It's the most wonderful time of the year. I'm referring, of course, to the release of the new Star Wars movie, which I saw with my family this past weekend. It was the most fun that I have ever had watching a movie, and I'm sure that many of you have seen it by now too. What a great movie to watch with your kids! If you want to geek out and listen to some other folks talk about the movie, The Incomparable podcast has already released six and half hours of discussion of the new movie in three podcasts — episodes 276, 277 and 278 — and has one more episode on the topic to be released soon. [UPDATE: There are now two more episodes, 279 and 280, so that is another two and a half hours of Star Wars goodness.] (My favorite app for listening to podcasts on my iPhone is the free Overcast app.) And oh yeah, we also have Christmas this week too, as if a new Star Wars movie wasn't enough. I hope that you and your family enjoy the holidays, and hopefully Santa will be bringing some of you a new iPhone or iPad. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I recently heard from an attorney in D.C. who successfully used the OmniOutliner app in a three-day trial. He tells me: "I used OmniOutliner to prepare my direct and cross exams. I did all the input work on my Mac, which synced immediately with OmniOutliner on my iPad mini. I then took the iPad Mini to the podium and it worked fabulously. Because of the quick sync, I was able to make edits on my Mac in the courtroom up to a minute before I needed to start questioning. Each question was a single item in the outline, which I could easily nest inside subject matter headings. If I needed to move questions or groups of questions around in the outline, cut and paste was easy. I created a second column for the outline in which I put citations to deposition transcripts or other impeachment material in case needs for cross. It worked really well for me."
- California attorney David Sparks discusses his experiences with the Apple Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro.
- If you are a lawyer in Wisconsin, you might be interested to learn that Brett Burney (former chair of ABA TECHSHOW) and Nerino Petro will be discussing iPad for Lawyers at a seminar sponsored by the State Bar of Wisconsin. Click here for more details on Burney's website.
- Tom Lambotte, a consultant who provides IT support to lawyers who use Macs, discusses the 2015 Apple at Law User Survey in a post on The Mac Lawyer website.
- Oklahoma City attorney Jeff Taylor of The Droid Lawyer reviews the Lumsing Universal Fit Bluetooth Noise-Isolating Headphones. They only cost $20, and while I haven't tried those, I do have something very similar made by Soundpeats that I bought earlier this year on Amazon. I use it to listen to podcasts on my iPhone while I am using a treadmill, and it is great to not have to worry about a cord getting in the way (and needing to find a place for my iPhone when it needs to be close enough to my head for a cord to reach). The quality for music is nothing special but it works, and for podcasts it sounds great. I can definitely recommend picking up an inexpensive pair of Bluetooth headphones.
- Pete Souza, the official White House Photographer, shows off some incredible pictures that he took this year with his iPhone and posted to Instagram. Amazing photographs.
- Sandy Stachowiak of AppAdvice reviews iReg, an Apple Watch app that can record conversations.
- iMore posted the winners of its Best of 2015 Awards. The iPad Pro was named Device of the Year. And I love that they named the Sphero BB-8 the iPhone accessory of the year.
- Christian Zibreg of iDownloadBlog discusses recent updates to Readdle's Scanner Pro, including iPad Pro support. I use a couple different apps to scan documents, but Scanner Pro is definitely a very good one.
- ABBYY FineScanner, another very good document scanning app, added the ability to digitize books. You snap a picture of both pages of an open book, the image is uploaded to the ABBYY website, and then each page is scanned. Here is a video that shows off the feature. (To access the book scanning feature of the app, you need to pay $4.99/month or $19.99/year.)
- If you use a Transporter, this week the company announced a new feature: web access to documents on your Transporter. Your documents stay on your Transporter and are not stored on the cloud; you simply use a website to access your Transporter. I could see this being useful if you are at someone else's computer and need to grab a specific file from your Transporter.
- If you subscribe to Apple Music or another music streaming service, starting today you can finally stream songs by The Beatles, as reported by Peter Kafka of re/code. I count 17 albums available, and it is nice to be able to ask Siri to play the best songs by The Beatles ... which starts a playlist with Here Comes the Sun, Let It Be, Come Together, Hey Jude, Blackbird, In My Life, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Revolution, With a Little Help From My Friends, Oh! Darling, Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds, A Day in the Life, Octopus's Garden, and many others ... so many great songs.
- And finally, here is a video with some of Apple's holiday ads, from 1982 to 2013. There are some great ones in this video:
