I’m headed to Chicago today for ABA TECHSHOW 2019. If you will be there too, please say hello!
On Thursday night, California attorney David Sparks of MacSparky and Mac Power Users and I will co-host one of the Taste of Techshow dinners. While our dinner is currently sold out, there are still spots open for other dinners.
On Friday morning, you will not find me 7am at the 3rd Annual TECHSHOW 5K, but congrats to all of you who are completing the circles on your Apple Watch that early in the morning. You will find me presenting a session at 8:30 a.m. in Room Columbus GH with Virginia attorney Sharon Nelson, a former TECHSHOW chair, a former president of the Virginia State Bar, publisher of Ride the Lightning, and the current President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a digital forensics, cybersecurity and information technology firm in Fairfax, Virginia. Our session is titled Vetting Technology: Avoid Indecision Paralysis. We will be giving advice on the types of technology that you should consider purchasing for your law firm and then provide tips on selecting what technology is the best for your firm. Sharon has worked with many smaller law firms and I have experience as the Chair of the Technology Committee at my (relatively) large law firm, Adams and Reese. This will be the first time that I’ve done a presentation with Sharon, but I’ve known her for years and she really knows her stuff. I’d love to have you join us.
Then at 10:30, you can join me in Room Columbus AB where I will team up with legal tech consultant Brett Burney of Apps in Law, who is also a former ABA TECHSHOW chair. Our topic is Get Your Mobile Ninja On: Top iOS Tips, Apps, and Gear. Imagine the old 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session that used to be at TECHSHOW, add on top of it a session full of iOS tips, and then add on top of that some hardware accessory recommendations. Yikes! It’s a huge topic, we have tons of cool things to talk about, and Brett is one of my favorite people to present with on iOS topics. You won’t want to miss it, and we’ll do our best to squeeze it all into one hour.
I need to leave the conference on Friday — after all, it is Mardi Gras in New Orleans this weekend! — but on Thursday and Friday I look forward to seeing lots of iPhone J.D. readers, especially all of you who I have gotten to know at prior conferences. If you are staying in Chicago through the weekend, consider attending the live recording of Mac Power Users on Saturday night.
Mardi Gras season officially kicked off in New Orleans a while back, but it kicks into high gear this weekend with the first of two big weekends of parades. If you find yourself here in the Crescent City this weekend, enjoy yourself, and I hope that you catch some great throws. And now, the news of note from the past week:
In an article for Law Technology Today, Illinois attorney David Buddingh describes EIE (Encrypted Information Exchange), an app he developed to provided encrypted end-to-end communications between attorneys and clients while also keeping a record of the conversation. The app will be exhibited at ABA TECHSHOW next week.
On his own Six Colors website, Snell explains the setup he used to record podcasts using an iPad Pro instead of a computer. He came up with a solution that works well, but it still seems way too convoluted to me. Hopefully Apple will make it easier for multiple apps to work with audio files in the next update to iOS for iPad.
If you want to use a VPN service on your iPhone or iPad to protect your security, Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac discusses some of the best VPN services for iOS.
And finally, maybe it’s just because I have an interest in photography, but I think that this new ad from Apple called Bokeh’d is one of the funniest Apple ads in a long time. The actresses do a perfect job with their lines. (It makes me miss the days of the funny “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ads.) Worth watching:
One of the most useful apps for an attorney using an iPad is an app that can be used to read, annotate, and manage PDF documents. For many years, the app that I used and recommended was GoodReader. Last year, I grew frustrated waiting over four years for an update to that app, so I started to look for the best replacement. After a lot of research, I settled on PDF Expert by Readdle, and I’ve now been using the app for many months. This is a fantastic app, and I recommend it without hesitation for any attorney using an iPad. As I noted earlier this month, the long-awaited version 5 of GoodReader is now available, and it is also an excellent app. But after going back and forth between the two, there is more that I like about PDF Expert, so if I was asked to recommend just one app for working with PDF documents, PDF Expert is currently my favorite.
Viewing documents
PDF Expert does an excellent job of displaying PDF files. Pages load quickly and it is fast to go back and forth between pages. Normally, a menu bar appears at the top of the screen, but you can tap of the middle of the screen to make the menu bar disappear, which means that the entire screen is devoted to your document. An indicator at the bottom right shows you what page number you are viewing in the document, although you can turn that off in the app settings or choose to have it appear and disappear automatically.
If you tap the button with the letter A at the right of the menu bar, you can select if you want to be in continuous scroll mode (where you continue to flick up or down to page through the entire document), single page view (where you swipe left or right to move between pages) and a view with two pages side-by-side on the screen. That two-page mode is useful when you want to skim a document.
There is also a Crop mode switch. It only works in documents that have been OCR’d, and unlike some other apps like GoodReader where you can adjust the crop margins yourself, in PDF Expert the app automatically crops the blank margins. I don’t like that you can’t adjust how much or how little crop there is, but sometimes the automatic cropping works well, and when it does it becomes easy to hide the margins on a document so that you can make the text portion even bigger and easier to read.
To quickly scroll through a document, you need to drag a very tiny gray rectangle on the side of the screen. Once you grab it, it works, but the rectangle is so small that I often find it very hard to grab, especially when it is all the way the top or all the way at the bottom. This is actually one of my largest gripes with this app. It is easier to grab it when using the precise tip of an Apple Pencil, but I wish it worked better with a finger. Simply making the rectangle bigger would probably be an easy solution. I prefer the way that GoodReader handles scrolling through a document — placing small page preview thumbnail images along the bottom of the screen so that you can drag your finger left or right to quickly scroll.
Tap the magnifying glass icon to search for specific words in the document you are viewing. This is fast and works very well.
You can apply bookmarks within a document to make it easy to return to a page in the document that you previously considered important.
If you tap the Pages button on the toolbar you can see thumbnail images of every page. This is a nice way to scroll through a document and look for a specific page. You can also select one or more pages and manipulate them in various ways, such as moving pages around, exporting specific pages, rotating specific pages, etc.
Annotating documents
Tap the Annotate button at the middle of the menu bar to enter annotation mode. Assuming that the document has been OCR’d, you can easily select text and then choose from the pop-up menu what to do, such as highlight or underline.
The other way to annotate is to tap on the tools on the toolbar that appears after you tap Annotate to choose a specific tool, such as a pen, a circle or square, underling, strike-through, a stamp, etc.
There is an undo button at the very bottom of the toolbar. Tap it once to undo the last action. Hold it down to undo or redo several actions, a useful feature I haven’t seen in other apps.
When you tap the pen tool on the toolbar, four pens appear on the toolbar. The top two pens are normal pens with a specific color and thickness that you can select. I personally find the 1 pt a little too narrow and the 2 pt a little too thick; I prefer GoodReader where you can also select 1.5 pt. The bottom two pens are pressure sensitive pens. Again, you can select the color and thickness, and here you can select more thicknesses such as 1.5 pt. The pressure sensitive pens make the ink thicker when you press down and thinner when you apply less pressure. I’m sure that this is nice for artistic drawings, but when I am annotating a brief sent to me by opposing counsel, I find pressure-sensitive pens to be unnecessary and even annoying. Fortunately, it is easy enough to ignore the bottom two pens, and it is nice to be able tap one of the top two pens to quickly switch between two previously selected pens, such as a thicker red pen or a thinner blue pen. You can also adjust the opacity of pens, but I always keep mine set at 100%.
After you have made an annotation, you can tap on it to change it, such as change the color of something that you wrote, make the pen ink thicker, change the opacity, delete the annotation, etc. You can also use a rectangular-shaped lasso tool to select multiple annotations at once and change them or delete them.
You can tap an icon at the top of the screen to see all of your annotations in a document, making it quick to jump to a specific place. If you used highlight or underline, you see the actual words to which you applied the annotation, which is helpful. If you handwrote something, you only see a pen icon to show you that you did so; there is no preview of what you wrote or anything like that.
Overall, while there are a few additional annotation features I would like to have available, the annotations tools in PDF Expert work well and give me almost all of what I want.
Managing files
While viewing and editing documents is critical, it is the file management feature which makes an app like PDF Expert so useful for my law practice. I can carry around thousands of documents on my iPad so that everything that I might possibly need is there. And this is where PDF Expert really shines.
A Sidebar Menu on the left side lists sources of documents on your iPad, such as folders that are synced or local documents, followed by links to cloud sources such as Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. You cannot have iCloud Drive documents listed there, but PDF Expert does give you access to iCloud Drive in other ways, such as tapping the big plus sign at the bottom right corner of the documents screen.
At the bottom part of the Sidebar Menu, you can show either your recent files or the files / folders you have starred as a favorite.
In the main part of the screen on the right, you see a list of folders and files. Tap on the three dots at the end of a row to see a menu of options such as move, rename, duplicate, zip, etc. If you hold down on a file name for a second, you can then drag-and-drop that file to another location.
For documents that you keep in a cloud service such as Dropbox, PDF Expert does an excellent job of syncing. Unlike GoodReader which syncs either manually (when you press a sync button) or on a timetable you select (like every hour), PDF Expert syncs often, and it does so quickly. (The manual says that it syncs every 10 minutes, but it must also do so whenever you launch the app. Suffice it to say that in my experience, the new files I need are virtually always either already there or are in the process of syncing.) For example, if I put a file in a Dropbox folder on my computer and then turn to my iPad, the file is quickly — almost instantly — updated on my iPad. This is one of the features that I like the most about PDF Expert.
Searching
I mentioned above that you can search within a document. Another incredibly useful feature in PDF Expert is the ability to search within a folder or all documents on your iPad, either by file name or by content. (GoodReader can search by file name, but not by content.) For example, if I am working on a federal appeal, I will have a folder with each volume of the federal record. Most documents on PACER are OCR’d already (although exhibits typically are not). If I want to search across the entire record, I can enter a word and PDF Expert will show me every file that contains that word. Then when I tap on the file, PDF Expert lets me search for that same word within the file so I can quickly get to what I’m looking for.
I really like this search feature, and it is another one of the big reasons that I prefer this app over GoodReader for most tasks.
Etc.
Although these are the most useful parts of the app for me, there are lots of other features. You can zip and unzip files. You can view file types other than PDF files, although you cannot annotate other file types such as Microsoft Word files. You can fill out PDF forms.
For an additional $9.99 in-app purchase, you can enable the feature of editing a document. Although I paid for this feature, I find that I never use it because I virtually never have a need to change a word in a PDF document. But if this feature appeals to you, you can purchase this option.
You can flatten PDF documents, but PDF Expert lacks some of the more sophisticated security features found in GoodReader, such as the ability to remove all metadata using the Secure Photocopy feature.
PDF Expert works on the iPhone as well. Although most of my work takes place on an iPad, it is sometimes nice to view or manipulate a file on my iPhone.
Conclusion
PDF Expert is a fantastic app. It is no exaggeration to say that I use this app every single day that I am working. Having all of the files that I need with me at all times is useful, the annotation features are great, and PDF Expert has lots of options for manipulating files. There are a few features in GoodReader that I’d love to see added to PDF Expert, and I still find myself using GoodReader for some tasks. But overall, PDF Expert is my favorite app for working with PDF documents on an iPad. This app helps to make me a better lawyer.
Click here to get PDF Expert by Readdle ($9.99):
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This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award on February 25, 2019. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
The big Apple news this week is just a rumor, but it comes from enough sources that it may well be true. John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed reported that on March 25th, Apple will hold a big event for the press at the Steve Jobs Theater at its new Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. Paczkowski says that at the event, Apple will unveil its new subscription news service, which I presume will let you pay one price to read lots of magazines and newspapers on your Apple devices. And then, in an article for Fortune, Mark Gurman and Anousha Sakoui reported that this is also the event at which Apple will unveil its video streaming service, which I presume will be a competitor to Netflix. The Fortune article says that Apple will have some Hollywood stars at the event, which could include Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner, and J.J. Abrams. Janko Roettgers and Cynthia Littleton of Variety report that the streaming video service won’t actually launch until the summer or fall. Only Apple knows all of the details, but this looks to be an interesting event. Add these new services to its existing Apple Music service, and subscription services could soon become a major part of Apple’s portfolio. And now, the other news of note from the past week:
I’m currently preparing a presentation that I will be giving with Brett Burney at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago in two weeks. Our presentation will be full of useful tips, app suggestions, recommended hardware, and more for the iPhone and iPad. I’m looking forward to it, so if you will be at TECHSHOW, I encourage you to attend our session on Friday, March 1, at 10:30 a.m.
Another presenter at ABA TECHSHOW 2019 is California attorney David Sparks. This week he explained why he enjoys using an app for the Mac called AirBuddy, which makes it easy to switch between using your AirPods with your iPhone and your Mac.
Sara Salinas of CNBC reports that Gene Levoff, the lawyer at Apple responsible for stopping Apple employees from conducting insider trading, has himself been charged with insider trading.
Speaking of President Trump, yesterday his press secretary Sarah Sanders announced on Twitter that the president would sign a government spending bill but would also declare a national emergency so that he can build a wall even without congressional approval. I don’t want to get political on iPhone J.D. so I won’t share my thoughts on that, although believe me I have many, but I did think it was interesting how Sanders made the announcement. Instead of just posting a normal tweet, Sanders made the announcement by typing in the Notes app on an iPhone, creating a screenshot, and then posting that picture. (It looks like she also accidentally put a black dot on the screen using the Markup feature when she cropped the image.) Folks often use a Notes screenshot circumvent the 280 character limit of a tweet. This message was only 300 characters so it may have been possible to edit a few words and post a normal tweet, but nevertheless it is interesting to see an official government communication using the same app that I use for a simple grocery list. (After I wrote that sentence, I learned that Trevor Noah found a more funny way to say the same thing. That’s why I’m a lawyer and he hosts The Daily Show.)
Apple released iOS 12.1.4 yesterday. This update fixes a number of bugs, including the security hole in Group FaceTime which someone calling you could use to listen to you before you even accept the FaceTime invitation. For anyone who loves being able to FaceTime with multiple people at once, you are up and running again. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses the latest update to CARROT Weather (my review) which adds new complications for the Apple Watch. I hope that more developers create this high level of customization on their Apple Watch apps, and I hope that Apple provides new avenues for developers to do so.
Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch reported this week that many companies are watching what you do with their apps, recording every button that you press, how long you take to do so, etc. Or perhaps I should say that they “were” doing so. Whittaker followed up yesterday to report that Apple notified the developers who were doing so to stop immediately because they didn’t get permission from the users to do so. Companies involved included Expedia, Hollister, Hotels.com, Air Canada, Singapore Airlines, and Abercrombie & Fitch.
Yesterday, Netflix enabled a feature called Smart Downloads on the iPhone and iPad. When you finish watching a TV episode, the app will automatically delete it and then download the next episode, so that it will be ready to watch even if you are on a plane or otherwise have no signal or a poor signal. You can turn the feature off if you don’t like it. When I start watching a show on Netflix or Amazon, I usually download the entire season to my iPad and iPhone, but it’s nice to know that Netflix will do something similar even if I forget.
The Apple Watch Series 4 can detect when you fall. It gives you a warning that it sensed it, and if you don’t respond after a period of time, it can call emergency services for you. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that this feature may have saved the life of a man in Norway. After I read that story, I turned on the feature on my own Apple Watch (it is turned off by default for most users). Later that day, as I reached for the door on my car door, I got an alert saying that the watch thought that I fell. I tapped the screen to say that it was a false alarm, and it hasn’t happened again since. I’m not sure what it was about swinging my hand towards my car door that triggered the alert. Hopefully I won’t get many more false alarms; for now I’m keeping this feature turned on just in case.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is going to be the commencement speaker at Tulane University’s graduation on May 18, 2019, which will once again occur in the Superdome. As a New Orleans resident and a former adjunct professor at Tulane, I’m thrilled for all of the Tulane students who will get to hear him speak. I wonder if he was convinced to come down here by Lisa Jackson, who is in charge of environmental, policy, and social initiatives at Apple. She grew up in New Orleans and graduated from Tulane before going on to bigger and better things, including four years as the EPA Administrator. Tulane and Apple announced that Cook was coming here by releasing a fun video created in the Clips app.
And finally, the new 2019 Emojis are here! Or at least, they are coming. Here is a video from Emojipedia showing off all of the new ones. These are Emojipedia’s own graphics, so the pictures will look somewhat different when Apple implements them later this year — or at least I assume that is when we will see them — but this video gives you a preview of what is coming:
GoodReader, an app that you can use to store, view, and annotate PDF files and other types of documents, was recently updated to version 5. That sentence may not sound all that interesting, but I have been waiting a very, very long time to be able to type it because this is the first major update to this app in five years. The app includes all of the features that folks liked about the prior version, and adds some new capabilities that make the app particularly useful for attorneys. I’m thrilled to see that this app is back and better than ever.
A little GoodReader history
GoodReader has been around since 2009, so it predates the iPad (which was announced in January 2010). Soon after I started using the iPad in 2010, I started to organize all of my PDF documents in this app. It quickly became an essential part of my law practice. I gave it a rave review in early 2011, and later that year I called it “the best $5 an attorney can spend on an iPad app.” For many years, the app received regular updates adding more useful features.
The last major update was GoodReader 4, released in 2014. Not long after that, the developer of the app, Yuri Selukoff (whose mother, by the way, was a patent attorney), obtained a difficult-to-receive EB-1 Visa (reserved for foreign nationals with extraordinary abilities) and moved from Moscow to San Francisco, as described in this interesting profile of Selukoff from a 2016 post on the Inside BlackBerry blog, which I’m surprised to see is still online.
In 2017, Selukoff started to tease that version 5 of GoodReader was in development. As other iPad PDF apps started to add interesting new features, I thought about switching to a different app, but so much of my time was invested in GoodReader that I decided to stick with it and wait for that promised update. After about a year, in early 2018, I ran a post called “The latest on GoodReader version 5” in which I mentioned that Selukoff was still saying that the update was coming soon. I ended the post by stating: “If the developer is ‘finishing’ version 5, hopefully that means that we will see it in weeks or months, and won’t have to wait until 2019.”
That post ended up being one of the most read posts on iPhone J.D. in 2018, and I’m sure that I know the reason why. Lots of folks, like me, were wondering if the app would ever see an update. And after no update came, many longtime GoodReader users decided to jump ship to a more modern PDF app.
I was one of them. About six months ago, I got tired of waiting for the update that might never come, so I surveyed the market of PDF apps and I decided to switch to PDF Expert by Readdle. I was planning to write a review of PDF Expert last month when I was invited to beta test GoodReader 5. After recovering from the shock of seeing an actual update to the app after all this time, I started to try it out. And I liked what I saw. As of January 30, 2019, GoodReader 5 is now available for everyone. GoodReader has a few shortcomings compared to PDF Expert, but it also has some better features, many of which are new to version 5. I still plan to post a review of PDF Expert in the future, but I want to continue to use both that app and GoodReader to get a better perspective on the advantages of each.
Here are the most notable features of GoodReader 5, the 10th anniversary edition of the app.
Easy to get around
In an app to manage your PDF files, you will frequently want to go back and forth between documents, and between looking at a list of files and looking at an actual document. GoodReader has always made it easy to get to a document because it has the Back to Reading button at the bottom. Now, it is easier to go the other way too. When you are looking at a document you can swipe in from the left edge to go back to the prior document you were working on, or if you go back far enough, the list of files. Once you start using that feature, you will use it all the time.
Every document in GoodReader has its own tab, and you can tap the tabs at the top to switch between the eight most recent documents that you have not yet closed (by tapping the arrow on the right side of the tab). You can also quickly jump to recent files and other files by tapping the title of a document at the top to see a list of recent files.
Similarly, it is very easy to move around within a document thanks to the bar at the bottom of the screen which you can slide your finger across to quickly scroll through the document, along with thumbnail images of pages to give you a small visual clue of what is on the pages. I like this feature and use it often.
At the very bottom of the screen, there is a button you can tap to see thumbnail images of each page in the document. Unlike GoodReader 4 which would often only load some of the thumbnail images, GoodReader 5 seems to quickly load all of the page images making this feature even more useful.
Split screen
Although this $5.99 app is a free upgrade for owners of prior versions, you can purchase an optional Pro Pack for an additional $5.99. Attorneys who use GoodReader are going to probably want to pay for the Pro Pack for the additional features that it enables. One of these features is Split Screen, where you can view two documents side by side. You can view the same document in both panes, useful if you want to compare something in one part of a document with something in another part of a document. Or you can have two different documents side-by-side.
GoodReader isn’t the first app to do this. For example, the Easy Annotate app had split screen back in 2013. But now that I have easy access to it in a primary app that I use for working with PDF files, I find myself using it more often.
Apple Pencil annotation
GoodReader adds support for the Apple Pencil. I like the new features, but for me there is still one big omission.
I’ll start by mentioning a feature that isn’t new, but I still love it. The first time you start to annotate a file, GoodReader asks if you want to edit this file or if you want to create an annotated copy. This is incredibly useful for my law practice. I will often have a folder of pleadings synced via Dropbox to GoodReader, and while I want to annotate some of those documents — such as highlighting and marking up a brief filed by opponent while I prepare a response — I also want to keep an untouched version of the document just in case I want to share it with someone else without exposing my attorney work product. In other apps, I have to remember to make a duplicate of the file before I start to edit. But in GoodReader, I can choose to do this at the time I start to edit. This feature in GoodReader is an oldie but a goodie.
In GoodReader 5, as soon as you touch the screen with an Apple Pencil you start to annotate (unless, as noted above, this is the first time you have started to annotate the document). For documents with text, you can select whether you want to jump into highlight mode when you tap on text. Otherwise, you jump into the pen mode to write on the document. This is a very useful feature. You can use your finger to scroll move around in a document, then pick up your pen and just start annotating when you are ready for that, all without ever having to tap on any annotation tools.
GoodReader also now supports double-tap on an Apple Pencil 2 to switch between the tool you are using and the eraser.
I do have one complaint. When you are in an annotation mode — highlighting, writing, eraser, etc. — touching the screen with the Apple Pencil will create the annotation, but so does tapping the screen with a finger. In some other apps, the app is smart enough to know that once you start using an Apple Pencil, you only want to annotate with the Pencil, and when your finger touches the screen that means you want to scroll through the document. But in Goodreader 5, I will frequently touch the screen by accident while the Apple Pencil is in my hand and create unwanted annotations. Ugh. I was advised by a person who handles PR for GoodReader that the developer is considering adding a feature in the future that ignores finger input when you are using the Pencil, so hopefully this will be addressed soon.
In the meantime, this sometimes annoys me so much that I turn off the “Track Apple Pencil” feature when I am working with a document (which can get to by tapping the Gear icon at the bottom of the screen to open PDF Settings) so that I have to manually enter and leave an edit mode. With this feature turned off, GoodReader 5 works the same way as GoodReader 4. You can first select text and then choose to highlight it, or you can manually tap the highlight tool to start highlighting.
File management improvements
GoodReader adds lots of new features to make it easier to manage your files. You can now use drag and drop to move files around and put them into folders. You can now view files in a list view with one, two, three, or four columns, or you can view items as either small or large icons on a grid. In prior versions of GoodReader, there was a pallet of tools that you could use to do something to a file located on the right side of the screen:
In GoodReader 5, all of those tools are hidden, giving you more screen space to see file names and, if you turn on this option, multiple columns. You expose the tools by tapping the Manage Files button at the bottom left, and then they appear at the bottom of the screen:
When you delete a file in GoodReader, instead of going away completely it now moves into a trash can. This gives you the ability to pull something out of the trash if you change your mind.
Folder icons now tell you the number of items in each folder.
You can tap one button to see all of your starred documents (the ones that you marked as favorites). You can tap one button to see all of your recent documents, making it easy to jump to a document you previously viewed without digging through a folder structure to find it.
And there are many other small improvements, all of which add up to make it easier than ever to manage your files in GoodReader.
Security
GoodReader adds a host of new features to help you protect the security of your documents. Perhaps the most useful one for attorneys is the new Secure Photocopy feature (which requires the Pro Pack). Here’s how it works.
I often hear people say that if you have a digital version of a document and you want to give it to someone else but ensure that there is no metadata in the document, you should print out the document and then scan that copy. This creates a file which only has the image of the document, with none of the metadata that was in the original document. The new Secure Photocopy feature works the same way, without you needing to use a printer. When you select this option, GoodReader will create an image version of the file and you can decide the quality of the image (144 dpi to 400 dpi); a higher number of dots per inch looks better but results in a larger file size. Then GoodReader turns that into a PDF document which you can share with someone else.
You can also use the Secure Photocopy feature to securely redact a document. Use the highlighter tool and change the color from yellow to black so that you place a black box over text you want to redact. Or you can use the pen tool with a wide brush to draw on top of anything you want to redact. This process simply places ink on top of the document — the underlying text is still there, so the document is not yet truly redacted. Next use the Secure Photocopy feature to create a new document based on the image. This new document will include the redactions, and you don’t have to worry about the text or anything else being underneath the redactions.
There are other security features too, such as the ability to encrypt files using AES-256 encryption and add passwords to files. You can also keep files in an encrypted format when they are in the GoodReader app.
Conclusion
These are only some of the new features in GoodReader 5, but these are the major new features that I think would appeal to most attorneys. Now that version 5 is released, it is my sincere hope that the developer continues to update and refine the app without us needing to wait years between updates. (Hopefully a sign of this: the developer has already released version 5.0.1 and version 5.0.3 containing small bug fixes.)
I think that every attorney who regularly uses an iPad to work with PDF files would benefit from having GoodReader 5. It works well as a primary app for working with PDF documents, but even if you are not going to make it your primary app, it is still a useful tool to have ready for when you want to utilize a feature such as split screen or Secure Photocopy.
I haven’t yet decided whether I will switch back to GoodReader as my primary app for working with PDF files. I became a big fan of PDF Expert by Readdle over the last six months, and there are still some things that it does that I prefer over GoodReader. Nevertheless, I’m thrilled that GoodReader is back and in top form. GoodReader has always been a powerful and useful app for any attorney with a paperless law practice (or anyone trying to become more paperless), and with the fresh coat of paint and the new features in version 5, GoodReader is better than ever.
In an ideal world, you will always get exactly where you are supposed to be at the time that you are expected to be there. In real life, delays happen. Perhaps you got tied up at the office, in court, in a deposition that went longer than you expected, etc. So sometimes you need to let someone know that you are running late but you are on the way there. You can always send someone an email or a text that says exactly that, but the iPhone gives you some other options that might be even more useful for you.
I’ll be there in…
Instead of taking a wild guess of when you will arrive, let your iPhone figure it out. If your iPhone knows where you are going — for example, if the Maps app is giving you guidance to get to a location — then the iPhone probably has a better sense of when you will get there than you do. If you are driving, the iPhone can take into account traffic conditions. If you are walking, the iPhone is pretty accurate at predicting how long that will take.
When you are composing an email or a text message, simply type “I’ll be there in” followed by tapping the space bar. As soon as you tap the space bar, the middle part of the QuickType area (just above the space bar) will say “time to destination” with an indication of how long it will take you to get there. Just tap it and it will type “17min” or however long. This is plain text, so you can go back and change it if you want — for example, if you know that you need to add an extra five minutes to deal with parking once you get there.
I’m at…
If you want to let someone else know where you are right now, the iPhone can help you with that too, but I believe that this tip only works (1) in the Messages app, not the Mail app and (2) if the other person is using an iPhone/iPad. Just type “I’m at” and then tap the space bar. In the middle of the QuickType area you will see the location services icon followed by the words “Current Location.”
As soon as you tap on “Current Location” the Messages app immediately sends a map to the other person with your current location indicated.
I want to emphasize the word “immediately” because unlike the “I’ll be there in…” tip — where you can tap the QuickType suggestion, let it enter the text, and then go back and modify the text predicting how long it will take you to get there — as soon as you tap Current Location, the map will be sent.
If you want the other person to come to you, they can tap on that map and then tap the “Directions” button and their iPhone will give them turn-by-turn directions to get to that location that you sent.
I’ll let you figure it out…
Sometimes, the best option is to let the other person track your location so they can figure out for themselves how quickly you are getting there. The Messages app can help you with this. When you are in the screen to compose a message to someone, tap their name/icon at the top and three buttons will appear. The first two let you call or FaceTime that person. The last one says Info — tap that one. On the next screen you will see an option to “Share My Location.” If you tap that, you are given an option to share for one hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely. Tap the appropriate option, and that person will be able to track you while you are on your way.
This one is especially useful if it is going to take a long time for you to arrive. The other person doesn’t need to bother you frequently to get an update on your location; they can figure it out themselves.
When I learned Monday night about the flaw in FaceTime that someone could exploit to listen to you even before you accepted their call, and after I confirmed in a test with my son’s iPhone that the security flaw was real, I posted about it quickly. But by the time that most of you saw the post, I had already edited it to note that Apple already implemented a temporary fix (for everyone) by pulling the plug on its Group FaceTime server. Nevertheless, my primary concern when I wrote my initial post was the risk of third-party access to a confidential attorney-client communication. Sure enough, on Tuesday, Houston attorney Larry Williams II filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming that this is exactly what happened to him, as reported by Laurel Brubaker Calkins of Bloomberg. Of course, just because something is alleged in a lawsuit, that doesn’t mean that it actually happened, and I have some questions about the facts as set forth in the complaint that he filed in Harris County, Texas (which you can read here), and I’m sure that will all be sorted out in discovery. The good news is that, unlike many other companies who have been in the news this week who make money off of invading your privacy, Apple takes privacy very seriously and I presume that they will devote substantial resources towards fixing this bug and coming up with ways to minimize the risk of something similar happening in the future. And now, the other recent news of note:
Speaking of hacks, Pittsburgh attorney David Ries, who knows a lot about security, discusses the current state of cybersecurity on mobile devices and technology in general in an article for Law Technology Today.
Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing of Reuters wrote an interesting, and scary, story about a technology called Karma which spies — and who know else — used to hack into iPhones in 2016 and 2017. I have a lot of questions about how this actually worked, but I haven’t yet seen a thoughtful analysis written by a security expert.
Speaking of how dangerous it is online, Debra Cassens Weiss of ABA Journal reports that an associate at Dentons Canada was duped into transferring $1.5 million into a thief’s account. This isn’t an iPhone story, but is a cautionary tale about cybercrime in general.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reports that if you were one of the first people to buy AirPods, they are starting to show their age and don’t hold a charge for as long as they used to. I’ve experienced this myself. I still love my AirPods and use them every day, but I can’t go more than about 90 minutes without having to put them in their case for 60 seconds to recharge.
In Overcast, my favorite app for listening to podcasts, it is now faster than ever to find a new podcast thanks to a new instant search feature. The developer, Marco Arment, describes what is new in this post.
And finally, Apple produced three cute 15-second videos showing use cases for sending someone money in Apple Pay: Doughnuts, Gift for Dad, and Salsa. Here is the Doughnuts video:
