If you had to deal with the cold weather this week, I hope that it went OK for you. It caused a lot of chaos down here in New Orleans. Precipitation and below-freezing temperatures are so rare down here that we don’t have good ways of dealing with ice on roads, plus many of the pipes in our homes are exposed and can freeze. As a result, schools and offices were closed much of this week, the Interstate was closed, there is a boil water advisory (meaning that we are not supposed to drink tap water in New Orleans), etc. Ugh. Fortunately, it was pretty easy for me to work when I was out of the office just using my iPad and iPhone. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn has a daughter who is in high school, Rebecca Kahn, who somehow managed to score an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, as detailed in this article.
- In the latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast, Florida attorney Kate Floyd and California attorney David Sparks discuss apps and workflows for being more productive with an iPad.
- Virginia attorney Sharon Nelson discusses the new policies announced by Customs and Border Protection on searching your iPhone when you return to the U.S. I discussed the impact this has on attorneys in this post.
- According to a tweet by Erik Schwiebert, a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, this is now the first time in 20 years that Microsoft Office is using the same codebase for all platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS and Android). The last time that happened, Microsoft imposed the PC interface on the Mac, which I didn’t like. But this time, I really like the way that Microsoft Word looks and works, and hopefully the shared codebase will result in even more integration. My next request: robust support for Styles in the iOS app!
- Apple announced this week that it will take advantage of a repatriation provision in the new tax law to bring back the vast majority of the $252 billion in cash that Apple has been keeping outside of the U.S. It will pay about $38 billion in taxes, and then some of the remaining money will be devoted to creating 20,000 new jobs, a new campus in the U.S., and (as reported by Chaim Gartenberg of The Verge), $2,500 bonuses to every Apple employee in the form of restricted stock units.
- Thomas Fox-Brewster of Forbes wrote an interesting article on the relationship between Apple and law enforcement regarding accessing iPhones.
- Back in 2016, I reviewed an app called Parkmobile which you can use to pay for street parking using an iPhone. It works well, and there have been times when I have been in a deposition which ran long and I was able to add more time to my parking meter just using an iPhone app, which is very cool. Darrel Etherinton of TechCrunch reported this week that BMW acquired the Parkmobile app. I hope that they don’t ruin the app; I’m a little concerned considering this report by Zac Estrada of The Verge that BMW is planning to make you pay an annual fee to BMW if you want to use Apple CarPlay in its cars, something that no other car maker has done.
- Speaking of CarPlay, Joe Rossignol of MacRumors reported this week that Toyota is finally adding CarPlay support to its cars, starting with some 2019 models. The same is true for Lexus, the luxury car division of Toyota. Toyota was one of the last major CarPlay holdouts. I bought a Honda Accord last year, and one of the reasons that I didn’t even consider a Toyota Camry was the lack of CarPlay support. I guess Toyota realized that there are a lot of folks like me.
- Horace Dediu of Asymco reports that Apple’s App Store will overtake global box office sales in 2018.
- And finally, I love using my iPad to take handwritten notes. In this new commercial, Apple shows that I can do that even when in a tree: