TrialPad and TranscriptPad. Ian showed me some cool new features that will soon be included in TranscriptPad, as well as a brand new app that he is working on. I look forward to trying them out and talking about them on iPhone J.D. when they are released, so stay tuned for some great stuff. Here’s a picture of me with Ian:
On Friday, I visited a ton of booths at the Expo Hall and saw lots of iPhone/iPad software and accessories that I’ll be talking about in the future. I also attended a few sessions. It was interesting to hear Wisconsin attorney Robert Sisson and Florida attorney Rick Georges discuss wearable technology on Friday afternoon. Of course they mentioned the upcoming Apple Watch, but most of their focus was on showing off other smartwatches currently on the market such as those that use Android Wear and the Pebble. Clearly, this market is about to be disrupted in a major way once the Apple Watch starts shipping.
Friday night, Katie Floyd and I hosted a Taste of Techshow dinner. I was too busy talking with everyone at dinner to remember to take a picture, but Katie and I both took pictures when many of us traveled to the dinner — in style, thanks to a limousine that was parked outside of the Hilton and looking for customers:
Thanks to everyone who joined us at our dinner: Judge Joseph Adams and his wife from York, PA; Maureen Blando from Mobile Helix in Silicon Valley; Jacksonville, FL attorney Jim Mullaney; David Roth from the Houston office of Jones Walker; Chicago attorney Eli Stoughton; Gregory Tweed from the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board; Ian O’Flaherty and Tara Cheever from Lit Software (makers of TrialPad and TranscriptPad, and current sponsors of iPhone J.D.); and Katie Floyd’s mom. I know that I speak for everyone when I say that it was a really fun night, and it is a shame that we could only fit a dozen people at our table.
On Saturday morning, I gave the 60 Apps in 60 Minutes presentation that I mentioned earlier this week. My co-presenters were Ohio attorney Joe Bahgat, legal tech consultant Adriana Linares, and Dallas attorney Tom Mighell. Here is a picture that I took of the audience as the room started to fill up, and by the time we were underway, the room was standing room only.
It is always interesting to look at the Saturday morning attendance to get a sense of attorney interest in different mobile platforms. As you can see from this collection of selfie stick pictures from — of course — Randy Juip, there were tons of attorneys interested in the iPhone/iPad, a decent number of attorneys interested in Android, and an incredibly small number of attorneys interested in BlackBerry or Windows mobile devices:
By the way, I see that my co-presenter Adriana Linares was preparing for the Apple Watch by rocking the Casio calculator watch — which she pulls off with much more style then when I wore a similar model as an awkward teenager in the 1980s.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to say hello to me last week; it was great talking to all of you. I hope to see even more of you at ABA TECHSHOW 2016, which takes place around St. Patrick’s Day next year.
This past Saturday morning at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago, I teamed up with Dallas attorney Tom Mighell, Ohio attorney Joe Bahgat and Florida legal tech consultant Adriana Linares to present the 2015 installment of 60 iOS Apps in 60 Minutes. Lots of useful and fun apps were discussed during the session, and the enthusiasm from the standing-room-only crowd was fantastic. I know that the session was fast-paced, so for those of you who attended and who may have missed an app or two, and for those of you who could not make it to ABA TECHSHOW 2015 this year, here is a list of the apps that we discussed.
For the apps that I previously reviewed here on iPhone J.D., I added a link to the app name.
And just in case those 74 apps are not enough for you, you should check out the prior editions of 60 Apps in 60 Minutes. Some of the apps we discussed in previous years are now outdated, but quite a few of them are just as worth checking out today as they were way back when:
2014 — Brett Burney, Chad Burton, Jeff Richardson, Reid Trautz
2013 — there was no 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session that year
2012 — Josh Barrett, Brett Burney, Jeff Richardson
2009 — David Sparks, Ben Stevens, Jeff Richardson, Reid Trautz (it wasn’t yet called 60 Apps in 60 Minutes that year, but there was a similar presentation)
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Lit Software, a current sponsor of iPhone J.D., had a lot of great announcements during ABA TECHSHOW 2015 last week, many of which I’ll be talking about in upcoming posts. But one of their announcements was time sensitive so I wanted to post about it today.
The announcement has to do with TrialPad, a powerful app that lets you easily organize and present evidence at trial, in a mediation, in a meeting, or any other time when you want to display documents, call out sections of documents, highlight text, create side-by-side document comparisons, edit and show video clips, add exhibit stickers to documents, search document text, etc. Lit Software’s announcement was that after TECHSHOW, the price of the app will increase to $129.99. That is still a great price considering all that the app does, but as of today, the price is still only $89.99. I’m told that it should stay there for just another day or two. So buy the app today, and save yourself $40 as compared to what the app will cost in just a few days.
This is an abbreviated edition of In the news because I at at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago right now. It has been an amazing conference so far, and I have enjoyed meeting so many iPhone J.D. readers from across the country, and even a few from other countries. But even though most of my focus right now is on legal technology, I have to admit that the best three words I heard yesterday were: Chewie, we’re home. And now, some of the news of note from the past week:
You can take notes on an iPad either by typing on a keyboard (the on-screen virtual keyboard or better yet an external keyboard) or by taking handwritten notes using a stylus and an app like GoodNotes. I often find that it is more productive to take notes by hand, and it turns out that there is science that supports that, as noted by Joseph Stromberg in this article for Vox.
Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac speculates that the way that Apple is showing off the Apple Watch at its Apple Stores is a preview of the future of the Apple Store. He may well be correct.
Lovejoy also reports that you will not be able to buy an Apple Watch in an Apple Store until June. Only online orders for now.
It is interesting to see companies starting to add Apple Watch abilities to their iPhone apps. For example, the 1Password app recently added the ability to designate certain items to be available on your Apple Watch, such as a locker combination or a credit card number, as noted in this blog post on the Agile Bits Blog.
Microsoft expert Paul Thurrott describes the large number of apps that Microsoft is currently shipping for iOS.
Apple announced that WWDC, its developer conference, will take place this year in San Francisco on June 8-12. Apple always has a keynote with lots of announcements at the start of WWDC, so if you want to start counting down the days until Apple next announces something new, now you know what date to count from. (That’s 55 days from today.)
And finally, while the Apple Watch looks to be pretty cool, Netflix thinks that we are ready for the next step in wearable technology — the Netflix Watch — as shown in this amusing parody video:
ABA TECHSHOW takes place in Chicago this week. Some events start tonight, and the main conference takes place Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning. If you are going, I suspect that you have long since made plans to do so, unless you practice in Chicago in which case you can register at the last minute at the conference. This will be my seventh year going to ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago. I first attended in 2008 to talk about protecting a law firm against disasters — a topic that was at the time still fresh in the minds of all of us attorneys who practice in New Orleans and had to deal with Hurricane Katrina. I didn’t attend in 2009, but I did join up with attorneys David Sparks, Ben Stevens and Reid Trautz to come up with a list of recommended iPhone apps that they talked about at the conference. That was a good list at the time, but there are only a few apps on that list that I would still recommend today — the world of law-related apps has changed substantially in the last six years! In 2010, I attended ABA TECHSHOW to talk about the iPhone, and I have attended and talked about the iPhone and iPad every year since then.
As always, I’m really looking forward to ABA TECHSHOW this year. Every year I meet even more attorneys using iPhones and iPads in their practice, often in very interesting ways, and for the last few years more and more vendors in the Expo Hall have been showing off something new for the iPhone and iPad.
Who wants free stuff?
Once again, I have a bunch of iPhone/iPad cleaning cloths sold by MOBiLE CLOTH with the iPhone J.D. logo on them to give away for free thanks to the generosity of John Hartigan, the President of MOBiLE CLOTH. Please introduce yourself to me if you see me at ABA TECHSHOW and, as long as supplies last, I’m happy to give you one. This year I will have both the larger “Classic” size and the smaller “Nano” size. Don’t be shy in asking — the more that you take from me, the fewer I have to lug around every day!
My Presentations
The iPad track is on Thursday, and it consists of four sessions that will be full of useful information for any attorney that uses an iPhone or iPad. I’m teaching the last two sessions on the track. At 2pm, I’m teaming up with Canadian attorney Bjorn Christianson for Easy and Effective Presentations from Your iPad. Right after that, I’m teaching a session on using Microsoft Word and some of the other Microsoft apps on the iPad.
There is also a Mobile Track on Friday, and while some of those sessions are aimed at lawyers using Android, other sessions appear to be applicable to iPhone and iPad users as well.
On Saturday morning, I’ll be presenting 60 Apps in 60 Minutes along with Ohio attorney Joe Bahgat, legal tech consultant Adriana Linares, and Dallas attorney Tom Mighell.
Click here to see the full schedule, where you will find eight different simultaneous tracks, so there is sure to be at least one session that would appeal to you throughout the day.
Taste of Techshow
On Friday night, I’m co-hosting a dinner with Florida attorney and Mac Power Users co-host Katie Floyd. Our dinner will be at 7:30pm at Rosebud on Rush, an Italian/Steak restaurant. All of the reservation spots are currently booked, but if you still want to join us there is often a waiting list just in case someone else cancels. You can ask about getting on the waiting list for our dinner at the Concierge Desk, and that is also the spot to sign up for a different one.
Just in time for ABA TECHSHOW 2015, Clio announced this week that it now has an iPad app. Clio (a former 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. When you use Clio, your important client data is securely accessible anywhere that you have Internet access. Because Clio is web-based, you always had the ability to access Clio using Safari on an iPhone or iPad. In September of 2013, Clio introduced an iPhone app to provide a customized interface for using Clio on that mobile device. With the new iPad app, you now have the option of using an iPad-centric interface on the iPad instead of just using the web-based interface in Safari.
I played around with the Clio for iPad app using a demo account, and it looks like a very nice app. A bar on the left includes all of the main features: Matters, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Time, Documents and Settings. In much of the app, the left portion of the screen shows you a list of selections, and items that you select have more specific information on the right side. And the design of the app matches the aesthetic of iOS 8. Here is what it looks like:
If you are a current user of Clio, the new iPad app should make the service even easier to use. And if you have a small or medium-sized law firm and you are considering upgrading your practice management software (or using practice management software for the first time), Clio is an even better option now that it has a useful and attractive iPad app.
