If you are wearing an Apple Watch and get into an accident, you can hold down the large button on the side of the watch for a few seconds and your watch will call 911 emergency services. Apple explains how this feature works on its website. You can do the same thing with an iPhone by holding the buttons on both sides, as Apple explains on this page. Kylie Gilbert of Shape magazine reports that a woman in Pennsylvania used the feature after getting into a car accident, and she credits her Apple Watch for the saving her life and her son's life. That's amazing. Less amazing is that an Apple iPhone repair facility in Sacramento has been making around 20 accidental 911 calls a day, and — as you would expect — Apple is trying to fix that. Hopefully you will never need to use this feature on your own Apple Watch or iPhone, but I encourage you to read the Apple pages on how these features work so that if the need arises, you can get emergency help. And now, the recent news of note:
- California attorney David Sparks compares and contrasts Overcast and the Apple Podcasts app, the two best ways to listen to podcasts on an iPhone. As he notes, the Siri integration is the killer advantage of Apple's app, but I still prefer using Overcast.
- Sparks also discusses Apple's new Close Your Rings page on its website, which encourages folks to get all of the activity circles on an Apple Watch every day. Like David, I try to get all of my circles every day. I was bummed to break a 183-day green circle streak during a recent vacation, but my red and blue circle streaks are still going strong, and keep me motivated to stay much more active than I would be otherwise.
- In the latest episode of the Apps in Law Podcast, Brett Burney interviews California appellate attorney Robin Meadow to discuss Microsoft OneNote and Evernote.
- The Lit Software blog explains how California attorney Tom Vidal uses TrialPad, TranscriptPad and DocReviewPad.
- David Lumb of Engadget reports that Apple updated iOS and other platforms this week to fix a bug which could cause crashes if you received a single Indian-language character via a text message or some other apps.
- I've read lots of interviews of Apple CEO Tim Cook over the years, but this week Fast Company published an interview of Cook by Ben Lovejoy, and it is one of the best I've seen in a long time, with lots of detail and insight on how Cook sees Apple.
- The iPad lacks native support for getting files on or off of a USB thumb drive, but Charlie Sorrel of Cult of Mac describes a workaround using Apple's Files app and a Sandisk iXpand Drive.
- Michelle Martin of Reuters reports that director Steven Soderbergh used an iPhone to create a movie called Unsane, which will premiere at the Berlin film festival.
- And finally, here is a fun video on YouTube showing what Siri might have looked like if it was introduced in the 1980s. There are so many things I love about this video. It was produced to look like the tech shows in the 1980s, and the content reminds me of using so many computers I used in the 1980s — an IBM-PC, a Mac, my Commodore 64, and even my Sinclair ZX81 which I equipped with a speech synthesizer. Very clever.