Thank you to Drobo for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. Drobo appears to your computer to be a single external hard drive, but it actually has multiple hard drives inside of it and your data is always stored on multiple drives. Thus, when one of the hard drives fail — and remember, all hard drives will fail at some point — your data is still safely stored on the remaining drives. Just eject the dead drive and replace it with another drive, and you are back in business. You can also swap out the hard drives to larger versions, making it easy to expand your storage. To read more about why I love using my own Drobo, check out what I wrote in December of 2015.
The Drobo that I purchased last year is the standard model, simply called the Drobo. It holds four drives and attaches directly to my computer using USB 3.0. Mine has four 1 TB drives, which only cost about $50 to $60 each. My computer sees that as a single drive with a capacity of 2.67 TB. (You don’t get the full 4 TB because some space is being used to backup data on other drives.) But you can use larger drives if you want more space.
When I took these pictures, there were only four (of ten) blue lights lit up on the front of my Drobo. But just this past weekend, as I was saving some video files (home movies of my kids), a fifth light went on because I’m now using about half of my total capacity (1.23 TB used, 1.43 TB free).
Drobo has other models too, including the 5N which holds five drives and attaches to your network using Gigabit Ethernet.
Finally, Drobo has a special discount for iPhone J.D. readers. For a limited time, if you buy a Drobo 4-bay, Drobo 5D, or Drobo 5N on the online Drobo Store, and use coupon code Jeff100, you’ll get $100 off. So it will only cost you $449 to get the same configuration that I have, or only $199 to get that same Drobo with no hard drives included — handy if you already have some hard drives to use, or if you want to buy the drives separately from another store like Amazon.
I love my Drobo because it gives me lots of space to safely store my files. If you are looking for external storage for your PC or Mac, check out Drobo and save some money with the coupon code.
I often link to stories about how people used Find my iPhone to recover a lost or stolen iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, however, if your device is stolen, there is a good chance that you’ll never recover it again. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything that you can do. Mikah Sargent of iMore recently had his iPad stolen, and he did not recover it. Nevertheless, he does offer good advice for what to do if your device it stolen. Read this now so that you will be prepared in case you are a victim in the future. And now, the news of note from the past week:
California attorney David Sparks threw caution to the wind and installed the first beta of iOS 10 on his iPhone, primarily so that he could try out the first beta of watchOS 3 on his space gray 42mm aluminum Apple Watch. This has resulted in some crashes — after all, we are talking about early beta software — but he confirms that the improvements in watchOS 3 are real. I especially like his idea of setting up three watch faces: one for work, one for fitness, one form home. That way, he can swipe between them quickly to get exactly the information and complications that he needs at different times in the day. I plan to do this too. But I’m especially happy to hear that current third party apps, without any specific improvement for watchOS 3, are running so much better on the current Apple Watch software. This is great news.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reviews the August Doorbell Cam, a smart doorbell. You can use your iPhone to see who is at the door when they ring the doorbell, or when motion is detected.
I normally don’t link to posts on Mac software, but I’ll make an exception for Jason Snell’s Hands on with macOS Sierra, the update to macOS that will be released this Fall. Obviously, his thoughts are worth reading if you use a Mac. But even if you don’t, the article is an interesting read to see how many features are coming to, or being improved on, the Mac that also have so much importance on the iPhone and iPad: Siri, iCloud, an update to Photos, Continuity, Picture-in-Picture, Messages, Notes — almost every single feature that Snell mentions has some sort of iPhone connection.
If you are interested in space and you have an Apple TV, you’ll want to check out the new NASA app for Apple TV. Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac discusses the NASA app.
The new Photos app in iOS 10 can look at your pictures and recognize over 4,000 difference scenes and objects, so that you can search for things like “beach” or “football” or “wine” and the app will find pictures containing those items. Kay Yin came up with a list of all of the items that Photos can understand. There are tons of common items, and quite a few obscure ones too, such as baklava, kilt, and ukulele.
There is a rumor that in an upcoming iPhone — perhaps the model to be released this Fall — Apple will not include a headphone jack, instead having folks use Bluetooth or the Lightning port for headphones. John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains why Apple would do this even though the move may seem unpopular at first.
Apple has not shown off many iPad-only features in iOS 10, but Federico Viticci discusses the features that we know of so far. Note, however, that Apple will likely release a new iPad later this year, and when it does so, we may learn of additional iOS 10 features for the iPad that require the latest hardware.
Do you ever see a small icon at the top of your Apple Watch and wonder what it means? Apple has a nice support page that explains every one of those status icons.
Dennis Sellers of Apple World Today reviews The Stylus Sling, a strap for your iPad that holds an Apple Pencil.
And finally, according to Ramona Shelburn of ESPN, when the Cleveland Cavaliers had lost the first two games of the NBA finals and LeBron James was looking for a way to inspire his team, he played a portion of the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave to Stanford University 11 years ago on June 12, 2005. I linked to this video in October 2011 when Jobs died, but it is so powerful that it is worth linking to again in case you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. I watched it again last night, and it is still great. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Anyone who purchases a first generation technology product knows — or ought to realize — that it won’t be perfect. The first generation iPhone was released in 2007, and it lacked third party apps, lacked 3G (using the slow Edge network), and could not even cut and paste. I knew when I purchased a first generation Apple Watch in early 2015 that I would be using a product with a lot of rough edges. Sure enough, third party apps are often painfully slow, and there are interface quirks that beg to be revised.
And yet I still love my Apple Watch, and I use it and rely upon it every single day. It helps me manage notifications from clients and co-counsel. It keeps me on track with my appointments. It put me on an exercise regime which, for the first time in my life, I have stuck with for more than a few months. I recognize that part of my fascination with this product is a result of me being a tech nerd who often lusts after the latest technology, even if it has flaws, just because it is neat. Having said that, I know many others who definitely don’t fall into that category and who also love wearing an Apple Watch — such as my wife, an intelligent attorney who is smart enough to use any technology, but who is definitely not a techie and doesn’t waste her time on any technology unless it is usable and clearly helpful.
When you have a product that you love to use but which has obvious flaws, one cannot help but look forward to the next version of the product. For many months now, I’ve been looking forward to buying a second generation Apple Watch whenever it is released, hoping that it would keep what I love while fixing the shortcomings. To my complete surprise, Apple showed off a new Apple Watch operating system last week — watchOS 3 — which seems to fix the key shortcomings of the Apple Watch with a simple, free software update coming this Fall.
I’ve been reading quite a bit about watchOS 3 for the last week, and the new features look incredible. For lawyers who want a personal assistant on their wrist to help them get things done, watchOS 3 looks like it is going to be an amazing upgrade. Here is why.
Launch apps faster
The core features of the current Apple Watch usually work quite well, but third party apps (and even some of the built-in apps) have had limited usefulness because they are slow to use. When watchOS 2 was released in September of 2015, its support for native apps led me to hope that apps with work faster. But that really hasn’t happened.
In watchOS 3, Apple is addressing this by keeping up to 10 apps (which you select) in memory all of the time. Thus, they are always ready to launch in an instant, and are already updated when you launch an app.
Apple is not known for lying in its product demonstrations, but when I saw Apple show how much faster watchOS 3 will be during the WWDC Keynote yesterday, I found myself doubting that it could be true. Sure, I can see how a new Apple Watch with new hardware could be faster, but would keeping apps in memory make such a big difference on the first generation Apple Watch? Apparently, yes. Apple released a beta version of watchOS to developers last week, and while nobody expects the first beta of software to perform as well as a final, shipping product, the early reviews from folks trying it out confirm that it really does work the way that Apple demoed it on stage.
Faster apps will mean that I will start using more apps on my Apple Watch. And since the Apple Watch is designed to let you get things done quickly — you get in, see information, then get out — that means that I will have much more information available to me without the distraction associated with using my iPhone, iPad, or a computer. Thus, whether I am using a third party calendar app like Fantastical, using a travel app during a business trip, or communicating with a colleague, the Apple Watch should be substantially more useful.
Even if this was the only new feature of watchOS 3, I would be thrilled.
Access apps faster, using the side button
Since the Apple Watch first debuted, pressing the side button has always brought up a wheel from which you can select a contact. I virtually never use that button, making it a complete waste. 95% of the time that I interact with another person using my watch, I am responding to an email or a text message, so I don’t need to use the wheel to initiate the communication. I will sometimes initiate a text message on my watch, but to do so I just use the Messages app or, better yet, tell Siri to send a message. There are only two hardware buttons on the Apple Watch, so to have one of them — 50% of the buttons — useless was a real shame.
In watchOS 3, pressing the side button will instead launch the new Dock, a useful area that contains the up to 10 apps that you decide to keep in memory all the time. Scroll between the apps by swiping on the screen or by spinning the Digital Crown. This means that you can access your most frequently used apps much faster, without having to hunt for their tiny icons on the app Home Screen. Tap the dots at the bottom to make the screens smaller and swipe more quickly, or just swipe across the apps.
Better yet, because these apps are already running in memory and automatically update in the background, when you see an app in the Dock, the app is actually running. If you see a timer app which is counting off seconds, you will see those seconds count down in the dock. If you see a weather app, it will show you the current weather. In other words, you can glance at the app without even launching the app.
And for this very reason, Apple is abandoning the Glance with a capital “G” feature of watchOS 1 and watchOS 2. In theory, you have been able to swipe up on the watch face to glance at your favorite apps. In practice, this has never worked well because in the Glances view the app could only show static information, and it was virtually never updated fast enough. And you could only access “Glances” from the watch screen. With the new Dock, on the other hand, you can press the side button and access it from any screen.
Glances are dead. Long live glances in the Dock.
Control Center
So what happens if you do swipe up from the watch screen? Instead of Glances, you will see the Control Center. The new Control Center is similar to the current Control Center, and retains buttons that let you turn on airplane mode, turn on do not disturb mode, turn sounds on or off (silence the watch), find your iPhone, and pair with a Bluetooth device. The new Control Center also adds showing the battery percentage (which can be tapped to turn on the Power Reserve mode to save battery) and a button to lock the watch.
Complications have always been one of the most powerful features on the watch face of the Apple Watch, but only a few of them fit on a watch screen so you have to make difficult triage decisions. Throughout my history of using an Apple Watch, one of my complications has been a battery indicator. Now that battery percentage is always just a swipe away from my watch home screen in the Control Center, I plan to remove that complication from my watch face, which will give me space for something else useful.
Fitness
If you use an Apple Watch to encourage you to be more active, there are lots of fitness improvements in iOS 3. First, you can share your Activity data with others, which will hopefully serve to inspire you. (Mary made her 10,000 steps today, so now I need to do so too!) If you use a personal trainer, you could even share your data with him or her so that your trainer can offer you even more individualized advice.
You will also be able to see more data when you are working out. On a single screen in watchOS 3, you can see up to five workout metrics at once (distance, pace, active calories, heart rate, elapsed time).
There is also a new watch face that includes big activity circles — or a digital version with big numbers — so that you can more easily monitor your progress throughout the day.
The workout app is also smart enough to pause if you stop running (such as at a stoplight) and then resume when you start running again.
There is also a new fitness app called Breathe, that guides you through a breathing exercise to aid in relaxation and stress relief. And for wheelchair users, watchOS 3 offers wheelchair-specific measurements and encouragement, such as a “roll” ring instead of a “stand” ring.
Replies
I noted above that by far the most common type of messaging that I do on the Apple Watch is replies — reply to a text message, or reply to an email. Replies are better in watchOS 3.
First, Apple removed one of the steps for replying. Instead of tapping Reply and then tapping how you want to reply (such as dictating a reply or selecting a recommended reply), you can now just directly tap the method for replying. Skip over the step of tapping Reply first.
Second, if none of the suggested replies is appropriate but you don’t want to speak to your watch (because, for example, you are in a meeting), you can now write your response using the new Scribble feature. Use your finger to spell one letter at a time to draft a reply on the watch. You are not going to want to scribble, letter by letter, an entire paragraph to add to a brief. But if someone asks what conference room you are in, you can quickly scribble something like 46A.
It works for both English and Chinese.
Speaking of sending messages, watchOS 3 takes advantage of the same glitz added to Messages in iOS 3. Thus, you can send and receive stickers (small pictures), animations such as confetti across the screen, etc.
Watch faces
I had hoped that Apple would allow third party watch faces in watchOS 3. They didn’t. I guess that will now be at the top of my feature request for watchOS 4.
But Apple is adding a few new built-in watch face options in watchOS 3. I already mentioned the watch face with activity rings. There some others too, including a Minnie Mouse. Perhaps we will see Donald Duck in watchOS 4. By the way, Apple didn’t announce this, but I’ve heard others say that if you tap the Mickey or Minnie watch face, you can hear the cartoon character’s voice say the time out loud.
Changing watch faces is now faster. Instead of a force touch followed by a swipe left or right, you can now use an edge-to-edge (left or right) swipe on the watch face to change to a different face. Put two watch faces that you like side-by-side, and you can swap them pretty quickly.
watchOS 3 also adds many new complications for built-in apps that you can use on watch faces, and increases the number of complications that you can use on some of the watch faces.
SOS
Hopefully you won’t need to use this feature, but it is nice knowing that it is there. If you press and hold the side button, the Apple Watch will start a countdown timer to call for help. Unless you cancel within a few seconds, your watch will automatically call 911 (or the appropriate emergency services number for the country that you are in). You can then talk to the 911 operator on your watch. After you hang up with 911, the watch can automatically send a message to your emergency contacts along with a map of where you are located so that they can also help you.
Your watch can also show your medical ID with whatever information that you put in it, such as your name, birthday, allergies, etc.
Reminders
You can already use Siri to create a reminder, and your watch will already notify you if it is time to remind you about something. WatchOS 3 adds a Reminders app so you can see and manage your reminders. This means that you can see all of your lists on your watch, such as your grocery list, and you can check off items right on the watch.
Find My Friends
Similarly, while you can currently use Siri to work with some Find My Friends features, watchOS 3 adds a new Find My Friends app. So you can just glance at your watch to see if your kids got to their activities on time, or see where your spouse is when you made it to the restaurant first.
Home
The new Home app will let you manage all of your HomeKit-enabled devices from the watch. Adjust the lighting, check the thermostat, etc.
Unlock your Mac
If you use a Mac, your computer can sense that you are nearby and wearing your Apple Watch to automatically log you in to your computer as you sit down in front of your computer.
Summary
The Apple Watch is going to be considerably better when watchOS 3 comes out this Fall. The speed improvements alone are going to be fantastic, but I also really like all of the interface improvements such as the use of the button for the Dock. And with the new apps and fitness improvements, pretty much everything that I do now on my Apple Watch will be better with watchOS 3.
Sure, at some point, maybe even later this year, Apple will release a second generation of the Apple Watch. And I’m sure that it will add some new feature that will make me want to upgrade. But I love that the current generation Apple Watch will get a huge boost just with the new software in watchOS 3.
And for those of us who do upgrade in the future, thanks to the new SOS feature in watchOS 3, I suspect that a lot of first generation Apple Watches will be going to parents and grandparents.
Most of the news of note this week relates to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Some if it relates to the announcements in the Keynote address, but other tidbits have been coming out during the week as folks have started to get a close look at the early beta of the new operating systems for the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. So without further ado, the news of note from the past week:
Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reports on the interesting tale of Fixed, an iPhone app that helped you with traffic citations. The idea is that you would scan the ticket and then the app would check for common errors and craft a customized letter on your behalf to challenge the ticket. But local governments hated the app and came up with ways to block it, which led to some changes in the app. The latest in the story is that a law firm recently acquired the app and hopes to make the technology work again. It’s an interesting story about the intersection of law and mobile technology.
California attorney David Sparks discusses the issue of service versus privacy in the context of the WWDC keynote announcements.
One more nice bit of news from Sparks. The big news about watchOS 3 is that it is supposed to be so much faster, even on current Apple Watch models. I’ve wondered if the reality would match the hype, but Sparks has been hanging out with folks running the beta of watchOS 3 on their Apple Watches, and he says: “I’m relieved to report that the watch improvements are for real. Apps do launch fast and the watch is significantly snappier.” The only remaining question is, why did Sparks, who is an even bigger Star Wars fan than I am, not title this post: “Crazy thing is, it’s true. … All of it. It’s all true.”
Slide to Unlock has been one of the iPhone’s trademark features since the very first iPhone, but it is going away in iOS 10. Susie Ochs of Macworld explains.
Billboard magazine interviewed four Apple executives to discuss Apple Music: Eddy Cue, Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor and Robert Kondrk, as reported by Shirley Halperin. It’s an interesting interview that addresses the intersection of music and technology.
Last month I explained that, if you have an iPhone 6s, you can create a PDF of an email (or anything else that you can print) using 3D Touch. According to Jordan Kahn of 9to5Mac, iOS 10 will bring to all devices the ability to create a PDF file from the Print screen. Great news.
If you use HomeKit devices in your home, the new Home app in iOS 10 will be very useful. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac shows off the new Home app.
And finally, during the Keynote address earlier this week, there was actually an amusing lawyer-related joke that was easy to miss if you were not paying attention. Apple’s vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, showed off a new feature in iOS 10 where you can 3D Touch on the Mail app icon to see who your unread messages are from, before the app itself even opens. In Federighi’s example, there were hundreds of unread messages. When he 3D Touched the mail icon, there were images of the top mail senders: Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple vice presidents Angela Ahrendts and Lisa Jackson, and Bruce Sewell, who has been Apple’s General Counsel since 2009. If you look close enough, you can see that every single one of the unread messages to Federighi were from Bruce Sewell. You can watch the video on Apple’s website, or I have embedded it below. Jump to the 54 minute mark to see the joke. Hopefully your own clients are a little more responsive to your own emails.
Yesterday morning during the Keynote Address that kicked off Apple’s WWDC developer conference, Apple announced new versions of the operating systems for the iPhone/iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, all of which will be released in just a few months this Fall. The updates to watchOS look really incredible, but I want to take some more time to understand them before I write about them. Today, I’m focusing on what is new in iOS 10. There was not a major focus on productivity features (which are typically most useful for lawyers), but there are lots of updates that make the entire iPhone/iPad more enjoyable to use, which will make it easier to get work done with these devices. And when the work day is over and you can focus on your personal life, great new features such as the Memories button in the Photos app will make iOS devices much more delightful. This looks to be a great update. Here are the key features that jumped out at me.
iPad split-view
I’ll start with the iPad because there was only one iPad-only feature showed off yesterday, but it is a nice one, especially for attorneys who use the larger 12.9″ iPad Pro. Safari in iOS 10 will support a split-view mode, so that you can view two web pages at the same time, one on the left and one on the right. You can enter text in a browser on the left while you look up information on the right. You can copy from one website and paste into another website.
That’s not the only split-view improvement for the iPad. Apple didn’t demo the feature yesterday, but Apple briefly showed a slide listing other new features by title, and one o them was side-by-side mail composing on the iPad. I hope this means that you will be able to draft an email on one half of the screen while you look at a different email on the other half of the screen. That would be really useful.
Universal Clipboard
Your iPhone and iPad work together even better in iOS 10 because of the new shared clipboard feature. You can copy something on your iPhone, then paste on the iPad, and vice versa. And if you use a Mac, the clipboard is shared with your computer as well.
Lock Screen
The lock screen in iOS 9 can already display some useful information, but it will be much better in iOS 10. First, it will be easier to even see the lock screen. Currently, when you pick up your iPhone, the screen is black. You can press the home button to wake the screen, but because Touch ID is so fast that also unlocks the phone before you could see what was on the lock screen. In iOS 10, simply picking up the phone will turn on the lock screen thanks to the new raise to wake feature, giving you time to see the lock screen before you unlock your iPhone.
On that lock screen, notifications will be even more useful. The notifications themselves will include more information. Moreover, you can use 3D Touch to act upon the notifications and get even more information.
Third party apps can also take advantage of the new lock screen notifications feature.
Taking a picture from the lock screen will be even faster in iOS 10. In iOS 9, you can swipe up on the small little camera icon. But in iOS 10, just swipe from the right at any point on the screen to swipe over to the camera. Getting into the camera faster means that you are even more likely to take a picture before the moment has passed.
If you slide over from the left, you can see widgets, such as weather, calendar, top news stories, etc.
One danger of having too much information appear on the Lock Screen is that someone else can pick up your phone and see information without even knowing the passcode to unlock your phone. This may cause me to limit the information on my iOS 10 lock screen. Nevertheless, it is nice to have so many more capabilities.
3D Touch on the Home Screen
In iOS 9, you can 3D Touch on an app icon on the Home Screen and see a list of a few items. Tap on an item to not only open the app but also jump right to that item or feature. In iOS 10, 3D Touch can still do that, but it also displays information from the app before you even open the app. So if you 3D Touch on the Mail app icon, and you will see the pictures of the top people who have sent you mail messages and how many unread messages you have from each person. Or 3D Touch the ESPN app and see the score of a game before the app even opens.
Siri
Siri will get much more powerful in iOS 10 because third parties will be able to incorporate Siri into their apps. This means that you will be able to ask Siri to do even more for you. For example, while you can currently use Siri to send and read text messages using Apple’s own Messages app, in iOS 10 you will be able to use Siri with third party messaging apps such as Slack. Or you can talk to transportation apps such as Uber and Lyft. Or you can talk to third party workout apps.
QuickType
In iOS 9, the QuickType bar just above the keyboard will suggest three words or phrases as you are typing. For example, if you are typing an email message in the Mail app and you type “motion for” and then tap the “s,” QuickType will suggest “summary” and then once you tap summary it will next suggest “judgment.” In iOS 10, QuickType will get even smarter by looking even deeper into the context of your entire message to help predict what you want to type next and offer that up in the QuickType bar. For example, if you type “The Orioles are playing in the” QuickType in iOS 10 will suggest “playoffs,” but if you type “The children are playing in the” QuickType in iOS 10 will suggest “yard” and “playground” and “park.”
QuickType will also suggest items other than words. For example, if you are in the Messages app and someone asks “where are you,” the QuickType bar will give you the option to send a map with your current location.
As a result, apps such a Mail and Messages will get even smarter and more helpful as you type.
The Memories button in the Photos app
As we move from productivity enhancements to the new features that just make your iPhone more enjoyable to use, especially outside in your personal life outside of the office, I cannot wait to use the new Memories feature in the Photos app. I love taking pictures and videos at an event and then creating a home movie for that event from that media to watch on my iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. The problem is that creating those home movies takes a lot of time. I need to select the best pictures and video clips, find appropriate music, sync the photos to the music so that the transitions occur in sync to the measures of the song, etc. It can easily take me well over an hour to create a video in iMovie that lasts just a minute or two. As a result, I rarely get around to creating these videos. Fortunately, with the new Memories feature, those movies can be created automatically in just seconds.
Before talking about Memories, I want to talk about other Photos improvements that are used with the Memories feature. First, the Photos app on the iPhone/iPad can now automatically recognize faces. Thus, the app can automatically determine which pictures are of you, your spouse, your kids, etc. Second, the Photos app can now automatically recognize objects and scenes. Thus, the app will automatically detect animals, backgrounds, etc. so that it knows which of your photos are taken on a lake, which ones include your dog, etc.
Using that information from Faces, Objects and Scenes, along with other information such as date and location that the picture was taken, the Photos app will group together pictures. A group might include the pictures you took on a specific vacation trip, or it might include different pictures of your kids throughout the year 2015, or it might include pictures that you took at the beach in different years.
Photos will then pick what it thinks are the best photos (and videos) in that group, and will create a movie — a slideshow / collection of video clips with background music.
The Memories feature of Photos will even create movies using pictures that you would not have even thought to group together on your own, such as pictures over the years taken at your brother’s house.
Based on the demo that Apple showed yesterday, the default Memories videos are great, but you can also edit a default video by making it longer or shorter, and by changing the mood. For some slideshows, you might want a “sentimental” theme. For others, you might want the “epic” theme.
These movies are awesome, but there is more. Memories will also show you the best pictures from these groups by automatically creating a summary. For example, the app can look across all of your pictures of your parents and create a group of the best pictures taken from different years.
The iPhone makes it so easy to take pictures that you probably have tons of them, far more than you could every look at in one sitting. And if you have been taking digital pictures since even before the iPhone, like I have, then you may have tens of thousands of pictures. (I see that I currently have over 43,000 in my Photos app.) By taking the pictures and videos that you already have (and may have even forgotten about) and by using artificial intelligence to group the best ones together in a way that makes sense, and by presenting them to you in great videos with appropriate background music, the Memories feature in iOS 10 will truly bring new life to the pictures and videos that you already have. It’s like paying an intern to go through all of your boxes of pictures to create something cool, except that it is free and instantaneous.
You can also use the Apple TV to see the Memories created on your iPhone. Thus, you can be sitting on your living room couch and want to look at some pictures, not even knowing what you want to look at, and the Photos app on the Apple TV will suggest some interesting Memories created on your iPhone. If you have been taking pictures of your friends and family over the years, I can see this being a serious time suck — but a great walk down memory lane.
As Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, said during the Keynote yesterday: “We all take so many pictures and movies, and we never go back to actually assemble them into something we’d want to watch. But now our iPhone can do that for us automatically.” This new Memories feature is quintessential Apple: using high-end technology in an intelligent way so that you don’t have to worry about the details, but which results in an amazing emotional experience. I can’t wait to use it.
Messages
The Messages app has significant new features that make your texts more fun and expressive. The bubbles around messages can now be animated, and you can now send a full screen animation such as balloons floating up the screen on someone’s birthday. You can now handwrite a response to give it a personal touch. The app will suggest Emoji replacements, so if you type “birthday” it can suggest a birthday cake icon. And third parties can now create Messages plug-ins to add stickers, media files, etc.
Some of these new effects might be fun at first but then become gimmicky. But there can be no doubt that starting with iOS 10, Messages will be even more interesting and fun to use.
Voice Mail Transcriptions
In iOS 10, if someone leaves you a voice mail message on your iPhone and you don’t want to take the time to listen to it (or you are in a quiet environment where it is not appropriate to listen), the iPhone can now create a transcription of the voice mail for you. This will surely make it much faster and easier to manage your voice mails, and is a great new feature.
Apple Music
I like the Apple Music service, but the interface can be confusing. It looks like Apple realized this, because Apple Music has a new interface in iOS 10 that looks to be much easier to navigate.
Also, songs now include lyrics too, making it easier to sing along to your favorite song — or just settle a bar bet over what is the fourth word in the refrain.
Etc.
And that just scratches the surface of what is new in iOS 10. There are also big improvements to the Maps app, third party phone apps (using Voice over IP or VOIP) are even more powerful, a new Home app makes it easier to control your HomeKit devices, the News app is better and allows subscriptions. I’ll be curious to try out the Notes collaboration feature, which lets multiple people work live with the same note. And Live Photos will be improved, with digital image stabilization and the ability to edit to make the mini-videos even better.
Plus there are significant security enhancements. For a great read on how Apple will use Differential Privacy to collect data from all users without being able to identify data specific to any one user, check out this article by Andy Greenberg for Wired.
I’m glad to see that iOS 10 will include so many great new features, making current iPhones and iPads even better.
Today, Apple begins its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. At 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern, Apple executives will give a Keynote address that will likely include a preview of the next version of the iPhone/iPad operating system. I hope that Apple also previews what is coming in the future for the Apple Watch. If you want to watch the two hour presentation as it happens, you can watch a live stream here. There are also a number of sites providing live blogs of the event, such as iMore and Macworld.
If you want a taste of what it is like to be in San Francisco for WWDC this week, California attorney David Sparks created a photo diary that will be updated throughout the week.
On Monday, Apple will begin its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. It will be a week full of sessions for app developers to learn how to make better apps for the iPhone and iPad (and better software for the Mac), but it starts off with a Keynote Address given by Apple Executives on Monday at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. I presume that we will see previews of the next version of the iPhone/iPad and Apple Watch system software (although the new operating systems probably won’t be released until September or October), and I’m sure that Apple will have lots of other interesting things to show off. You will be able to watch a live stream of the presentation here, and I’m sure I will have something to say about it all on Tuesday. And now, the news of note from the past two weeks:
California attorney David Sparks reviews Liquid Text 2, an app for viewing PDF files that has some interesting features that lets you look at different sections of the documents at the same time.
Burney also reviews Scanner Pro, currently my favorite app for scanning documents.
A number of lawyers and legal professionals participated in a roundtable for Law Technology Today to discuss the best apps for productivity.
South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn discusses the Lexis Advance HD and TextMap apps.
Zoran Milich of Reuters reports that the U.S. Fourth Circuit ruled that police do not need a warrant to obtain a person’s location using cellphone location data in the possession of a wireless carrier.
Back in 2014, I reviewed an app called Immigration that you can use to see the statutory law relevant to immigration lawyers. The author of the app, San Francisco attorney Josh Adams, wrote me this week to say that he updated the app in several ways: “I enhanced the app to display subsections in variable-length rows. I also added the ability to see subsections on their own screen by long-pressing. Not only that, I have added three additional sources of procedure: the Immigration Court Practice Manual, the Board of Immigration Appeals Practice Manual, and the Foreign Affairs Manual.” Click here to get Immigration ($24.99):
In an article for Macworld, J.R. Bookwalter reviews Avvo, an app that helps individuals find and pay for an attorney.
David Sparks is worried that subscription pricing will lead to subscription fatigue. This is possible, but I like the idea of providing continual support to the developer of a useful app so that the app is improved. Having said that, I admit that it could be a problem if a developer stops improving an app, because I presume that if you stop paying then the app stops working. I currently have some older apps that I purchased a long time ago which I continue to use but haven’t been updated in a long time. We’ll have to see how this all pans out in actual use, but in general I support the idea of more flexible pricing models.
Motion Stills is an interesting app from Google that creates GIFs from Live Photos, improving the result by using video stabilization technology. It’s pretty neat.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had his LinkedIn password hacked. And since he used the same password — dadada — on Twitter and Pinterest, those accounts were hacked too. Holly Ellyatt of CNBC has more details. Take this as a public service announcement that you should not use the same password on multiple sites. Especially if you are Mark Zuckerberg.
Djuro Sen of Australia’s 7 News reports on a mother who used the “Hey Siri” function to call an ambulance after she dropped her phone, rushing to get her one-year-old daughter breathing again. Siri called the ambulance, and now the girl is fine.
David Pogue of Yahoo! Finance discusses services that you can use to digitize your old videotapes before they deteriorate. I used an old videotape player and a box that connects that to a computer to digitize my old videotapes a few years ago. I’m glad that I did so because many of those tapes were clearly on their last legs, and it would have been a shame to lose the memories forever. Plus, my old videos included family members who are no longer alive. If you haven’t yet taken steps to preserve your aging photographs and videos, I urge you to do so.
And finally, Apple released some great new “shot on iPhone” video ads this week. Buster Hein of Cult of Mac created a post with all seven of them embedded. I especially like this one, shot by Craig J. of Kasane, Botswana:
For the past few weeks, I’ve been preparing for an oral argument before the U.S. Fifth Circuit, which took place yesterday. My iPad has been a critical part of of the process, so I thought I’d talk about some of the ways that I have been using my iPad to prepare for and present my oral argument. I happen to be using as 12.9″ iPad Pro, and that huge screen was fantastic as I reviewed items in the record on appeal. Nevertheless, everything that I did would have worked with other iPad models too.
Record on Appeal
The Fifth Circuit is completely electronic and paperless. You file a brief by using a website (somewhat similar to the Pacer system used at the federal district court level). Judges also read briefs using iPads, as has been previously reported by Ray Ward, an appellate attorney at my firm who publishes the Louisiana Civil Appeals blog. So unsurprisingly, the Record on Appeal is also provided in an electronic format. You download it using the Fifth Circuit’s (rather clunky) Java-based system using a computer.
In my case, the Record on Appeal consisted of a docket sheet plus 22 volumes, each a separate PDF file. Each volume contained around 400 pages. The bottom right of each page had an annotation with the page number, affixed by the district court when it prepared the Record on Appeal.
The first thing that I did was rename each of those PDF files so that the title corresponded to the page number of the first page in the volume, such as 3532.pdf, 3932.pdf, 4332,pdf, 4720.pdf, 5018.pdf, etc. That way, I could quickly determine which volume contained a specific page. For example, if I wanted page 3894, I knew that it was in the file called 3532.pdf because the next volume started with a number higher than 3894. I actually did all of this way back when I was drafting my Appellee Brief, but it remained just as useful in preparing for oral argument.
Inside of the folder in my Dropbox associated with this case, I created a subfolder called Record on Appeal and added all of the PDF files. Then, I used the GoodReader app to sync everything into GoodReader on my iPad.
Most of the items in the Record on Appeal in my case were already OCR’d. For example, any brief filed at the district court level was a PDF created from a word processing document, and thus already had the text embedded in the PDF file. Additionally, in my cases, most of the depositions were also filed in a format with text embedded. However, for volumes with important information that I would want to be able to search using a full text search, I used a program on my PC to OCR the document and saved that version into my folder. Having a document or exhibit OCR’d is also handy if you want to highlight words in the document.
As a part of my preparation for oral argument, I reviewed the entire Record on Appeal. (Of course, I had already looked at most of it to prepare my Appellee Brief a few months back.) As I reviewed the record, whenever I came across something important I annotated it, either using the highlight feature of GoodReader, or sometimes by using a stylus to circle something and/or make notes in the margins. For particularly important items, I used the Bookmarks feature of GoodReader so that I could jump directly there in the future.
One nice feature of the electronic Record on Appeal is that it already contained a built-in outline of the items. Thus, I could use the Outline feature of GoodReader to see an index of all of the items in each volume of the record, which made it quick to jump around.
After reviewing the Record on Appeal on my iPad, annotating and/or bookmarking what was important, and then returning to the important parts to review them again, I had a pretty good handle on the facts in the record.
Cases
Of course, the facts are half of the story; you also need to know the law. I downloaded in PDF format from Westlaw or Lexis each of the important cases cited in any of the briefs, and even some cases not cited in the briefs but that could be relevant, and put them all in a folder on Dropbox called Research. I synced those over to my iPad as well so that I could read, highlight, and annotate cases.
Briefs
As you can guess, I also had another folder on Dropbox with all of the appellant and appellee briefs in my case.
Other apps
GoodReader was the main app that I used to prepare for oral argument, but I used some others as well. My particular case happened to involve a series of houses in a certain neighborhood of New Orleans. I used the Apple Maps app to get a general overview — a bird’s eye view — of what the neighborhood looked like. I also used Google Maps and its Streeview feature to see what particular houses looked like from the street. None of this was in the record so it isn’t like I would specifically reference in oral argument something that I saw, but these mapping apps helped me to get a general understanding of the properties at issue in my case.
I used the Westlaw app to do legal research on my iPad. Of course with the briefs already submitted most of the core research had already been done, but it was still helpful to read key cases in those apps and then learn how other courts quoted and dealt with those cases.
As I prepared for oral argument, I used Microsoft Word on my computer to take notes and prepare the outline of my argument. While I did most of that work on my computer, I also sometimes used the Microsoft Word app on my iPad to modify those documents. For example, one night I was on my couch at home reviewing cases and I thought of another argument, so I used the LogMeIn app to connect to my work computer and access my outline, opened it in Word on my iPad, made the changes to the outline, and then saved the file back to my work computer.
In this particular case I was brought in as appeal counsel, and thus I worked with the PDF copies of transcripts in the Record on Appeal. However, had I been involved in the case at the district court level, I suspect that the deposition and hearing transcripts would have already been in the TranscriptPad app on my iPad and I might have used that app to read and annotate transcripts. But in this case, I didn’t happen to use TranscriptPad.
The net result
As a result of the above activities, I had the record, the caselaw, and everything else that I needed to prepare for oral argument on my iPad. This was very convenient because whether I was working in my office, at home, in a conference room at my firm, or in another attorney’s office, I always had instant access to all aspects of the case.
It wasn’t that many years ago that I was working on appeals with the record in paper form, bound in volumes that took up many boxes. I would spread them out on a table and make that the war room for my appeal, but it meant that every time I wanted to review the record I had to go to that room. It is infinitely more convenient to have all aspects of the record with me at all times, just a tap or two away.
The day of oral argument
As I noted in a post last year, the Fifth Circuit generally does not allow you to use electronic devices in the courtroom. Your iPhone must be turned off — not just airplane mode. However, the Fifth Circuit adopted a rule in January of 2015 (available here) which states that “an attorney presenting argument or assisting at counsel table may use a laptop, tablet, or similar device.”
In fact, as I entered the courtroom of the Fifth Circuit yesterday, I saw a sign confirming the same policy:
I took full advantage of this policy. No, I didn’t use my iPad to be paperless during oral argument. For example, my outline was on the front and back of a single sheet of paper. Because I memorized my prepared comments, I didn’t really need that sheet of paper much, but it was comforting to know that it was there. (And given the number of questions that the judges asked, I didn’t follow the outline anyway.) Also, I had printed out that short Microsoft Word file that contained my notes, such as information on the important cases, additional information about items in the record on appeal, etc. I also printed out the two most important cases so that I could more easily quote from them during oral argument if necessary. (I turned out, that wasn’t necessary because the few quotes I needed were on my outline.)
But thanks to my iPad, I didn’t need to also lug around a ton of paper, binders, etc. with all of the briefs, other cases, the Record on Appeal, etc. If I needed to look up something from the record or a case as my opponent was arguing, everything was on my iPad so I could do so — complete with all of the annotations I created as I prepared for oral argument. Thus, I had the security of knowing that everything was with me, without all of the cumbersome paper that would have make it virtually impossible to quickly jump to the one page that I need. And when I went up to the podium, I just took those few sheets of paper including my outline and notes, my iPad, and the legal pad that I had used to take notes while my opponent spoke.
There were a few settings on my iPad that I changed the morning of oral argument. First, I turned the volume all the way down to zero. Second, in the Settings app, I went to General -> Auto-Lock and changed it from my normal 5 minutes to Never. That way, if I had an important case or record item on my screen, it would stay on my screen without having my lock screen show up after a few minutes. In court, I did not tether to my iPhone (which was off) or attempt to connect to any Wi-Fi network because I didn’t want any text messages, emails, or other alerts showing up on my screen. (My iPad doesn’t have a built-in cellular connection, but if it did, I would have turned it off.)
Conclusion
Obviously, I don’t yet know whether I will win or lose this appeal. But whatever the result, I was much better prepared thanks to my iPad. [UPDATE 8/8/16: Fortunately, I did win!] The annotation tools in GoodReader were incredibly helpful and easy to use, and the time that I saved not searching for paper (or traveling to a file room containing all of that paper) gave me much more time to analyze the facts and the law.
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