Next week we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iPhone going on sale. On June 29, 2007, about six months after Steve Jobs first previewed the iPhone, long lines formed to be among the first to use this revolutionary device. The idea of a smartphone without a physical keyboard seemed insane to many, and the first generation of the iPhone was extremely limited, but it still forever changed not only the cellphone industry, but the entire technology sector. In an article for BackChannel on Wired, Steven Levy talks about being one of only four reviewers to try out an iPhone before they went on sale to the public. (The others were Walt Mossberg who was with the Wall Street Journal, David Pogue who was with the New York Times, and Ed Baig of USA Today.) And now, the recent news of note:
- I bought the 12.9" version of the new iPad Pro. I'll have a full review soon, but in short the speed is amazing and the improved screen is very nice. California attorney David Sparks decided to switch from his prior 12.9" version to the new 10.5" version, and wrote a review after one week with the new iPad.
- TranscriptPad was updated to version 2.3.0 and adds two great new features. First, the app can now create impeachment reports. Second, the app can now create a report with marked testimony in chronological order instead of sorted by issue code. A blog post on the Lit Software website explains these two new features.
- ExhibitView for iPad was updated to version 7 not that long ago, featuring retina graphics and more printing options. Click here for more information.
- In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell explains why typing is much better on the 10.5" iPad than the former 9.7" version, even though that size difference seems minor.
- In an article for Six Colors, Snell explains what is different between the original 12.9" iPad Pro and the 2017 edition.
- If you get a new iPad (or iPhone), you might decide to hand over your old device to a child. Ben Patterson of Macworld offers advice for things to do before giving your iOS device to a child.
- In a two hour interview for the Computer History Museum, five folks talk about the creation of the iPhone. The first hour features iPhone Engineers Nitin Ganatra, Scott Herz, and Hugo Fiennes. The second hour features Scott Forstall, the iPhone software team leader, in what is I believe his first public discussion of working at Apple since he left the company.
- The CarPlay Life website discusses what is new for CarPlay in iOS 11.
- David Pogue of Yahoo identifies some of the most interesting new features in iOS 11.
- Juli Clover of MacRumors discusses some of the interesting smaller features of iOS 11.
- Michael Simon of Macworld discusses what is new about watchOS 4.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors reviews an iClever ergonomic keyboard that folds in half. When I travel, I still enjoy using a different iClever foldable keyboard I reviewed last year.
- If you currently pay $9.99 a month for Apple Music, Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that you can now save yourself some money by changing to $99.99 a year. I don't yet see an annual rate for a family plan.
- Apple is now selling a new Pride Edition of the Apple Watch woven nylon band for $49, as explained by Lory Gil of iMore. Although this band features six colors, they start at red and end at purple; even so, it sort of reminds me of the six colors of the original Apple logo, which started at blue and went to green.
- And finally, I recently took a road trip with my kids, and the day that I got home, the Memories feature of Photos was nice enough to put together a great video containing still photos, live photos, and short video clips from my trip. The automatically-created version was great, but it was easy to make some small edits to it, removing some photos I didn't like and adding others that I love, and within minutes I had a fantastic slideshow that, before Memories, would have taken me hours to create. And as nice as that was for a recent trip, I also love how Memories creates videos of older photos that I haven't seen in a while. If you take pictures with your iPhone and don't yet pay attention to the Memories feature, you should do so. And to remind you to do so, Apple recently released a new commercial for Memories, showing what it might have taken in the old days to get similar results: