In the news

If you own an iPad Pro and you want an Apple Pencil, they are still very hard to get.  South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn notes on his iPad Notebook website that if you order one online, shipping times are still 4-5 weeks, and Apple won’t let you order more than two.  I placed an online order for the Apple Pencil just a few minutes after you could start ordering them back on November 11 but my shipping date range is still Dec. 7 to Dec. 14.  But if you call your local Apple Store before they open, you might find that they have a few in stock as of the last day or two.  Yesterday, the Apple Store near New Orleans finally had two in stock, so I bought one of them when the store opened at 10am.  I’ll talk more about the Apple Pencil when I post my full review of the iPad Pro, but in short:  it is excellent, by far the best stylus that I have ever used with an iPad.  And now, the other news of note from the past week:

• New York attorney Neil Squillante, publisher of TechnoLawyer publications such as TL NewsWire, provides some first impressions on the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil as a tool for lawyers.
• Speaking of Squillante, in the TechnoLawyer Serendipity newsletter, he wrote about a big update to Adobe’s Acrobat app for the iPad:  it now integrates with Dropbox.  I think that Squillante is correct to conclude that this makes the app considerably more useful for lawyers.  It also makes Dropbox more useful for lawyers who use an iPad.
• In a think piece on his MacSparky website, California attorney David Sparks writes about the different approach that Microsoft and Apple take to mobile devices such as the iPad; Microsoft wants the same operating system everywhere, whereas Apple sees a value in keeping the systems distinct so that they can each play to their strengths.
• Sparks also writes about improvements to the search feature in the App Store.
• In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell writes about some of the problems with the keyboard (external and on-screen) on the iPad Pro.
• Zac Hall of 9to5 Mac wrote about some of the new features in iOS 9 that are particularly useful on the iPad Pro such as split screen, picture in picture, and keyboard shortcuts.
• To protect yourself from unauthorized use of your online accounts, I always recommend that you use two-factor authentication when it is offered.  That way, even if someone gets your username and password, they still cannot login from a computer or other device without also having access to the second form of authentication, such as a number texted to your cell phone.  Dan Moren of Six Colors writes that Amazon recently turned on two-factor authentication.  I have turned it on for my account, and I recommend that you do too.
• Dan Moren also wrote about the pros and cons of the Apple Watch, in an article for Macworld.
• Lauren Goode of The Verge rates the set-top boxes and concludes that the Apple TV is the best.
• Tony Chambers, the editor in chief of Wallpaper, interviews Apple’s Jony Ive to ask about the new Apple Pencil.
• Adrian Weckler of The Independent interviews Apple CEO Tim Cook.
• David Pogue of Yahoo Tech has tips for making text easier to read on an iPhone running iOS 9.
• Justine “iJustine” Ezarik posted on Twitter a fun series of pictures that show some of Apple’s biggest to smallest screens stacked on top of one another to show the relative size of the iPad Pro.
• I often feel like I am one of the few attorneys that doesn’t play golf.  If you play golf and you own an Apple Watch, you might be interested to learn that PING has a new Apple Watch app that can help you improve your swing, as reported by Andy Faust of WatchAware,
• Jared Newman of Macworld reviews the Onelink smoke and CO detector, the first HomeKit-enabled smoke detector, which means that it works well with your iPhone.
• And finally, this week Apple released six 15 second commercials for the new Apple TV.  Each starts with a screen that looks like the traditional TV color bars, except with the traditional six colors of Apple, and then those bars dissolve into an Apple TV app.  So far, Apple has released Crossy Road, Asphalt 8, Disney Infinity 3.0 (Star Wars), HBO Now (Game of Thrones), Netflix (Orange is the New Black) and ABC (The Muppets).  They may have more in the works; I’m wondering if we will soon see one for the National Geographic Channel because of the placement of its app icon at the end of each commercial.  Here are the first two I listed: