Thank you to GoodNotes for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. I’ve been using this app for many years, and it is one of my all-time favorite apps for the iPad, an app that I use almost every day in my law practice. I especially love using GoodNotes on the large screen of my 12.9″ iPad Pro, but any size iPad paired with an Apple Pencil can be a fantastic substitute for a legal pad. And “substitute” is probably not the right word because it doesn’t capture what a dramatic improvement it is over pen and paper.
The GoodNotes app allows you to create notebooks and organize those notebooks into folders. I have a folder for firm-related notebooks, a folder for one client for which I have a high-volume of cases, and a folder for all of my other clients. I have a folder of older notebooks that I probably won’t need again, but you never know when it is useful to dig up something from the past. (The oldest notebook that is still on my iPad hasn’t been modified since January 13, 2014, but I have older ones on my computer that I exported many years ago.) I also have a folder for notebooks related to my family, a CLE folder for any notes that I take during a CLE, and a Miscellaneous folder that has various different notebooks including one dedicated to puzzles. (I take a screenshot of a crossword on my iPad, paste that onto a page of my puzzle notebook, and then I use GoodNotes to try to solve a crossword — which I prefer doing with a stylus rather than typing letters on an on-screen keyboard.) That Miscellaneous folder also contains a scratch paper notebook that I use for various things. A few nights ago, I used that one when I was helping my sixth grade daughter study for a math test; I would write a problem and then she would solve it.
For my litigation practice, I typically have a single notebook for each case. That makes it easy to search all of the notes related to a case when I’m trying to find something that I wrote months or years earlier. Sometimes I will use a dedicated notebook for a project. For example, when I prepare for and attend an appellate oral argument, a mediation, or a trial, I sometimes create a special notebook for that project.
I take virtually all of my notes using a legal pad template. There is one built-in to GoodNotes, but I prefer to use one that I created myself because I like having the dotted red lines on the left and right side. If you want to download my legal paper template and use it yourself with your own notebooks in GoodNotes, click here to download my legal paper template file. You can import any PDF file into GoodNotes and save it as a template to use with one or more notebooks.
Now that GoodNotes supports using two windows at once, I’m surprised how often I find it useful to have a page of reference notes on the left while I take new notes on the right.
Sometimes I use this to open two instances of the same notebook so that I can see different pages at the same time. For example, I often attend a meeting where there is an agenda sent around by email before the meeting. I insert that PDF File into my notes (if the agenda is in Word format, I use the Word for iPad app to convert it to PDF). Sometimes I take handwritten notes right on the agenda. Other times I use my legal pad template, and it is nice to look at the agenda on the left at the same time that I am writing on subsequent pages on the right. The ability to open up two instances of the same notebook is very useful, so much so that it was recently honored by the MacStories website, which gave that feature the runner-up award for best new app feature of 2019. (The top award went to the new feature in the Overcast app that lets you share a clip from a podcast, which I agree is a neat feature, but it is far less useful in a law practice.)
I usually just keep my notes in the GoodNotes app, but sometimes I will export a notebook as a PDF file, which I then save using my firm’s document management system. Because GoodNotes automatically performs an OCR of your notes, the PDF file is searchable.
Using GoodNotes to take digital notes is great for so many reasons. All of my notes for all of my cases are with me at al times, even notes that I took years ago. I like being able to use different pen colors in my notes to make them easier to read and organize, and it is nice that you can insert a picture into a document and then annotate that image. You can even use your iPhone or iPad to take a picture of something like a PowerPoint slide and then immediately insert that into your notes, ready for you to annotate. And it is easy to move around your notes between pages to make room for something else that you want to insert.
If you own an iPad and a stylus and you are not yet taking digital notes on your iPad, I strongly encourage you to try doing so with the GoodNotes app. This is a fantastic app, and it is a key part of my paperless law practice. Thanks again to GoodNotes for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month.
I love using HomeKit to control various devices in my home. This time of year, the most useful one is a Lutron Caseta Wireless Smart Lighting Lamp Dimmer, which my wife and I control from an iPhone or Apple Watch to turn on and off the lights on our Christmas tree. It is so nice to not have to reach all the way around the tree to the outlet every morning and every night. But sometimes I see a home automation device that doesn’t support HomeKit, and with a few minor exceptions (like a Nest smoke detector) I ignore those because I like being able to control everything in the Home app on my iPhone. Fortunately, this may change soon. Jason Snell of Six Colors reports that Apple, Google, Amazon, Zigbee, and others have formed a smart home alliance to increase compatibility across devices. I look forward to seeing what comes of this. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Brad Gibson of Cult of Mac reports that the rubber tips on AirPods Pro have a new plastic odor that sort of smells like blueberries. I’ve noticed this on my new AirPods Pro. There is nothing offensive about the smell, and I suppose it will go away over time, but it did surprise me.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that a woman in Iowa was able to find her car after it had been stolen because her iPhone was in it, and she was able to use Find My iPhone to help the police locate her car.
Federico Viticci created used Apple’s Shortcuts app to create a free, sophisticated assistant for Apple Music that he calls MusicBot. It makes it faster to access certain aspects of Apple Music and enables a few other features that are not simple to do in the Music app itself.
I was in an AT&T store the other day and noticed an interesting screensaver running on all of the iPhones. You can view it here.
Time magazine selected the 10 best gadgets since 2010, and three Apple products made the list: The iPad, the Apple Watch, and Apple AirPods. (The iPhone came out in 2007.)
And finally, speaking of 2010, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal decided to leave her iPhone at home and see what it is like to travel only with gadgets that she used in 2010, such as an old BlackBerry and a Garmin GPS. And she picked an interesting destination for her trip. Click here or the picture below to watch the video on the Wall Street Journal website.
The holiday season can be a perfect time to flip through some magazines, whether you are traveling by plane or train or just looking to fill a few minutes of down time at an in-law’s house. Instead of spending lots of money at an airport newsstand, you can get magazines for free at your local library. And thanks to the digital services available at modern libraries, you can download full copies of magazines, for free, on your iPad. There are different apps that offer this service so you need to find out which one your library uses. My library, the New Orleans Public Library, uses an app called Flipster. (A similar app used by some libraries is RBdigital.)
The Flipster service is not limited to public libraries. It also works with certain academic libraries, schools, companies, and governmental entities.
Although you don’t have to visit a branch of your library to download magazines to the Flipster app, you do need to have an active library card. Once you follow the instructions in Flipster to authenticate through your local library, you can then use the Explore tab at the bottom left to see all of the magazines that are offered.
The Flipster service offers access to almost 1,500 titles, but you’ll only see the ones to which your local library has provided access. I see that I currently have access to over 80 titles through the New Orleans Public Library, and the selection is quite good, including:
Bloomberg Businessweek
Bon Appétit
Brides
Bust
Car and Driver
Condé Nast Traveler
Consumer Reports
Cosmopolitan
Country Living
Eating Well
Ebony
Elle
Entertainment Weekly
Essence
Esquire
Fast Company
Food & Wine
Forbes
Good Housekeeping
GQ
Harper’s Bazaar
Health
Highlights
InStyle
Kiplinger’s
Louisiana Life
Marie Claire
Martha Stewart Living
Men’s Health
Men’s Journal
Money
Mother Jones
Motortrend
National Geographic
New Orleans
The New Yorker
Newsweek
O, the Oprah Magazine
Out
Outdoor Photographer
Paper
Parents
PCWorld
People
Popular Mechanics
Popular Science
Rolling Stone
Runner’s World
Shape
Southern Living
Sports Illustrated
Time
Travel + Leisure
Us
Vanity Fair
Vogue
Wired
Woman’s Day
I think that most folks will be able to find something that they consider worth downloading.
When you select a magazine, you then have a choice of either downloading the current issue or a back issue.
You can see all of the magazines that you have downloaded in the My Shelf tab. Some titles expire after a certain amount of time, and the amount of time varies depending upon the title. But you can download an issue again, and the app shows you when an expiration date is coming soon. Using percentages below each magazine icon, the Flipster app gives you a sense of how much of the magazine you have already viewed.
Once you select a specific issue of a magazine, you can read it. In landscape mode, you can read two pages at a time, which is nice because some magazine content was designed to spread across two pages.
Or you can turn your iPad to portrait mode and read one page at a time. In either orientation, you can pinch to zoom to make things larger. And many magazines feature hyperlinks within the issue so that, for example, you can tap on a story title on the cover on in the index and then the app will jump to that page.
In full-screen mode, you just see the content of the magazine. When not in the full-screen mode, you can see menu options, such as a table of contents.
You can bookmark pages of a magazine. You can also enter a text view mode in which you just focus on the words. In that mode, you can copy text and paste it elsewhere to quote it.
My only significant complaint about the Flipster app is that you cannot search for text within a magazine. This is curious because there is also a version of Flipster that works in a web browser (either on a computer or an iPad), and that version gives you the option to search.
I really like using the Flipster app. It is a great way to read some of my favorite magazines. It is also fun to browse through magazines that I would never purchase but which might contain an interesting article. And to be honest, sometimes I will decide to give my brain a break and I’ll just flip through a magazine mostly just to look at the pictures.
Magazines are not the only digital assets that you can download thanks to your public library. You can also use apps to download audiobooks, videos, comic books, and of course, books. For example, before I started watching the show Watchmen on HBO (which was incredible, by the way — I recommend it), I used the Hoopla app to download and read the Watchmen graphic novel, which made the television show (which is somewhat of a sequel) even more enjoyable. But when I am traveling and sometimes have only short periods of time to read, a magazine is perfect, and the Flipster app along with the large screen of my 12.9″ iPad Pro makes for a fantastic reading experience.
Last month, for my birthday, my wife purchased me a pair of AirPods Pro. But due to the intense demand, I didn’t actually receive them until this week. If you are lucky, you can occasionally find them in limited quantity in an Apple Store or on Amazon (they are out of stock as I am typing this), but for the most part you have to wait. I want to use them for a few weeks before I write my review, but I was interested to read an article this week by financial analyst Horace Dediu called iPods Pro. That title isn’t a typo; Dediu is making the point that products like the AirPods are surpassing the “peak iPod” point which occurred in 2007. At the time, the iPod was credited with saving Apple, showing that the company could branch out beyond the Mac with a successful product. Of course the iPhone would become far more popular than the iPod, but “peak iPod” is still an interesting point of comparison. Dedui believes that the Apple Watch already passed “peak iPod” and that the AirPods are about to do so now. This doesn’t surprise me; almost everyone I encounter who uses AirPods really likes them. My son recently received AirPods as a present when he turned 14, and they instantly became his constant companion. (I can’t judge; mine are almost always in my pocket too.). And now, the news of note from the past week:
Louisville, Kentucky attorney Stephen Embry is featured in a recent blog post on the Lit Software website because of his extensive use of apps like TrialPad and TranscriptPad and other iPad apps.
Legal ethics expert Dane Ciolino reports that South Carolina recently became the 38th state to adopt the duty of technology competence in ABA Model Rule 1.1, comment 8. You can get details on all 38 of the states on this webpage maintained by Massachusetts lawyer Bob Ambrogi.
In article for Wired, Lily Hay Newman discusses the problem of smart devices like the Ring Doorbell and Ring indoor cameras being exploited by hackers, who can then hear what is going on inside your house and in some cases even force you to listen to them. Yikes. This is why I see so much value in buying products from a company like Apple that pays attention to privacy.
Killian Bell of Cult of Mac recommends Apple Watch stocking stuffers for $40 or less. There is an interesting item on the list I had never heard of before: the EdgeGear Shift, a band that wraps around your hand to hold an Apple Watch so that it is easier to see why you are running.
Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the AirFly Pro, which you can use to wirelessly connect your AirPods to any device with a headphone jack, or to send audio from your iPhone to any device with an AUX-in jack.
Hardy also reviews the ConnectSense, which replaces a traditional power outlet to provide HomeKit compatibility.
Ryan Christoffel of MacStories reports that you can now post a Live Photo taken with your iPhone on Twitter; Twitter converts them to GIFs so that anyone can see the short video.
And finally, this week Apple released a very impressive video shot on iPhone in a desert in Suadi Arabia called The Saudi desert riders. Very cool.
USB-C is already a popular next-generation port, and its usefulness will increase in the future. One of the reasons that the latest iPad Pro earns the name “Pro” is that it uses a USB-C port instead of Apple’s proprietary Lightning port. Because USB-C is an industry standard, accessory manufacturers have a lot more freedom to come up with interesting and useful accessories that work with an iPad Pro. A perfect example of this is a jack-of-all-trades hub, one which turns the single USB-C port into something much more useful.
A few months ago, I reviewed the HyperDrive 6-in-1 USB-C Hub for iPad Pro, an $89 hub that gives you six ports: 3.5mm Audio Jack (for headphones), USB-A (for traditional USB devices), SD Memory Card and Micro SD Memory Card (useful for external storage and also for loading pictures taken when a camera), HDMI (for connecting to an external monitor) and another USB-C port (useful for charging). The Kanex 6-in-1 Multiport USB-C Docking Station is a similar device, offering all of the same ports for $99.95.
Besides the minor price difference, the major difference between this Kanex hub and the HyperDrive hub is the design. Kanex sent me a free review unit for testing purposes, and I’ve been trying it out for about a month. If you are in the market for a device like this, there is a good chance that you are trying to decide between this product and the HyperDrive device, so I’m going to compare the two throughout this review.
Six ports
Let me start by saying that I really love using a hub like this with the iPad Pro. Whether you use the one from HyperDrive, Kanex, or some other manufacturer, it is incredibly useful to be able to carry around just a single device and have almost every port you are likely to need with an iPad Pro. The main omission from both of these devices is an Ethernet port, which you can find on some other hubs that are not made to stay attached to the iPad Pro, such as the $89.99 HyperDrive POWER 9-in-1 USB-C HUB. But given how easy it is to find Wi-Fi, tether to the cellular connection on an iPhone, or use an iPad Pro with built-in cellular, I have not yet been in a situation in which I actually would have used an Ethernet port, plus I like using a hub that stays attached to the iPad Pro instead of dangling off to the side.
The technical specifications of these six ports are very similar on both the Kanex and HyperDrive devices:
3.5 mm Audio Jack: same on both
USB-A: both support high-speed USB 3.1 Gen 1, capable of 5GB/s transfer speed
USB-C: both support USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 3.0, capable of 5GB/s transfer speed and PD 60W which is more than enough to charge your iPad Pro as fast as possible. I believe that 30W is the most that the current iPad Pro can handle, although you can also use this hub with laptop computers that support more power.
SD and Micro SD Memory Cards: same on both
HDMI: Both support 2K/60Hz on the iPad Pro and 4K/30Hz on MacBook. I believe that the HyperDrive also supports 4K/30Hz on the iPad Pro, but I’m not certain of that. The iPad Pro can actually support 4K/60Hz, but you need a dedicated connector to get that. For me, however, none of these specifications make a real difference. I frequently connect my iPad Pro to HDMI to give a presentation, and I’ve never been in a situation where I or anyone in the audience could really tell the difference. Indeed, if you are using a projector, the audience may not even be able to tell the difference between HDMI and VGA.
Having said that, I have noticed one difference. With both devices, I can use the USB-C port to provide power to my iPad Pro when I use a cord connected to the iPad Pro’s USB-C port on one end and a power source on the other end. For example, I might use a USB-to-USB-C cord and then plug the USB end into a traditional USB power adapter, or I might use a USB-C-to-USB-C cord and then use a USB-C power adapter.
However, if I use a USB-C-to-USB-C cord with one end connected to the Kanex device and the other end connected to my iMac, I get an error message telling me “Cannot Use Thunderbolt Accessory” and “Thunderbolt accessories are not supported on this iPad”.
I don’t get this error message when I use the HyperDrive device, and instead, the HyperDrive charges my iPad Pro from my iMac just like it does when I plug the USB-C cord directly into my iPad Pro without going through the HyperDrive. As I workaround with the Kanex hub, I can use a USB-to-USB-C cord and connect to the USB port on my iMac and the USB-C port on the Kanex device, and that lets me charge. But this is a minor annoyance when I am using my iPad Pro next to my iMac and I want to use the Kanex hub.
Other than this isolated issue when charging, I had a lot of success using the Kanex hub with my iPad Pro. I used the USB port to connect an external mouse, I used the Audio Jack to connect wired headphones when I was in a loud environment where my AirPods didn’t work as well (which I suppose would not have been an issue had I been using AirPods Pro with noise-canceling turned on), and I transferred lots of pictures from the SD card I use with my Nikon camera to my iPad Pro, where I could delete the bad ones and make the good ones even better using Photoshop for iPad.
Design
One of the things that I like the most about the HyperDrive hub is that it fits perfectly against the side of the iPad Pro and is essentially the same width. Thus, I can do just about anything with my iPad Pro with the HpeerDrive hub attached and it just works. The Kanex has a different method of attaching to the iPad Pro, and in some situations, I find it awkward to use.
The Kanex hub fits around the corner of the iPad Pro, and a cord comes off of the device which you wrap around and plug in to the USB-C port. The Kanex hub has a nice snug fit against a naked iPad Pro.
If your iPad Pro is in an Apple case — either the Smart Keyboard Folio (which I don’t use) or the regular Smart Folio without a keyboard (which I use every day), you simply remove an insert that attaches magnetically to give the Kanex Hub more space and then the hub has a nice snug fit against the iPad Pro in a case.
If you use a different case for the iPad Pro, these two sizes for the Kanex hub may or may not work for you, but with the Apple cases, it works great.
When you are facing the screen of your iPad Pro, the Kanex device looks good, perhaps even less conspicuous than the HyperDrive hub.
From the back, the Kanex device and its cord bulge out about a half-an-inch or so.
This means that you cannot lay your iPad Pro flat on a table when the Kanex hub is connected. If you do, the iPad Pro will rock back and forth at the two corners like a see-saw. It also means that while you can use the Kanex Hub connected to a Smart Folio when the iPad Pro is fully propped up, it doesn’t work when the iPad Pro is only slightly propped up — the angle that I use when I am writing on the screen with an Apple Pencil or typing on the software keyboard on the iPad Pro screen. The HyperDrive hub doesn’t have this problem.
Conclusion
The Kanex 6-in-1 Multiport works really well as long as you are not encountering any of the problems that I noted above — charging from an iMac using USB-C and placing the iPad Pro completely flat on a table or at a slight angle using the Apple Smart Folio case. My main critique of this device is that I don’t know why to recommend it over the HyperDrive 6-in-1 USB-C Hub for iPad Pro, which doesn’t have any of those issues and is $10 cheaper. I suppose one minor advantage is that the Kanex hub has a very snug fit on the corner of the iPad Pro, so it is slightly less likely to be accidentally pulled off of the iPad Pro, but it’s not like I have ever had a problem with the HyperDrive hub coming off by accident. And depending upon what you are doing with the hub, perhaps some folks would prefer the configuration of the Kanex hub with the HDMI port on the side and the USB port on the top, versus the HyperDrive which has the HDMI port on the top and the USB port on the side. In my uses, however, it has never really mattered where the ports are located.
Why spend $10 more for the Kanex device that, in a few situations, is awkward when you could instead save $10 and use the HyperDrive device without encountering those problems? I haven’t yet come up with an answer to that question. Thus, the Kanex 6-in-1 Multiport USB-C Docking Station is a nice and useful accessory, but I think that most folks would prefer the HyperDrive 6-in-1 USB-C Hub for iPad Pro.
For those of you who celebrate Christmas, the season is now upon us with Christmas less than three weeks from today. To get you in the mood, California attorney David Sparks created an Apple Music holiday playlist. It’s really good, and I’ve been listening to it with my iPhone and my AirPods as I write this post. David calls his playlist “Yule” but a better name for it might be “A Very Jazzy Christmas.” It’s got artists like Dave Brubeck, Diana Krall, Ella Fitzgerald, Vince Guaraldi, Miles Davis, and artists from my hometown of New Orleans such as Louis Armstrong, The Dixieland Ramblers, Harry Connick, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis. And because a large number of the songs are instrumental, I find it easy to work while listening to the playlist. Click here for David’s post on his MacSparky website with a link to the playlist. And now, the recent news of note:
In the latest episode of the Digital Edge podcast, Virginia attorney Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma Bar Association recommend tech toys for the holidays.
In addition to creating a holiday playlist, California attorney David Sparks recently spent some time on vacation in Hawaii, and he talks about taking advantage of the cellular Apple Watch during that vacation.
Dan Goodin of Ars Technica reports on a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that police violated a suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights when they forced him to reveal his (computer) passcode.
The Apple Watch screen is small, but there have still been a few times when I have wished that I could look at Twitter on the screen. Ryan Christoffel of MacStories reviews the new update to Chirp, a free Twitter app that lets you use Twitter on an Apple Watch. I was really impressed to see what a good job the developer did with this one.
Sascha Segan of PCMag reports that Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon said this week that Qualcomm and Apple are working to launch a 5G iPhone as fast as they can.
This week, Apple announced its editorial picks for the best apps and games of 2019. Apple also announced the most downloaded apps of 2019, and many of my favorites made the list such as Dark Sky Weather, Scanner Pro, Things 3.
If you are in the market for a new car, I recommend that you don’t consider a car unless it has good CarPlay support. I really love using CarPlay in my Honda Accord. Until recently, BMW has been (I believe) the only company to charge you an $80/year subscription to use CarPlay, which makes no sense to me. But Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reports that BMW has finally decided to phase out this requirement on new BMWs with the latest infotainment system.
Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac reports that Readdle’s Calendars 5 for iOS has gained Microsoft Exchange support.
Jonathan Taraya of Fox40 News in Sacramento, California reports that police arrested two men who stole an Apple Watch because the owner pinged the watch while the police were searching their motorhome. I presume it was a cellular Apple Watch, unless the owner was also close enough to be in Bluetooth range.
And finally, Apple released two great videos this week showing off the amazing video capabilities of an iPhone. Snowbrawl is a 90-second video that tells the story of a truly epic snowball fight. It was filmed on an iPhone 11 Pro by David Leitch, the director of Hollywood films such as John Wick and Deadpool 2. Just as good as the video itself is the behind-the-scenes “making of” video, which shows some pretty creative things that they did with the iPhone as a video camera.
For many years, I used my Mac’s built-in iPhoto, and more recently Photos, software to create hardcover books full of pictures that I had taken over the last year or some other period of time. A book of pictures of my kids over the last year was always a perfect Christmas present for my parents. Apple discontinued its photo printing service in September 2018, so last year I had to select a third-party service to create these books. The ones that I looked at most closely were Motif and Mimeo, both of which worked within the Photos app on a Mac and did a pretty good job of recreating the experience that you used to get from Apple. I ultimately decided to use Motif, and it worked great. Over the past year or so I’ve created four books using Motif on my Mac, and every one came out great.
On October 1, 2019, Motif released an iOS app so that you can now create picture books completely on your iPad. (You could also use an iPhone, but that screen is so small that I think it makes far more sense to use an iPad.) The company offered to let me print a free book so that I could try out the service and prepare this review. We are just a few months away from the beginning of Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, and for many decades I have enjoyed getting together with friends and family to celebrate so I have tons of pictures — especially from more recent years when I have had kids to take to parades. Thus, to do a realistic test of Motif, I decided to create a book full of Mardi Gras pictures over the years. With one exception that I’ll note at the end, the process went very well, and I actually found a lot to like about creating a picture book on an iPad. Indeed, when it is time for me to create my annual end-of-the-year book with pictures of my kids, I’m now planning to use the Motif iPad app instead of my computer.
Creating a book
You start the process in the Motif app by selecting a product. I selected Hardcover Photo Books, but you can also create softcover books, and soon you will also be able to create calendars and photo wall tiles.
Next, you select a size for your book. Almost every time that I have created a book using the former Apple service or Motif, I’ve created a large 13″ x 10″ book. The larger book size is more expensive but makes it easier to see pictures when you have multiple pictures on a single page, and when you have a single picture take up a full 13″ x 10″ page, it looks stunning. But the other sizes are 11″ x 8.5″, 10″ x 10″, and 8″ x 8″.
The next step is to select an image source. Motif lets you select from Memories (automatically created by Photos) or from your Albums. If you already have an album of photos to use, then you are ready to go. For my project, before I even started using the Motif app, I used my iPad’s built-in Photos app to add pictures to an album created for this book. Because I was selecting the best pictures from around two decades of pictures, this process actually took me a while to do, but it was fun to travel down memory lane as I curated the pictures.
Note that, for some of the picture selection process, I used Photos on my desktop iMac computer instead of my iPad. I was going through a very large number of pictures, and that process was often easier with the big 27″ screen of my iMac and a mouse. But I also selected many of the pictures on my iPad, and I certainly could have selected them all that way.
Once you have selected an album of photos — whether it is an album that you already had or one that you created specifically for the book — Motif will then analyze the quality of the pictures, including looking for duplicates. Motif will then select what it thinks are the best pictures to include in your book. Using a slider at the bottom, you can tell Motif how many pictures to include in the book and it will adjust its recommendations accordingly. And of course you can manually tap pictures to include or exclude them from the book.
Next, you select a theme for the book. There are currently 14 themes in the app. My favorite is called Image Conscious because it has no margins and allows each picture to be as large as possible within a thin frame on the page.
Next, you are presented with your book. Motif automatically puts pictures on pages for yo. Some pages have just one picture, some have multiple pictures. The pictures are roughly in chronological order, but not completely. You can view two pages of pictures at a time.
At this point, you could just tap the Checkout button and order the book. But my guess is that you will want to rearrange the pictures and change the templates of individual pages (how many pictures are on each page, and whether you also have words next to the pictures). You can also add more pages to the book. When you are adding a page or changing a template, you first tell Motif how many pictures you want to have on the page, and then you select from a wide variety of templates that work for that many pictures.
I have one complaint about working with templates. You cannot add just a single page within a book. You have to add two pages at a time. I understand the reasoning for this because it means that a picture that you selected to be closer to the outside edge of the book versus closer to the inside seam doesn’t change places when you add pages, but I still wish that the app let me make the decision to do this anyway.
Once you have your page template set, you can pick the pictures to place into the template. Using the Images button at the bottom, you can see all of the pictures that were selected but not yet used in your book (to avoid you using the same picture twice), or you can view all images, or you can view all images already placed. You can also add more images to the project from your Photos library.
This part of the process worked particularly well on the iPad. It is easy to pinch your fingers to zoom individual pictures so that just the best part of the picture fills the frame, making that process better than using a zoom slider on a computer. I also liked that the iPad is so portable. I could get in a comfortable spot on my couch to edit my book, and when I wanted to get a second opinion, it was easy to take my iPad to wherever my wife was located to solicit advice.
For the hardcover book, in addition to the pages in the book and the cover, you also get a book jacket with inside flaps. The cover of the book jacket is the same as the cover of the book, but you can add extra pictures and/or text to the inside flaps.
Once you have all the pages in your book the way that you want them, tap the checkout button. Motif will analyze your book and will give you a warning if you have individual pictures that are going to be a little blurry because the picture quality is low and you have them very large on a page. I got quite a few of those warnings for the older pictures in my Mardi Gras book because some of those old pictures are just scans of old photographs. But I decided to use those pictures anyway because of the memories that they contained, even if they were not very sharp, and that turned out to be the right decision.
Next you get to the payment page. The book that I selected came with 20 pages for $49.99, and each additional page was an additional $1.49. You can choose to ship economy (6-11 business days), standard (4-9 business days) or expedited (5 business days).
The final product
I placed my order on October 27, 2019, and it shipped just a few days later on October 30, 2019. The quality of the book was just as good as other books that I have ordered from Motif in the past using my computer, and just as good as books that I previously ordered using the service that Apple used to provide. (I’ve heard that this is not a coincidence and that the same printing service handled both, but whether that is true or not, all that matters to me is that the quality is the same.) The pages are thick, the photo quality is fantastic, and the book looks incredibly professional.
The one printing error
Unfortunately, however, there was one printing error. One of the pictures in the book was of my son wearing a fireman costume on Mardi Gras Day in 2009. The picture looked fine in the Motif iPad app, as you can see above. But in the book, the picture is rotated 90º counter-clockwise.
I decided that this was a good thing because it gave me an opportunity to test Motif’s customer service. I contacted Motif using their website on November 3, 2019. I received a response the next day, asking me for more information about my order, which I provided. Then on November 5, 2019, I received another email offering to reprint my book for free.
I then started a series of emails with customer service asking if I could do anything different this time since the picture was in the correct orientation in the app, just not in the printed book. I ultimately decided to follow their instructions and printed the book a second time … and again, the photo was turned 90º. After subsequent emails, Motif alerted me that there is a technical problem with my specific photo, and after some investigation I think that they are correct about there being some issue with my image file, even though the photo looks fine on my Mac, my iPad, my iPhone, and in the Motif app. I should be able to create a new version of the photo, use it in the Motif app, and print the book again and I presume that will fix the problem, but I haven’t done this yet. (And with the holidays right around the corner, I didn’t want to wait any longer before posting this review.) [UPDATE 12/13/19: After this review was posted, I did create a new version of the photo, used the coupon code Motif gave me to print the book again, and the version I received today is perfect. Also, today I received a different book that I created using Motif (that I paid for) and it is also perfect.]
Having said that, throughout the customer service process, Motif was great to deal with. The grammar used by their support staff is not perfect — clearly, English is not their native tongue — but I had no trouble understanding what they told me. I almost always got responses within 24-48 hours, and while faster responses would have been better, that seemed reasonable.
Moreover, this is not the first time that I have had a problem with a printed book. About 8 years ago, I printed a book using Apple’s former service and the colors on one of the pages were incorrect, as if too much blue was used (or not enough of some other color). Apple ultimately sent me a new book, although it meant that I had to give the “bad” book as a Christmas present and then I swapped it out for the “good” book after New Year’s.
Suffice it to say that if you are planning to order a Motif book for Christmas, you should do so soon.
Conclusion
Because I have used Motif and the similar Apple product for many years, I understood how the Motif app on the iPad was going to work. But even if this had been the first time that I had created a book, this app is easy enough to use that I would have had no trouble creating my first book. Because I use Apple’s iCloud Photos feature, all of my photos are available on my iMac, iPad, or iPhone. If you use this feature as well, then you already have access on your iPad to every photo that you might want to use in a book. Because the iPad makes it so easy to get work done anyplace, I found it really nice to use Motif in an iPad app instead of on a desktop computer. I did have that one problem with my printed book, and I do wish that Motif’s quality check in the iPad app could have discovered this issue before I printed the book. Nevertheless, Motif was very quick to give me a promotional code to reprint the book for free, and I don’t believe that their customer support folks had any idea that I was writing a review for a website, so I presume that they would treat all customers the same way.
If you are interested in turning your digital photos into a beautiful book that you can hold in your hands and easily share with friends and family, the Motif service is great. And now that they have an iPad app, you can use a very portable device with a touchscreen interface, which works very well for this type of project. If you are creating books to give as gifts for the holidays, you will want to act quickly to make sure that your book is printed in time. But whenever you are ready to make a book, the Motif app is a great way to do it.
