If you bought a new Apple device in the past few months, then you have free access to the AppleTV+ service. There are some great shows on there — I loved For All Mankind and The Morning Show, and so far I am really enjoying Trying — and there are other shows that are good enough to enjoy even if they won’t win any awards. But today, I want to mention Mythic Quest, a comedy about a videogame company. The first season came out a while ago with nine episodes, some of which were better than others, but the standout episode is the one in the middle, Episode 5. Apple recently released a tenth episode called Quarantine, which was filmed by all of the actors in their homes using iPhones. There have been tons of things filmed using webcams over the last few months, from episodes of Saturday Night Live to concerts to late night TV shows. But so far, this tenth episode may be my favorite of this new genre. It is worth watching all of the other nine episodes of Mythic Quest just so that you get to know the characters and can fully appreciate Episode 10, which is fantastic. So if you are looking for something to do while you shelter at home, I recommend that you watch Mythic Quest and prepare to enjoy the laughs during Episode 10. You can learn more about how this episode was created in this article by Lacey Rose of The Hollywood Reporter, but you should watch the episode before you read that article because it has some spoilers. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Michigan attorney Jonathan Frank reached out to me this week to share a post on LinkedIn about his first Zoom arbitration, including how he used his iPhone connected to a monitor. My experiences with trial and appellate court hearings using Zoom has been very positive. You lose something by not being there in person, but you gain so much in convenience and efficiency that overall I think that it is a better experience. I haven’t done a mediation or arbitration via Zoom yet, and as Jonathan notes in his post, that is a different type of experience because it can go on for so long.
One week ago, a bug caused many iPhone and iPad apps to be unable to launch, giving the error “This app is no longer shared with you.” A version of this bug has been around for a while, and I posted a fix for it a year ago. Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reports that Apple has now fixed the bug. That’s great news, and I’ll be curious to see if Apple’s fix only addressed the new version of the bug that surfaced last week or if Apple also fixed the bug that I have been seeing every few months for over a year.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reviews the Yobi B3, a smart doorbell that works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
Andrew O’Hara of AppleInsider reviews the Logitech Circle View, a smart security camera that works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
Glenn Fleishman of Macworld offers advice for participating in a videoconference using your iPhone and a large TV (such as a TV connected to an Apple TV) so that you can see the other participants on a larger screen.
And finally, almost a year ago, I mentioned a video from Apple called Bounce that shows, in an exaggerated fashion, how freeing it is to use AirPods. As reported by Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac, that advertisement recently won the Best in Show award at the 99th ADC Awards. It’s a great video, and worth watching again:
Back in 2014 and 2015, Apple revamped the way that photos are stored and managed on the iPhone/iPad and the Mac, and at the same time changed the name from “iPhoto” to “Photos.” Around that time, California attorney David Sparks created a Video Field Guide to show and talk through the apps. I reviewed that guide almost exactly five years ago. In the past five years, Apple has made a huge number of changes to Photos, especially in iOS 13. Accordingly, David has spent the last year creating an all-new Second Edition of his Photos Field Guide. The first edition had over two hours of videos. This second edition has over six hours of video, about 128 individual videos. David provided me with a free review copy of this Field Guild as soon as it was released a few days ago, and I enjoyed spending lots of time with it over the long Memorial Day Weekend. It sells for $29, but for a limited time you can purchase for only $24. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get the most out of the Photos app on their iPhone or iPad. (And if you also use a Mac, the Guide also fully covers the Mac version of Photos.)
The Photos Field Guide is perfect for anyone who appreciates that there are lots of features in the Photos app but who hasn’t taken the significant time to figure all of them out yet. David goes through virtually every feature in the app and for each feature shows how it works and explains why you would want to use the feature — or in some instances, why you are better off not using the feature.
David has created about a dozen video Field Guides, and they are all available at the website learn.macsparky.com. A few of them are even free. Once you purchase the Photos Field Guide, you will be able to click the guide from the main page of that website and start to use it.
The primary way to use the Field Guide is in a web browser. I mostly used the Photos Field Guide in Safari on my iPad, and it worked great. I also used it on a Mac, just a little, to see how it worked there, and that also worked well. All of the chapters are listed on the left. Simply tap on a chapter to have the video play on the right. You can tap a button in the bottom right of the video to have it fill the screen, which is how I watched most of the videos.
The Photos Field Guide includes chapters devoted to every aspect of the app. There are chapters with tips for taking better photos and using all of the features in the Camera app and chapters on recommended accessories such as small tripods that work well with the iPhone. There are chapters for importing photos that you take with another camera, such as a DSLR camera. There are chapters on managing the photos in your library, editing photos, organizing your photos, finding photos (and discovering the ones that you might have forgotten about), and sharing photos. There are also three chapters on working with video.
And those are just the chapters devoted to the iPhone and iPad. There also versions of most of these same chapters devoted to the Photos app on the Mac. And David Sparks points out when there is a function that you currently can only do on the iPhone/iPad but not on the Mac (such as advanced video editing functions) and on the Mac but not on the iPhone/iPad (such as using the retouch tool to remove a blemish). (In the iPhone/iPad chapters, he shows how you can work around that limitation by using third-party apps to remove a blemish from a photo.)
The chapters on finding and managing photos are particularly useful. When I started practicing law in the mid-1990s, a single roll of film on a camera might take my wife and I months to finish. Nowadays, I may take dozens or even hundreds of photos on my iPhone in a single day. With so many more pictures, knowing how to use photo management tools is essential. For example, I love that I can easily tell Photos on my iPad to show me pictures of my daughter, taken in 2012, on the beach, and then I’m instantly looking at those pictures.
The logical way to use the Field Guide is to read the chapters in order, but you don’t have to do it that way. If a particular chapter doesn’t interest you, you can just skip it. Or you can jump around to the chapters that interest you. When you complete a chapter, a checkmark appears next to the chapter name to make it easy to keep track of what you have already watched.
A bar and number at the top left tells you how much of the Field Guide you have completed so far.
What I love about this Field Guide is that David shows you the actual screen of his iPad (or iPhone or Mac) so you can see exactly what he is doing while he explains to you what he is doing. These are not videos in which you see his face talking about the app. The only time I saw a video with David talking to the camera was in the very last chapter at the end of the book, a 29-second video called “Thanks.”
I also like that David shows how to work with the Photos app using his actual Photos app, not some limited mock-up. That way, when he gives tips for managing a lot of photos, you see him doing so with his tens of thousands of photos. Yes, that means that you see a ton of pictures of David’s family and friends, a lot of pictures of Disneyland because he is a fan and it is close to his home, and even some pictures of his very cute puppy.
I will note that there were a very few instances in which I wish that he had used a photo designed to illustrate a particular function instead of just a convenient picture from his own library. For example, when he showed off the powerful vertical and horizontal perspective features, he did so on a photo taken at Disneyland that didn’t even need the adjustment. (For an example of how you might use that feature in real life, look at the two pictures of a PowerPoint slide showing a horse in this post.) But for most of the time, it was helpful to see him using the features with his real photo library because it felt like how I would be using the Photos app with my own, real, library of photos.
There are some settings that you can adjust in the Photos Field Guide, such as changing from 1x play speed to a faster or slower play speed. You can also download individual videos so that you can watch them later without an Internet connection. And to make that easier, at the very end of the Field Guide, David combined all of the chapters in each section of the book into a single video for each section (21 sections total) so that you can easily download a series of chapters devoted to a topic without having to download a dozen individual chapters for each section.
I consider myself a fairly advanced user of the Photos app – I take a ton of pictures (over 50,000 in my Photos library) and frequently edit the pictures either in the Photos app on my iPhone/iPad/Mac or using Photoshop on my Mac or iPad — and I still learned quite a few things from the Photos Field Guide. For example, I found his tips on sharing photos especially useful because David explained the limitations on certain sharing methods that you can avoid using other sharing methods, something I did not fully understand. If you consider yourself an intermediate or beginning user of Photos, then you will find this resource even more valuable.
And I say that from experience. After the first edition of David’s Photos Field Guide came out five years ago, I got a copy for my grandmother. Even though she was in her late 80s, she loved working with her photos on her Mac, and she would tell me how she would watch parts of that Field Guide over and over again until she had figured out how to master each task. Watching a video in which someone shows and explains how to do something is often far more useful than looking at a book, and my grandmother loved learning how to do more with all of the photos that she had accumulated (and scanned) from a lifetime of vacations and family events. My grandmother has now passed away, but I know that if she were still around, the second edition of this Field Guide would have brought a big smile to her face. And because of the work that she did with her digital photos while she was still alive, I love that I can still go through her photos that she organized so well.
Finally, while this guide would be useful at any time, now that we are all spending more time at home as a result of COVID-19, this is a perfect opportunity to find some time on a weekend to curl up with your iPad (or Mac) and learn from the Photos Field Guide. You will quickly find yourself doing more with the pictures that you already have, and then in the future, you will do more with your photos than ever before.
Just about every lawyer stores lots of confidential information on an iPhone or iPad, protected by the device’s passcode. But both good guys and bad guys are always looking for ways to hack that passcoce. Olivia Solon of NBC News reported this week that Grayshift, a company that makes iPhone-cracking devices for law enforcement, has a new trick up its sleeve. In the past, the Grayshift device would try to guess the iPhone passcode. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains, an iPhone is made so that it cannot accept more than 12.5 guesses per second. That means that a four-digit passcode would take on average seven minutes to crack (14 minutes maximum, if the last possible guess was the right one), and a six-digit passcode (the current default) takes on average 11 hours to guess, 22 hours at most. Go up to ten digits, and the average goes up to 12.5 years. Go over ten digits and/or use letters in addition to numbers (which is what I do), and the time to crack a passcode goes up exponentially. But with the new software from Grayshift, called Hide UI, a law enforcement official takes your iPhone, connects it to the Grayshift hardware, and then returns the iPhone to you. When you next enter your passcode, Hide UI secretly runs in the background and watches the passcode that you enter. Then the official takes your iPhone back, and they can get in. When this type of tool is used by good guys, like law enforcement trying to protect lives, that’s great news. When bad guys steal your phone and do the same thing to access your confidential attorney-client information, that’s horrible news. Be careful out there, and advise your clients to do the same. And now, the news of note from the past week:
If you use Microsoft Teams for videochat, you saw this week that Microsoft finally added 3×3 video so that you can see nine people at once (plus yourself) instead of four. It’s a nice improvement, and long overdue. But unfortunately, the iPad app still only shows four people, one of whom is you. According to a post on Microsoft User Feedback Forum, Microsoft is “continuing to work to include more videos during a meeting, as well as enabling support for mobile devices.”
Many attorneys are now attending trial and appellate court hearings via videochat. (I had my first such hearing earlier this week, and the process worked well.) Ideally, you will be in a well-lit environment with a nice background, but if not, you can use a virtual background with Zoom, Teams, and many other services. As Ray Ward of the Louisiana Civil Appeals blog wrote this week, the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal has offered some background images that oral advocates can use to make it look like they are standing in the courtroom in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cute idea.
Apple added many more Pride Apple Watch faces this week — the ones with rainbows. Killian Bell of Cult of Mac explains how to access them.
Dave McNary of Variety reports that the new Tom Hanks submarine drama called Greyhound was supposed to be the big movie in theaters right now, but in light of COVID-19, Sony decided to sell the release rights to Apple for its Apple TV+ video service. No word yet on when the movie will be available to watch.
Don’t force quite apps on your iPhone unless they are not working correctly and need to be restarted. Adam Engst of TidBITS explains why.
Leif Johnson of PCWorld notes that if you pair AirPods with Windows 10, the microphone doesn’t work as well as it does on an iPhone or Mac. I didn’t know that.
And finally, here is a beautiful video released by Apple a few months ago called Otherworldly: Valley of Fire. The whole thing was filmed on an iPhone 11 Pro using the Ultra Wide camera.:
Yesterday, Apple released the latest update to the iPhone operating system. Apple just calls it iOS 13.5, but to me, this is the COVID-19 update. It includes a number of changes to make the iPhone work better in a world in which we are dealing with the coronavirus. Here are the major new features.
Mask detection
We all need to wear masks in public, but if you have a newer iPhone with Face ID, that means that you cannot simply look at your iPhone to unlock it. Face ID examines your eyes, nose, and mouth to confirm that you are really you, and it won’t unlock your iPhone if your nose and mouth are covered up. Before iOS 13.5, it took the iPhone a short period of time to scan your face looking for a nose and mouth that it would never find because of a mask before it would finally give up to switch to a mode where you enter your passcode.
With iOS 13.5, your iPhone notices in a fraction of a second that you are wearing a mask and jumps directly to the screen where you enter your passcode. Even though this only saves seconds, it actually removes quite a bit of aggravation. This was a great idea — and one that most of us never would have thought of before a few months ago.
Exposure notification
Experts such as the CDC say that contact tracing is a “key strategy for preventing further spread of COVID-19.” When someone gets COVID-19, it is helpful to quickly notify others who may have caught the disease from that person so that they can be quarantined before they unknowingly spread it to others. Contact tracing is often done by a public health official asking a sick person where they have been. But nobody has perfect memories, and even if you know the exact time that you were in an exact place, how do you know who else was close to you?
iOS 13.5 includes the first version of the exposure notification software developed jointly by Apple and Google. And it is done in a way that protects your privacy. If you choose to participate, once a public health official confirms that you have COVID-19, then other smartphones that were sufficiently close to your smartphone (as measured by Bluetooth) for a sufficient amount of time give their owner a notification that they may have been exposed to COVID-19. All of this is done with privacy in mind. You have no way of knowing who they are and they have no way of knowing how you are. And unlike some contact tracing software in which the government keeps a central database of everywhere that your phone has been, the Apple/Google approach doesn’t make this information available.
The privacy emphasis is good not only because it is inherently good to protect your privacy but also because that encourages more folks to turn on this feature. The more people that use the system, the more that the system can do to protect us all.
Note that iOS 13.5 is only the first step, just the back-end software that exists on your iPhone. To actually take advantage the exposure notification feature, you need to do two things. First, you need to download a free app provided by your country or state or other locality that is designed to work with the Apple/Google data. Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal reports that, here in the United States, the states of North Dakota, Alabama, and South Carolina will soon have their apps available. Parish Dave of Reuters reports that 22 countries are considering releasing compatible apps.
Second, you need to turn on the feature in the Settings app. Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Bluetooth -> COVID-19 Exposure Logging to turn it on. You can see this setting once you download iOS 13.5, but you cannot do anything with it until you have installed an authorized app.
I hope that we don’t have to wait long to see apps in all 50 states and many other countries. Also, I hope that lots of folks take advantage of this feature. Much like wearing a mask, the more that people participate, the more that we are all protected.
Eliminate FaceTime nausea
Before COVID-19, I only used FaceTime to talk to one person at a time. But now that we need to stay apart from our friends and family, I’ve had more group FaceTime calls to talk to several family members at once. Unlike some other services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams that have fixed rectangles to indicate different people, a group FaceTime calls uses an interesting feature in which the rectangles float around the screen and the rectangle for the person who is speaking grows largers while others get smaller. In theory, it is a neat trick.
In practice, it sometimes makes me feel seasick to see shapes moving around the screen getting bigger and smaller. Fortunately, iOS 13.5 gives you the option to turn this off. Go to Settings -> FaceTime -> Speaking to turn off the automatic prominence feature that changes the size of the tiles based upon who is speaking.
I’m glad to see this option, because other than this annoyance, I find the quality of group FaceTime calls to be very high. Now that I have this option, I’m much more likely to use group FaceTime to talk to a group of people who are all using Apple devices.
Tell emergency services who you are
Hopefully, none of us will ever need to call 9-1-1 or whatever the emergency services number is in your part of the world, but it is nice to know that the service is there if you need it. In iOS 13.5, if you call emergency services — whether for a COVID-19 reason or something else — you can choose to have your iPhone share a limited amount of your health data automatically, information that can make it faster and easier to get the medical attention that is best for you.
Before discussing this new feature, let’s talk about the iPhone Medical ID, a feature that has been available since the release of iOS 8 on September 17, 2014. In the iPhone’s Health app, you can add information selected by you such as your name, age, medications, blood type, and emergency contacts to a Medical ID card. If someone finds you in a state in which you cannot communicate, they can pick up your iPhone and (if you have it enabled) see the information on your Medical ID without having to unlock your iPhone. (When on the lock screen on which the keypad is displayed, tap Emergency, then tap Medical ID, both of which are at the bottom left.) That way, even if you cannot tell a medical professional or police officer this critical information, your iPhone will do it for you. If you have a contact listed on your Medical ID with an associated phone number, that person can even use your iPhone to call that number without unlocking your device. For example, the person could call your spouse to advise that you have been injured.
The new feature in iOS 13.5 is that your iPhone can share this information with emergency services when you call them. That way, they not only know where you are located but they also know who you are and other information that could be critical in a time-sensitive situation to help you as soon as possible.
Etc.
There are a few other minor new features. For example, Ryan Christoffel of MacStories describes a new feature that lets you share a song, album, or playlist in Apple Music to Instagram and other services.
Also, like every update to the operating system of the iPhone and iPad, this update fixes some bugs and improves security. Thus, I always recommend that folks update their iPhone and iPad when an update is available, except that you might want to wait a day or two just in case there are any problems with the rollout that Apple needs to fix. I had no trouble yesterday when I updated my iPhone to iOS 13.5 and my iPad to iPad OS 13.5, nor have I seen reports of others encountering problems, so I think that this update is safe to install.
My entire family has been working and attending school from home for the past eight weeks. Although New Orleans is slowing starting to open up tomorrow, I have no doubt that we will be spending a lot more time at home in 2020 than in prior years. That means that the Wi-Fi at my house has been getting much more use than normal, and I suspect that the same is true for many of you. At my house, I’m still using the Apple AirPort Extreme system that I described in this 2015 post, but Apple stopped selling and upgrading that equipment long ago, and I’ve been considering an upgrade to improve performance throughout my house. If you are also considering an upgrade to your Wi-Fi hardware, the best systems today seem to be the mesh Wi-Fi systems such as the Eero Pro. California attorney David Sparks points out on his MacSparky website that Apple is now selling Eero products in its online store, an indication that Apple approves of the product, and he notes that the system has been working well for him. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Samuel Axon of Ars Technica reports that Apple has acquired NextVR for an estimated $100 million. We don’t know exactly what Apple has planned for AR and VR in the future, but the company is clearly working on something big.
One way to see why a lot of people are very happy with Apple’s new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro is to take a look inside of the product. iFixIt used X-Ray photography and took a Magic Keyboard apart to show how it all works.
If you are interested in using a stylus with your iPad but don’t want to pay $99 or $129 for an Apple Pencil, Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the Meco Stylus Pen, which costs $33 on Amazon.
If you are interested in using a stylus with your iPad and want your stylus to also sterilize your iPad screen, the Apple Pencil won’t do that — and I think that it is safe to predict that the Apple Pencil will never do that — but the new Adonit Note-UVC will, according to Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac.
Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac reports that a new smart lock from August is smaller than previous models and works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that Apple’s A13 chip used in its newest iPhones, including the $400 iPhone SE, is faster than any chip used on even the most expensive Android phone that you can buy.
And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal prepared an interesting video showing how the exposure notification app that should soon be available on the iPhone (and Android) works:
I am presenting a 90-minute webinar CLE this Friday, May 15, at 9:30 Central to provide tips for using an iPad and iPhone in your law practice. I’ll be talking about viewing and editing documents, taking handwritten notes, security issues, recommended apps, tips for being more efficient, the latest software and hardware, and much more. I have some slides prepared, but in addition, this will be the first time that I have conducted an online CLE in which I will be doing a live demonstration from my iPad to show you exactly how I use my device. Hopefully, that will make this more interesting than a typical webinar in which you only see slide after slide. Participants will also have the opportunity to ask questions for me to answer.
The online CLE is sponsored by the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, and you can click here to register. Loyola is charging $30 for the seminar, and it is approved for 1.5 hours of Louisiana CLE credit. Depending upon the CLE rules in your state, you may be able to get credit for it in other states too. With so many states approving online CLE during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is nice to be able to get CLE hours without having to leave home.
On June 3, 2019, Apple debuted iPadOS at its WWDC developer conference. One of the new features announced was the ability to run two instances of an app side-by-side. To show how useful this would be, Apple demonstrated Microsoft Word running in this mode. When iPadOS was released in September 2019, I had hoped to see Microsoft Word updated to see the feature that had been shown off on a big screen three months earlier:
Now it is May 2020, and we finally have a new version of Microsoft Word for iPad that includes this feature. It is very useful because it allows you to work with two documents at the same time.
Entering Split View
If you have been using the Split View feature on your iPad since iPad OS was released last year, then you already know how to enter this mode in Microsoft Word. In short, you drag to the right side of the screen.
First, when you are on the home screen of Word — the screen that has the New, Recent, Shared, Open, and Settings icons on the left — you can hold your finger down on any document name in the list and then drag that file over to the right edge of the screen. That will open up the file on the right side of the screen, and then you can tap on any other document on the left side of the screen to view it.
Second, when you are on the home screen of Word you can tap the three dots at the far right of the file name. One of the options in the pop-up list is Open in New Window. Select that.
Third, you can slide up a finger starting just below the screen to show the dock. (Or, if you are using an external keyboard, you can use the shortcut Command-Option-D to show the dock.). Next, drag the Word icon from the dock to the right edge of the screen and you will open a second Word window on the right side.
Using Split View
Once you have activated Split View, you can work with the document on the left or the right just as if you had two Microsoft Word apps running side-by-side. You can open or close documents on either side.
Although you can edit either document in this mode, the text is rather small. After all, you are now only using half of the width of a screen for a document. Even on my 12.9″ iPad Pro — the largest iPad screen currently available — I find the two documents to be a little small to read when they are side-by-side.
If you hold down on the separator between the two documents (which Apple calls the app divider) you can make one side of the screen larger (two-thirds of the screen) and the other side of the screen smaller (one-third of the screen). That does make one document much easier to see, but it makes the other document tiny.
Fortunately, there is a way to make the text larger when you have two documents open at once in Word. At the top right of the screen in Word, the second-to-last button starts the Mobile View mode. Or you can get to the same mode by tapping the View tab and changing from the default Print Layout mode to the Mobile View. In this mode, you can pinch to make the text bigger or smaller and the line breaks adjust accordingly. The Mobile View mode doesn’t show page breaks or footnotes. In other words, you are no longer seeing what the document is going to look like when you print it, but instead you are just focusing on the words in the document. By putting the document on half of your screen in Mobile View — or by putting both documents in Mobile View — it is easy to see all of the words even with just half of the screen devoted to a document.
By switching between the Print Layout view and the Mobile View as you are working with a document, it is easy to switch between seeing your entire document with all of the formatting and reading or editing a document.
With two documents open side-by-side, you can easily review one Word document on the left half of the screen while you type another document on the right side of the screen. Or you can take a paragraph from one document, select it, and then drag a copy of that paragraph across the screen to place it in the other document. You can also select text in one document and copy it and then go to the other document and paste it without having to close the first document, find the second document, and open the second document.
On a computer, many of us are used to having lots of different Word documents open at the same time, although to be fair it can be confusing to find your place when you have too many open at once. The iPad is more limited by now having only two documents open at once, but having two is far more useful than just having one. Indeed, you can close a document on one side of the screen and then open another document all while you keep your primary document open on the other side of the screen, and that works well if you need to shuffle between three or more documents at the same time.
Note that technically it is possible to look at three different Word documents at the same time, but I’m not sure that this mode is very useful. Here is how that works. While you already have two documents open at the same time in Split View, you can bring up the dock and then drag the Word icon to the middle of the screen, right on top of the separator (the app divider). This will open up a third instance of Microsoft Word in what Apple calls Slide Over view. But in this. mode, the third Word document will be covering up most of the second Word document:
I suppose that having a third document in Slide Over in Word could be useful in rare circumstances because you can swipe the handle at the top of this third Word document to push it off of the screen, and then you could bring it back to the screen by swiping in from the right side of the screen. So if you just need to briefly consult that third document, you could swipe to bring it in and then swipe the other direction to move it back off. And if you need to see the second document on the right side of the screen you could move that Slide Over view so that it instead covers up the left side of the screen. So I can imagine a scenario in which this three-document approach makes sense. Most of the time, however, this would just make things confusing, so I suspect that I will stick with just one or two documents open at once.
Exiting Split View
When you want to return to working with just one document at once, drag the separator in the middle of the screen over to the right side (if you just want to look at the left document) or over to the left side (if you just want to look at the right document). This will return you to looking at just one document at a time.
When you do this, the other document is still technically open. You can see this by activating the iPad app switcher: swipe up with one finger from the bottom edge of the screen and hold in the middle of the screen until the app switcher appears. From the app switcher, you can jump between the two different documents, each of which is open in a full-screen mode.
Conclusion
Although it is unfortunate that it took Microsoft so long to implement this feature, I’m glad that it is finally here. I frequently find myself working with two documents at the same time. Just last night, I had on the left side of the screen the Memorandum that I wrote in support of a motion for summary judgment while on the right side of the screen I was drafting my Reply. It was useful to be able to look at the arguments in my original Memorandum and drag case citations and other things from my original Memorandum into the Reply that I was drafting.
My next big wish for Microsoft Word for iPad is to see full support for the new iPad OS cursor that you can use with a mouse or trackpad. When Microsoft revises the Word app to take full advantage of the new cursor, it will be much easier to select text. According to a recent article by Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch, Microsoft is working on this feature but it won’t be out until Fall 2020.
All indications are that we are getting close to a time period when more folks will be leaving their homes again, many of whom will start to report to work. Of course, this greatly increases the risk of more folks being exposed to the coronavirus. Fortunately, we are also very close to the time when Apple and Google will make available the software required for public health authorities to release official apps that will notify you if you were potentially exposed to someone with the coronavirus because your iPhone/Android and their iPhone/Android were recently in close proximity. It is currently unclear where these apps will be available. For example, the NHS in the UK initially said that it was going to offer its own system which centralized the collection of data, but Natasha Lomas of TechCrunch reports that, according to the Financial Times, UK may be rethinking that decision. As Jeffrey Goldberg of 1Password explains, a cornerstone of the Apple/Google approach is that it is decentralized to protect the privacy of folks who are using the apps. For example, the apps will not result in any single government database that tracks where users were located. When the apps are available, we now know a little more about what they will look like; Russell Brandom of The Verge reports that Apple released some sample screenshots. I hope that these exposure notification apps are available soon. Along with other measures, like encouraging everyone to wear a mask in public, it can help to save lives. And now, the news of note from the past week:
In the latest episode of the AppStories podcast, available here on the MacStories website, Federico Viticci interviews Apple VP Craig Federighi to discuss the fantastic new pointer support in iPadOS. It’s a great interview.
Federighi also talked to Matthew Panzrino of TechCrunch to discuss the new iPad cursor, resulting in this article.
Although most Apple Stores around the world are currently closed, Apple has launched a new hub for its online store which tries to mimic the features of a normal Apple Store, like shopping assistance, a genius bar, and even a Today at Apple section — which features a number of high-quality videos recorded by Apple Store employees in their homes showing you how to do lots of different things with your Apple devices.
If you are like me, your appearances in video conferences have vastly increased due to COVID-19. If you don’t like the built-in camera on your computer, you can use your iPhone’s high-quality camera as a webcam. Tim Brookes of How-To Geek explains how to do so.
My favorite show (so far) on Apple TV+ is For All Mankind. Former Astronaut Garrett Reisman, who is a technical adviser on the show, provides a guided tour of the lunar base featured in the series in this interesting video.
And finally, Apple CEO Tim Cook was the commencement speaker at the Ohio State graduation this week. Of course, the event had to be virtual due to COVID-19, so Cook gave a recorded address. It’s a great, well-written speech, and I recommend it:
On Thursday, Apple released the results for its 2020 fiscal second quarter (which ran from December 29, 2019, to March 28, 2020) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. Unlike Apple’s Q1 which contains all of the holidays sales, Apple’s Q2 is usually not a particularly interesting quarter. But this year, I was curious to see what impact COVID-19 might have. It wasn’t until the end of March that COVID-19 started to have much of an impact in the United States, but China is also a large market for Apple. Three months ago, Apple predicted that its Q2 revenue would be between $63 billion and $67 billion, which was a larger range than normal because of COVID-19 uncertainty. A few weeks later in February, Apple announced that it no longer expected to see that much revenue because of COVID-19, and Apple did not release a revised number. The actual revenue announced by Apple last week was $58.3 billion. That’s actually a little bit higher than Apple’s $58 billion in revenue from 2019 Q2, so all things considered, it certainly wasn’t a horrible quarter for Apple even if it wasn’t as good as it had originally anticipated. If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha. Jason Snell of Six Colors also prepared a transcript. Apple’s official press release is here. As always, I’m not as interested in the financial details as I am the statements of Apple executives during the call that are of interest to iPhone and iPad users. Here are the items that stood out to me.
iPhone
iPhone revenue was $28.96 billion, compared to $31 billion this time last year.
Apple had temporary iPhone supply shortages in February, but by the end of March seems to be back on track.
Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that while the iPhone SE is the least expensive iPhone being sold by Apple, it is faster than even the fastest, most expensive, Android phones. That is because the new iPhone SE contains the same Apple-designed A13 chip that Apple also includes in its most expensive models of the iPhone. (The iPhone SE really is a fantastic value for folks who prefer the version of the iPhone with a button and Touch ID instead of a larger screen and Face ID.)
iPad
iPad revenue was $4.4 billion, compared to $4.9 billion this time last year.
Apple said that the new 2020 version of the iPad Pro, and the new iPhone SE, have “received outstanding customer response, even during these extreme circumstances.”
Other
This was a record-setting quarter for Apple — in a good way — in two areas. First, Apple reported its highest-ever revenue in Services. This includes just about everything folks pay to Apple other than hardware, things like the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud storage, AppleCare, etc. Apple considers this a critical area of revenue because it can be a steady source of income. People may wait two to three years before buying a new iPhone, but they often pay Apple in the area of Services every month.
For example, Apple now has over 515 million paid subscriptions across all of its services, and it expects to have over 600 million by December 31, 2020.
Second, Apple reported that this was its best Q2 ever in the area of Wearables, Home and Accessories. This segment includes the Apple Watch and AirPods, two items that are incredibly popular for Apple.
For example, Apple said that its wearables business is now the size of a Fortune 140 company.
Apple has sourced more than 30 million masks for frontline medical workers battling COVID-19. It has also designed, tested, manufactured, and distributed more than 7.5 billion face shields and continues to ship more than one million face shields every week to medical workers.
Cook said that Apple employees continue to work hard notwithstanding the pandemic. “In some areas of the company, people may be even more productive, in some other areas they’re not as productive. And so it’s mixed, depending upon what the roles are. But as you can tell, from what we did this quarter, despite the environment, we have our head down and are working because we know that our customers want the products that we’ve got. They’re even more important in these times.”
Cook said that, in light of COVID-19, Apple cannot predict what kind of sales it will have in April, May, and June, and thus Apple is taking the unusual step of not issuing guidance for its 2020 Q3. But Cook did say: “We’ve always managed through difficult moments by doubling down and investing in the next generation of innovation. And that’s our strategy today. And so while we can’t say for sure how many chapters are in this book, we can have confidence that the ending will be a good one.”
Ever since iPad OS 13 was released last year, it has been possible to run two instances of certain apps side-by-side. For example, you can have the Mail app open on the left side of the screen while, at the same time, you use Mail to compose a message on the right side of your screen — making it easy to consult older emails as you draft a new one. Microsoft has an Office Insider program that offers beta versions of upcoming Microsoft software, and this week, the Office Insider Blog describes an upcoming feature in Word for iPad that lets you use two windows side-by-side. This seems like an incredibly useful feature. When I use Word on my computer, I virtually always have more than one Word window open at a time so that I can copy items from one document and paste them into another. It will be great to be able to do the same thing on the iPad, even if you are limited to having two documents open at once. If you use PowerPoint on your iPad, that same post says that this feature is also coming to PowerPoint for iPad. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Christina Farr of CNBC provides the behind-the-scenes story on how Apple and Google came together to create an exposure notification system for COVID-19 that protects your privacy.
If you use the Group FaceTime feature to talk to multiple people at once, you know that the square of the person who is speaking gets larger while the squares of others get smaller. That feature is visually interesting, but it also can make you feel a little seasick as faces move around the screen. Dan Moren of Six Colors reports that the next version of iOS — iOS 13.5 — will include the option to disable this feature.
In that same post, Moren reports that iOS 13.5 will also make it easier to unlock an iPhone when you are wearing a mask, bringing you directly to the screen where you enter your passcode instead of using Face ID.
In a different post, Moren reviews the Logitech Combo Touch. It looks somewhat similar to the Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad in that it combines a keyboard and a trackpad. But while Apple’s Magic Keyboard works with the two most recent models of the iPad Pro (the 3rd and 4th generation iPad Pr0), the Logitech Combo Touch works with the 7th generation iPad (released in 2019), the 3rd generation iPad Air (released in 2019), and the 10.5″ version of the 2nd generation iPad Pro (released in 2017). Moren concludes that the Logitech Combo Touch is fine, but not nearly as nice as the Apple Magic Keyboard. Of course, it is also not as expensive.
If you use Microsoft Teams for your videochats, Microsoft announced yesterday that background blur is “rolling out now” as a feature on the iPhone and iPad. I don’t see it yet. but hopefully it will come in an update very soon. The iPhone and iPad versions of Teams also lack the ability to use custom backgrounds, something added to the PC and Mac client a few weeks ago. According to that same post, the desktop client is about to get the option to have nine people on the screen at one time instead of four — to which, I say, it’s about time! (And Microsoft says that the number will increase even more in the future.) No word on when, if ever, you will be able to see more than four faces on the screen at one time on the iPad or iPhone versions of Teams.
Ben Sandofsky of Halide takes a detailed look at the camera on the iPhone SE. While the hardware is essentially the same as what was included with the iPhone 8, you get more features and better results with the iPhone SE because it has such an advanced processor. Every year, it becomes even more true that software, not hardware, determines how good a camera is.
Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac discusses HomeKit options for outdoor lighting. Back in 2018, I reviewed the iHome iSP100 Outdoor Smart Plug, which is what I use to control the lights in my backyard. I recently changed my outdoor configuration, so I updated that post earlier this week. Since my wife and I have been sheltering in place for over six weeks, we have been using our backyard even more, and I really love being able to tap a button on my Apple Watch or iPhone to turn the outdoor accent lights on and off.
If you want to use HomeKit to lock and unlock the deadbolt on a door, Level Lock is a new product that replaces the inside of your deadbolt but lets you keep the outdoor hardware. As a result, the lock looks the same, but now you can lock/unlock it using your iPhone or Apple Watch. And you can also give guests the ability to do the same thing during time periods that you create. It looks like an interesting product.
No matter where in the world you are located, you can celebrate the second-and-final-weekend of what would normally be Jazz Fest in New Orleans this weekend by listening to Jazz Festing in Place on WWOZ, either in the iPhone app or on the web. Great artists who are on deck for today through Sunday include Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, the Neville Brothers, Wynton Marsalis, Dr. Michael White, the Blind Boys of Alabama, John Boutte, the Hot 8 Brass Band, and many, many more. You can also use the two-week archive to listen to last week’s Jazz Festing in Place.
And finally, in this video called Float, Apple shows off the iPad Pro with the new Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad:
