Month: October 2020

When I first discussed iOS 14 on June 23, 2020, I guessed that the new widgets feature would be one of the more noticeable improvements.  What I didn’t realize was how popular it would become and how I much I would enjoy the feature.  People like me who use their devices to be productive are finding lots of great uses.  And folks who just want to change the appearance of their iPhone are also loving this feature, evidenced by all of the pictures I’m seeing of creative iPhone screens and the buzz surrounding them.  For example, when Kat Mogus posted a short video on TikTok to show how she was using the fantastic Widgetsmith app to create what she says is her “aesthetic af” pink homescreen, it went viral and already has 3.5 million hearts.  It also helped to push David Smith’s Widgetsmith app to the #1 spot on the App Store.  If you haven’t started to explore the widgets feature yet, I encourage you to do so because I find that it makes my iPhone and iPad even more useful in my law practice.  Plus, widgets are fun.

Creating a widget

Apple has a helpful page on its website that explains how to create, edit, and delete widgets.  In short, you press down on an empty area of the screen to get into “jiggle mode” where you can move apps around.  In that mode, you will see a plus sign at the top left corner.  Tap the plus sign to bring up a screen with some suggested widgets at the top followed by a list of all of your apps that have been updated to take advantage of iOS 14 widgets.  You can simply browse to find something useful or use the search bar at the top to search for something specific.

For example, let’s say that you want to place a calendar widget from the built-in Calendar app.  Tap on Calendar and this brings up a screen where you can see each of the possible sizes of the widget.  In this case, there is a 2×2, a 2×4, and a 4×4.  Tap on one of them, and then drag it to your home screen.

You can either place a widget in its own space on your home screen or you can place a widget on top of another widget in a stack — more on that below.

Making space for widgets

If you are like me, you have considered the 24 app spaces on your first home screen to be prime real estate, second in importance only to the four apps that live at the bottom of all of your home screens.  So at first, I was reluctant to place even the smallest 2×2 widget on my screen because I didn’t want to give up four different apps for just a single widget.  But I soon realized that I was wrong to be clinging to my old ways.  Here is why.

First, when you place a widget for an app on your home screen, you really don’t need the app icon any more.  For example, if you place the Calendar widget on your home screen and you tap it, it will launch the Calendar app.  Place a widget for a to do app and you no longer need that app icon on the main screen.  Thus, you are taking up the space of at least four app icons, but you no longer need one of those app icons on the home screen.

Second, as noted above, you can stack multiple widgets.  If you stack four widgets in a 4×4 widget space, you are using the same screen real estate that the four apps themselves would have used.  You can switch between the widgets in a stack by just swiping up or down on the stack.

Third, I realized that it really wasn’t that hard for me to select a number of apps that used to be on my first home screen that worked just as well on my second screen.  For example, on my iPhone, there are apps like Dropbox and Facebook and eero and Files that I do use frequently, but it isn’t really a big hassle to swipe over once to a second screen to get to them.  The slight inconvenience is outweighed by the usefulness of using widgets on the first screen, as discussed below.  Plus, it has given me a new reason to go to the second screen of my iPhone, which is now a perfect place for me to place even more widgets — or, for now, one of the large 4×4 widgets.  As for the apps that used to be on my second screen, they are now on my third (and final) screen organized into folders.  The apps that are not important enough to be on any of those three screens are now on hidden screens.  If I want to use any of lesser-used apps, I use the new App Library feature of iOS 14 to keep track of all of those.

Note that I’m only talking about screen real estate for the iPhone because, unfortunately, you cannot currently place a widget on the main portion of an iPad screen.  They have to live on the left side of the screen, which means that there is actually less space for widgets on a large iPad screen than on a small iPhone screen.  And that just makes no sense.  I still find widgets to be incredibly useful on the iPad, but with all of the additional space on the iPad screen I would love to be able to place widgets anywhere, just like the iPhone.  This is so obvious that I have to imagine that Apple is working on adding this in a future update to iPadOS.

The usefulness of widgets

Now here comes the fun part:  using widgets to improve your life.  I love widgets because they display the useful information that I need the most, often making it unnecessary to open up the app to get the information that I need.  For most widgets, you get to select what information is displayed, so the information that you see is the information that is most useful to you.

For example, although I sometimes use the built-in Calendar app, I prefer to use Fantastical (an app I most recently discussed in this post), and it has some great widgets.  There are currently 12 different widgets to choose from.  In the smallest 2×2 size you can get choose to see what is up next, a list of upcoming events, the entire month, or just today’s date (in two possible formats).  Larger widget sizes can display even more information.

I use Things to keep track of my “to do” list for work — the motions, appeals, discovery, and other projects that I am working on.  The 2×2 version of the Things widgets is big enough to display the three items at the top of my list, which are the items that I am most likely to be working on each day.  I find it very useful that when I am on my home screen I am gently reminded of the most important tasks for me to be working on.

Another app with fantastic widgets is Carrot Weather (which I reviewed in 2018).  It has twelve widgets.  These widgets update throughout the day to show you the weather, and if you pay for a Tier 3 subscription, there is a widget that shows a weather radar so you can see if rainclouds are close.  The Carrot app also has an optional personality.  It can be serious and just give you the facts, or you can turn on the snarky feature for the app to provide silly (and often timely) comments along with the weather.

The built-in Photos app has three widgets in 2×2, 2×4, or 4×4 sizes, which display a special moment selected by the Memories part of the Photos app.  The photo selected changes throughout the day, and it often brings a smile to my face to glance at a picture of my kids when they were younger (and cuter!) as I am doing work on my iPhone.  If you want more control over photos, the Widgetsmith app will rotate through pictures that are within a specific album in the Photos app.  Thus, you can use Widgetsmith to display a picture of your spouse, child, pet., etc. that changes over time – whatever you make the subject of one of your albums.

Any of these widgets would be useful on their own, but as I mentioned above, if you drag a widget on top of another one, you can create a stack of widgets.  As I noted above, you can swipe up and down to manually swap through the widgets in a stack.  Better yet, if you hold down your finger on a stack for a second or two, you will see an option to edit the the stack and use the Smart Rotate feature.  (You can also use that feature to rearrange or delete widgets in a stack.) 

 

The Smart Rotate feature is one of the best part of widgets.  Throughout the day, the iPhone rotates the widgets with Smart Rotate turned on, often trying to show you the widget that might be most useful at that point in the day.  I love this feature because I look at my iPhone and iPad home screen frequently, and over a relatively short period of time as the widgets rotate I end up seeing all of the widgets in a stack.  Thus, in a 2×2 space that would normally be devoted to four static app icons that need to be tapped to see any useful information, a 2×2 widget gives me a way to launch an of the four apps while also showing me useful (or fun) information that often makes it unnecessary to launch the app.  By frequently seeing information such as my upcoming schedule and the weather, with some pictures thrown in to give me an occasional smile, the space that used to hold four static app icons is now making me much more productive and happy.

For example, I currently have the Fantastical widget and the Things widget in a single stack.  As they switch back and forth throughout the day, I get subtle reminders of what is coming up and what I should be working on.  With just two widgets in a stack, if the one that I want to see is not currently being displayed, it just takes a quick swipe to see the other one.  And then I can tap on either one to launch the Fantastical or the Things app.

Speaking of Smart Rotate, there is a similar feature if you use the Widgetsmith app.  That app lets you choose from a large variety of information to display — in lots of different styles, fonts, colors, etc. — and then you can have the information displayed in the widget change based upon the time of day.  That’s a neat idea that other developers should copy.  Carrot Weather already does; for the 2×4 widgets that I display on my iPad, in the morning it shows me the hourly temperature for the next few hours, but at the end of the day it shows me the daily temperature for the next few days.

You cannot interact with the items displayed on the widget.  For example, for the Fantastical widget, I simply see my calendar items, and tapping anywhere on the widget launches the app so that I can dig deeper in the app itself.  But there is currently one exception:  the Shortcuts app.  Although the 2×2 version of the widget is used to launch one specific shortcut, the 2×4 widget lists four shortcuts and the 4×4 widget contains eight shortcuts.  It selects the shortcuts from whatever folder you select, so within the Shortcuts app, you can create a folder called “widgets” and place the four or eight shortcuts that you want in there.  It is very useful to launch a shortcut and start using it directly from the home screen.  I’m currently using a 4×4 Shortcuts widget on my second home screen so that I can launch 8 shortcuts — the last one of which is a simply shortcut that simply launches the Shortcuts app, making it unnecessary for me to have a Shortcuts icon on my homescreen.

I’m still trying to decide what shortcuts to place on that large widget.  I recommend that, for one of the shortcut slots, you include a shortcut to launch Shortcuts, making it unnecessary to have the Shortcuts app on your home screen. 

It’s not all good news.  I’m currently working through a bug that one of my widgets will work when launched within the Shortcuts app but doesn’t work when launched from the widget.  I’m still not sure if the fault lies with me or with Apple on that bug.  Nevertheless, it is already obvious that the Shortcuts widget is one of the most powerful widgets.

Conclusion

The widgets feature has fundamentally changed the way that I interact with my iPhone homescreen.  It is probably the most significant thing to happen to the primary screen of my phone since I started using an iPhone in the first place.  And these are early days.  Many popular apps have not yet been updated to support widgets, and those that have are likely to have even better widgets in the future as we all figure out what is best about this feature.  Moreover, the ability to create widgets will cause folks to create new apps that did not exist before.  Widgetsmith itself is a perfect example, and as I was writing this post, I learned of a new app called Scribblet that lets you write something — a handwritten to-do list, a drawing, an inspirational quote, etc. — and have it display in a widget.  Sribblet itself may not be my cup of tea, but it demonstrates that developers are coming up with new ideas to exploit what widgets can do.  And finally, there is Apple itself, which I’m sure will improve widgets in the future — such as, hopefully, allowing widgets to be placed anywhere on an iPad screen.  Suffice it to say that widgets are already great, this feature is certain to become even better in the future.

Yesterday, Apple announced that it will live stream an Apple Event on Tuesday, October 13 at 10 Pacific / 1 Eastern.  Apple didn’t say what it will be announcing but we all know that the focus will be the 2020 version of the iPhone.  The last time that Apple announced a new iPhone in October was the iPhone 4s, announced on October 4, 2011.  (That was the iPhone that first added Siri.)  From 2012 to 2019, Apple announced new iPhone models every September so that there would be plenty of time to get them into the market for the end-of-the-year holiday buying season.  This year, on the other hand … well, we all know what affect the year 2020 has had on normality.  Apple alerted everyone in early August that the new iPhone would come out a little later this year, and here we are.

The invitation for the Apple Event features the phrase “Hi, Speed.”

I presume that is a reference to the next iPhone being faster, not only because of the new A14 processor (that we heard about last month in the new iPad Air (4th generation)), but also because many expect this to be the first iPhone to work with the new 5G networks.  So far, most of the reports that I have seen is that 5G is not yet ready for prime time — it is a big drain on battery life, it is sometimes slower than 4G, and it is only available in limited areas.  It will be interesting to see if the 5G version of the iPhone has these same shortcomings.

By the way, if you visit this page on Apple’s website using a modern iPhone or iPad and tap on the graphic in the middle of the page, you will see an interesting AR/VR advertisement for the event.

I could not be more pleased to welcome Readdle as a new sponsor of iPhone J.D.  I have been using their iPhone and iPad apps for as long as I can remember, and they have created and improved some of the very best productivity apps.  For example, I can count on one hand the apps that I consider essential to my law practice, and PDF Expert is unquestionably on that list.  Every lawyer works with PDF files, and PDF Expert is a fantastic tool for working with PDF files in a law practice.  The app itself is free, plus you can access advanced features if you purchase a $50/year subscription — which I consider a no-brainer for any attorney looking to be more productive with their iPad.  The app works great on an iPhone too, but I’m going to focus on the iPad today because the larger screen is infinitely better for working with PDF documents.

Viewing documents

PDF Expert does an excellent job of displaying PDF files.  Indeed, especially for large files, I find that PDF Expert on my iPad Pro is faster and better than even the PDF software that I use on the PC in my office. 

Pages load quickly and it is fast to go back and forth between pages.  Swipe a finger up and down to read a document in the default Vertical Scroll mode.  You can tap the thumbnail icon at the top left to see an overview of all of the pages, making it quick to find your way through a very long document. 

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 view settings icon at the top right, you can switch to a Horizontal Scroll mode.  I find this mode useful when I am reviewing the final draft of a document before I file it with a court.  It lets me focus on each page, one at a time, to make sure that everything looks right.  The Two Pages mode is also a great way to quickly look through the entire document at a higher level.

There is also a Crop mode switch that you can use on documents that have been OCR’d, letting you hide the margins so that it is easier to make the text part of the document bigger and easier to read.

To quickly scroll through a document, you can grab the small tab on the right side and move up and down.  In an earlier version of PDF Expert, the app used a tiny gray rectangle that was harder to grab, but in the current version it is easy to use.

I often need to find the part of a document that mentions a specific word.  If you tap the magnifying glass icon at the top right, you can enter words to search for, or you can see your recent searches and tap one of them to do the same search again.  This is fast and works very well.

Every time that you open a PDF file, it opens in a new tab.  That way, you can work with multiple PDF files at once, and just tap another tab to jump back and forth between different documents.  PDF Expert also has full support for multitasking if you want to run two apps side-by-side.

When I am working with longer documents — such a volume of a record for an appeal — I find that it is useful to use the bookmark feature, accessed by tapping the Bookmarks icon at the top right.  For example, I will place bookmarks to note the first page of the most significant documents in the record so that I can quickly jump to those specific parts of the volume in the future.

Tapping the Bookmarks icon gives you access to two other useful functions.  First, there is the Outlines tab.  Although you can add your own Outlines to a document if you want, the primary way that I find this feature valuable is to take advantage of an outline that is already contained in a document.  For example, when federal district courts create the appeal record in a case, each volume of the record contains an outline that corresponds to the document number.  So if I know from the index that I want to jump to Document 172, I can just access the outline and jump straight there.

The other function accessed in this area is the Annotations tab, but before I discuss that tab, let’s talk about annotating documents.

Annotating documents

At the top middle of the toolbar, there are tabs that you can tap to see different annotation tools.  For example, the first tab called “Annotate” includes tools for highlighting, underlining, writing, drawing shapes, adding comments, etc.

Tap on a specific tool to use it.  If you have an Apple Pencil 2, you can double-tap the Pencil to turn a specific tool on and off, making it quick and easy to switch between browsing through a document and then highlighting a sentence or adding some other annotation.

After you have made an annotation, and when you don’t have any specific tool turned on, you can tap on the annotation to change it.  For example, you can change the ink color of something that you wrote, make the pen ink thicker, change the opacity, delete the annotation, etc. 

Let’s return to the Annotations tab on the right side that I mentioned above.  This view shows you on the right every single annotation that you have a document, making it quick to jump to a specific part of the document that you annotated.  For some annotations, like highlighting or underlining text, you can 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 on a specific page.

In 2019, Readdle updated PDF Expert to add a feature that vastly improves the experience of annotating a document:  the ability to customize the toolbar.  You need to pay for a subscription to use this feature, but I would do so even if this was the one and only feature included with a subscription.  Creating a custom toolbar means that you can select the specific tools that you enjoy using the most, and place them in an order that makes the most sense to you, to maximize your productivity when annotating documents.

I currently have my tools set up so that the first three tools are fine point pens (black, blue, red) with a 1 point thickness. Then, as a separator, I have the highlight tool — which may be the tool that I use the most. Next, I have five medium point pens with a 1.5 point thickness for when I want my annotation to be a little bit bolder, and I have five different colors: black, blue, red, green, and purple.  Toolbars in other PDF apps typically only give you two or three colors by default; to access more colors, you have to dig into sub-menus, which requires extra steps so I normally just skip it.  But because I could create my own Favorites tap with the tools that I selected, all five pen colors are just a tap away, so I can use more easily use different colors to mean different things in my documents, making my annotations more valuable to me.

When you share a file, you have a choice of sharing the original document (with annotations that can be further edited) or a flattened copy (which means that the annotations cannot easily be edited by someone else, and the annotations are virtually guaranteed to be seen no matter what PDF program someone else is using to view the document).

Managing files

While viewing and editing documents is critical, the file management feature is also an important reason that PDF Expert so useful for my law practice.  I carry around thousands of documents on my iPad so that everything that I might possibly need is there.

A Sidebar Menu on the left side lists sources of documents on your iPad, such as folders that are synced or local documents.  Files that you accessed recently are just a tap away.  A list of Connections provides access to cloud sources such as Apple’s built-in Files app, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. 

At the bottom part of the Sidebar Menu, you can show folders or files that you have marked as favorites.  When there is a matter that I am actively and extensively working on — such as an appeal that I will be working in for the next few months – I will typically make the folder associated with that project a favorite so that I can get to my work more quickly.

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.  You can apply a color to a folder if you want it to stand out more.

If you hold down your finger on a file name for a second, you can then drag-and-drop that file to another location.  Whether you are using drag-and-drop or just browsing through your folders, you can long press on the Back button at the top left to see all previous subfolders, making it faster to jump to the specific folder that you want.

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.  I mentioned above that you can search within a document, but you can also search the contents or filenames across all of your documents. 

Pricing

The app itself is free, and for many attorneys, the free version will provide you with everything that you need.  But if you upgrade to a PRO subscription, which costs $50/year, you get much more.  I’ve already mentioned the custom toolbar feature, which I use every single day.  That feature alone makes the experience of using this app much better.  Additionally, a subscription also gives you the option to:

• Sign documents
• Merge PDF files
• Add, delete, and extract pages from PDF files
• Password-protect PDF files
• Redact text in a PDF file (either with black bars or to make the text disappear)
• Edit PDF text
• Edit PDF images
• Add links to PDFs
• Convert Word files, Excel files, and images into PDF files
• Reduce PDF file size by selecting one of four different document quality settings

All of these can be useful, but I find the options to merge PDF files and add/delete/extract pages from PDF files are particularly useful in my law practice.  For example, I will extract pages to create exhibits.  The reduce file size option can be useful when a file would otherwise be too large to attach to an email, although how well it works depends upon the specifics of the file that you are working with.  I don’t use the other features very much, but it is nice that they are there.  For example, when I need to convert a Microsoft Word file to PDF, I usually just use Word itself to do so.

Conclusion

Although I’ve written about PDF Expert several times in the past (such as 2/21/19, 8/27/19, 11/21/19), I appreciate Readdle sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month to give me an excuse to talk about this essential app again including some of the latest improvements.  If you use an iPad, there is no excuse for not having the free version of this app on your iPad.  Start using it in your law practice and see what you think.  If you find the app as invaluable as I do, you will likely want to subscribe to the PRO version, like I did last year, to take advantage of all that the app has to offer.

Click here to get PDF Expert by Readdle (free): 

One of the interesting new features in iPadOS 14 is Scribble, the ability to use an Apple Pencil to write text into a text field instead of using the on-screen keyboard.  I wasn’t sure how useful the feature would be when it was announced, but now that I’ve been using it, I really like it.  I often have the Pencil in my hand as I am reading and annotating briefs, caselaw, exhibits, etc. in an app like PDF Expert (which is a sponsor of iPhone J.D. this month) or when I am taking handwritten notes in GoodNotes.  When I then need to enter some quick text — such as to search for something in Safari or Mail — it is incredibly convenient to just write a few letters or words with the Pencil that is already in my hand.  Alexander George of Popular Mechanics interviewed Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, to discuss the new Scribble feature.  If you haven’t tried it out yet, I encourage you to do so.  It is yet another reason that the Apple Pencil makes me more productive in my law practice.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Legal technology consultant Brett Burney of Apps in Law offers tips for using Zoom on an iPad or iPhone.
• Michael Simon of Macworld reviews the new Apple Watch SE.
• Lori Gil of iMore reviews the new Apple Watch Series 6.
• In an article for TidBITS, Julio Ojeda-Zapata explains why the Apple Watch is especially useful during the pandemic.  I’ve had some of these same thoughts.
• Apple has brought its new map data (that it is building in-house with its own vehicles equipped with cameras) to Ireland and the United Kingdom, according to a report by Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac.  And the Apple Look Around feature of Maps now works in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
• I’m a big fan of the Deliveries app, a centralized place to track any packages that you are receiving or sending.  My family has been purchasing even more items online as a result of the pandemic, and it is nice to have one place to go to find out where items are and when they should arrive.  As Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports, the Deliveries app was updated to add a new design and new features.  The app is also switching to a subscription service, so instead of costing $4.99 to purchase, the app is now $4.99/year, with complimentary subscriptions of four months (for long-time users) up to 18 months (for newer users).
• The GoodNotes app updated its shape and line tools so that you no longer have to tap on a different tool to draw a perfect shape or line.  The new features are explained in this post on the GoodNotes blog.  I’ve used this quite a bit, and it is a great improvement.
• Now that it is so easy to use a keyboard and a mouse with your iPad, you may want a good way to carry them around.  A keyboard cover is a good idea to protect the keyboard; you don’t want to shove it into a briefcase and have something catch a key and pop it off.  For over three years, I’ve been a happy user of the Canopy by Studio Neat, which is not only a keyboard cover but a stand to prop up your iPad.  But if you want something different that also holds a mouse, I see that Waterfield now has a Dash Sleeve for Magic Keyboard, and it looks nice.  They also have a version for the Magic Trackpad 2.
• The new spatial audio feature for AirPods Pro is really neat, creating the illusion that different sounds are coming from specific locations.  You can use it with some TV shows, such as the fabulous Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ — which just realized its amazing Season 1 finale.  Brent Dirks of AppAdvice reviews a free app called SpatialBliss which creates rich environments with 3D sound but you get to control where each sound comes from.  Definitely check this one out if you own AirPods Pro.
• And finally, if you are looking for something fun to watch, a week ago, my wife and I watched the debut of the new short move Father of the Bride Part 3 (ish).  We both enjoyed it.  It features the actors from the prior movies — Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, etc. — as well as some surprise new actors, and it is well-done and funny.  (I didn’t realize that their son from the movies, Kieran Culkin, is the same actor who now plays Roman Roy on HBO’s fantastic show Succession.)  The writer and director of the movie, Nancy Meyers, wrote an article for the New York Times to explain how the actors used iPhones to film their parts in the movie, which Meyers then turned into the final movie.  The article is spoiler-free so you can read it before or after you watch the movie.  And the movie is free to watch, part of a fundraiser for the great World Central Kitchen.  You can watch the 25-minute movie on YouTube, or I’ve embedded it below: