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:
- North Carolina attorney Brian Focht names his favorite apps for taking depositions.
- 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.
- Sparks also reviews the Waterfield Staad Backpack, which can hold a large iPad Pro.
- E-discovery consultant Brett Burney reviews TrialDirector for iPad, an app for presenting documents at trial.
- 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.
- Joshua Dalman, a digital forensics examiner in the Maryland, explains what kind of data can be found on an iPhone in an article for the ABA Section of Litigation.
- 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.
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains that Apple is making some significant changes to the App Store, including adding subscription pricing for apps.
- 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.
- Brandon Chester of AnandTech reviews the new 9.7" iPad Pro.
- Jason Snell reviews the Apple TV in an article for Macworld.
- 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: