I’ve been using Apple’s AirPods Pro for almost a full year, and they are one of my all-time favorite Apple products. I use them every single day to listen to music, listen to podcasts, participate in videoconferences, and conduct phone calls, and I love doing so. And that really says something about this product because I love them even though I’ve had two problems. First, I started to hear some weird crackling noises with them — a problem that Apple appears to have now fixed. Second, when I use the silicone tips that Apple includes with AirPods Pro, they AirPods don’t stay in my ears very well.
As a solution to that second problem, I added added some memory foam to to the silicone tips in early 2020. I explained the process for doing so in this post, and that made a huge difference in getting the tips to stay in my ears. But over the course of this year, I’ve had to replace the memory foam once or twice as it has fallen apart, and that has been a bit of a pain.
A few weeks ago, California attorney David Sparks mentioned on the 2020 Holiday Gift Guide episode of the Mac Power Users podcast that there are now vendors who do a good job of combining memory foam with silicone, and he recommended a product by Foam Masters called the Hybrid Silicone-Memory Foam Ear Tips. They are only $15.99 on Amazon, and the product listing says that there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so I figured that I had nothing to lose by trying them out. I’m glad that I did because I find these even more comfortable than the ones that I created for myself, and they come ready-to-use with no assembly required.
Apple gives you three sizes of tips when you purchase AirPods Pro, and Foam Masters does the same thing. Thus, when you purchase this product, you will get the tip size that works best for you no matter what size you prefer. They come with a small clear plastic case that you can use to store any tips that you are not using.
You connect these tips the same way that you connect the Apple tips: just push them on. When you connect Apple’s tips, you feel a slight little click. I didn’t feel that same slight click when I connected the Foam Master tips, which made me concerned that they were not connecting correctly. Indeed, there were two different occasions when I removed the AirPod from my right ear and the tip became unattached and stayed in my ear. Ugh. I reached out to Foam Masters to ask about getting a replacement, and the company quickly wrote back to say:
I totally understand what you mean. I can send you replacements, but I know exactly how to solve this problem. The ear tip just needs to be pressed in harder for a nice secure fit. Can you try using a toothpick to clean any possible debris around the bracket on the AirPods Pro itself? And THEN connect the ear tip to the AirPods Pro.
I followed these instructions, and it turns out that there was debris around my AirPod bracket — ear wax can be sort of gross — and I was able to get it off using a toothpick, using the magnification feature on my iPhone so that I could make sure that all of the debris was gone. And sure enough, this was a perfect solution for this problem.
The overall size of the replacement tips are the same size as Apple’s tips. Thus, even with the large size attached, my AirPods Pro were still a perfect fit for the charging case.
Note that if you don’t want the silicone on the tips, Foam Master also sells a version of its tips with just the memory foam. I didn’t try those because I prefer the feel of the silicone that you get with the hybrid model, plus the silicone cover makes the tips more resistant to sweat. Perhaps that is the same reason that Apple decided to include silicone tips with the AirPods Pro, not memory foam.
Thanks to this inexpensive product, my AirPods Pro fit and feel better than ever. I’ve used them when sitting down, when walking around, and when using my treadmill and getting sweaty (thanks to Apple’s new Fitness+ service). No matter how active I am, the AirPods stay in my ears and sound great.
If the tips that Apple includes with AirPods Pro already are already perfect for your ears, then perhaps you don’t need to change anything. And I’m a little jealous of you. But if you have ever wished that your AirPods Pro fit and/or stayed in better, I encourage you to to check out these replacement tips and see what you think. Hopefully you will work just as well for you as they do for me.
This is the final In the news for 2020, and given everything we have gone through this year, I — like pretty much everyone else — am very much looking forward to the future. But of course, there are always folks thinking about, and looking forward to, what the future may hold. A few days ago, an iPhone J.D. reader shared an article with me from the April 11, 1953 edition of The Tacoma New Tribune in which Mark Sullivan, the president of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, made this bold, and very accurate, prediction: “In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk.” I was curious if this was real, but it is confirmed by Snopes and has been discussed elsewhere in the past, such as this article by Jason Kottke. I’m impressed that someone could look at the rotary telephone of the 1950s and foresee the iPhone. As I glance at my iPhone 12 Pro, I honestly have no idea what phones will look like and do 67 years from now, but I hope that it won’t be called the iPhone 79 Pro. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Apple released iOS 14.3 this week, and one of the new features is support for the ProRAW format for the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max. Photographer Austin Mann does a great job of explaining and showing what you can do with ProRAW that you couldn’t do before.
Another new feature of iOS 14.3 is support for Apple Fitness+. Todd Haselton of CNBC wrote a good review of the Fitness+ service. I started using it this week, and so far I’m very impressed.
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses using Apple technology for health and fitness — and just for being outdoors — in a good interview on an episode of the Outside podcast.
MacStories named the winners of its MacStories Selects 2020, recognizing the best apps of the year. There are some great apps on that list.
Clare Duffy and Shannon Liao of CNN decided to figure out how much you would have to spend if you want to get the best versions of all of Apple’s current products. The figure they came up with is about $80,000, but about $70,000 of that was devoted to a desktop and laptop computer. So if you don’t need a new computer, just think of all of the money you can save.
And finally, this week Marques Brownlee had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question about how he and his team embraced technology, and it is a pretty fascinating video Q&A:
California attorney David Sparks converted his law practice from paper to paperless long before many other attorneys did so, and along the way, he discovered lots of tips and tricks for making the transition. He compiled all of his advice into an ebook called Paperless, which I reviewed back in 2012. It was a great resource, and I know that many lawyers found it valuable.
David has moved away from producing electronic books and instead he now produces a series of what he calls electronic field guides, which are videos devoted to a topic broken down into lots of sections and chapters. I prefer watching one of David’s video field guides over reading a book because he shares his screen, shows you what he is doing, and explains to you what he is doing as he is doing it. It is very easy to follow along. In the past, I’ve written about his iPhone Field Guide and his Photos Field Guide.
David has now returned to Paperless (the first book he ever self-published) and has released a new version of his Paperless Field Guide, this time as a video field guide. Of course, using mobile technology in a paperless practice is very different today than it was in 2012. The 2020 version is full of fantastic tips for reducing the paper in your life and going digital with the aid of an iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac. David shared a free preview of it with me, and it is excellent. If you want some tips for reducing the paper in your life, this is a fantastic resource that I am sure that you would find very valuable.
The video course includes 95 videos with nearly seven hours of content. David includes tips on converting paper to digital and then storing, editing, and sharing your digital documents. Although not written specifically for lawyers, he does include examples from his law practice.
The content is great, but I am equally impressed with how it is all presented. The video production quality is top-notch. Each video also includes a fantastic (optional) closed captioning system, which not only shows the words he is saying at the bottom of the screen but also lets you see all of the words in the video and jump to a specific part of the video. Plus, the full text of each lesson is presented below the video. This means that you can select a topic, skim the text of it, and then decide which topics you want to watch.
You can watch the videos on pretty much any device, but I liked watching it on my computer so that I can use my iPad at the same time to try out what David was describing. As you complete each segment of the course, a check mark indicates that you have completed a section. That way, you can feel free to jump around without losing track of what you haven’t seen yet.
One section of the course gives you the option to download a PDF file containing all of the text in the course, broken down by chapter and section. So if you wanted to read an ebook, much like the 2012 version, you could do so. He also provides an ePub version that works on an electronic reader device. You miss out on a lot by reading instead of watching the course, but the PDF document makes it easy to search across the course to find out what section you want to go watch.
The normal price of the Paperless Field Guide is $29, but for a limited time you can take advantage of a $24 introductory price. If you want a helping hand for reducing the paper in your life and for making the most of documents once they are in a PDF format, this is a great resource. And kudos to David for creating his best field guide yet.
This article won the TechnoLawyer Pick of the Week award on December 29, 2020. The editors of TechnoLawyer, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law office administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
A scanning app is essential for any attorney using an iPhone and/or iPad. By converting a physical document into a digital form, you can read it on a back lit screen and zoom in to see the fine print, annotate it, share it, store it, etc. Back in 2012, I tried out the scanner app sold by Readdle called Scanner Pro after I heard so many other lawyers rave about the app, and I was very impressed. Although I’ve tried out other scanning apps, Scanner Pro has been my go-to app for many years because it works so incredibly well. I use the app extensively in my law practice, but I use it frequently in my personal life as well. For example, whenever I get a product that has a manual, I scan the manual and put it into a special folder on my home computer. If I ever need the manual again, I know exactly where to look. And during the pandemic, my wife has used Scanner Pro to digitize all of the recipes that she clipped and saved from magazines and other sources — in some cases, back in the 1980s.
Because this app is so useful to me, when Readdle signed up to sponsor iPhone J.D. this month, I was the one who asked to make its Scanner Pro app the focus of this month’s post. It just so turns out that this is a great month to mention the app because it was updated to version 8 on December 10, 2020. (I described the last big update, version 7, back in 2016.).
Here is why I find this app so useful, along with information on what is new in version 8. Note that I focus on the iPhone in this post because that is how I always use this app, but you can also use this app on an iPad.
Scanning
One of the things that I have always loved about Scanner Pro is how incredibly easy it is to turn a physical document into a digital scanned document. When you open the app, the app jumps right into scanning mode so you can immediately capture an image of the first page of the document. This makes it fast to start scanning. (You can turn off the Start with Camera feature in the Advanced Settings portion of the app, but I would never want to do so.) If you are already working in the app, you can start scanning by tapping the large plus sign at the bottom right corner of the app.
Hold your iPhone over the first page your document, and as soon as the app recognizes the four edges of the document, it will take the picture. You can turn off the Auto-Capture mode to put the app in manual mode, where you have to tap a button to take a picture, but it is much more convenient to keep Auto-Capture turned on.
Once the first page of a document is imaged, the app is ready to scan the second page and does so as soon as it sees the four corners. Then you can move on to the third page, etc. This process works well and is very fast. By simply letting the app take a look at each page of a document, the app scans the pages into a single PDF file. No need for you to tap any buttons between each page being scanned.
The quality of a scan created by Scanner Pro is excellent. Of course, you get best results if you scan a good version of a document when it has high-contrast around the edges (the document is against a surface with a different color) and the light is good. For example, a typical white letter-size sheet of paper is easy to scan against the darker background of a wooden table with overhead lights. But I’ve also had good luck with documents that are less than pristine. If a document is in very poor shape, such as crumbled up or folded, then I find that a flat-bed scanner works better because it can help to flatten the document. However, it is pretty rare for me to work with documents like that, so for virtually all of my other scanning needs, Scanner Pro works great.
Everything that I just wrote assumes that you are using an iPhone’s camera to scan a physical document. However, you can also tap the photos icon at the bottom right of the scan screen to instead select an image on your camera roll and scan that image to create a PDF document.
Editing a scan
Once all of the pages have been scanned, tap the thumbnail of the document at the bottom right to work with the document. Using icons at the top of the screen you can see each page of the document and select specific pages to act upon them, plus you can use other features like add annotations to the document, set a password, or delete. But I rarely use those options and instead I find the five tools at the bottom to be the most useful.
Add – this lets you add one or more pages to the document. If I have a poor quality document, I will sometimes scan just the first page, make sure that I am satisfied with the results, and then go back and add the additional pages.
Search – this lets you search for text within the document. The app will tell you which pages of the document contain the word, and then when you view that page, you can see the word highlighted on the page.
Share – use this option to share the document.
Edit – tap this button to edit the scan. You can rotate the document, adjust each of the four corners of the document if the app didn’t do so correctly (which sometimes happens when you place a white document on a white table), change the document size (such as letter, legal, A4, etc.), change the color of the scan (color document, black and white document, photo, grayscale), adjust the brightness or contrast, and turn automatic warp correction on or off. The app does such a good job that I often don’t need to enter the edit mode (except to change my mind about whether I want a color or black and white scan), but it is nice to have this much control.
Note that you can also set the document to color/black and white/etc. when you are in the scan mode, which saves you the trouble of later adjusting this in the edit mode.
Text – this is a new feature in version 8. Tap this button and the app will show you just the text that is in the document, without any of the formatting. Scanner Pro performs an OCR on every document that you scan, and that is how it knows which words are on each page of a document. The quality of the OCR depends upon the original that you are scanning. In my law practice, where I am often working with black text on a white page, Scanner Pro does a great job with OCR, except that sometimes it gets confused when there is something like a clerk of court stamp on top of typed words. For other documents, the quality of the OCR depends upon the source, but even a document with the plain text of only most of the words is easier to work with than a document with none of the text recognized.
In the Text mode, you can copy all or some of the text and share the text elsewhere. For example, you can scan a contract and then copy a paragraph of that document to paste that text into a block quote section of a brief you are drafting in Microsoft Word.
Languages
Although I typically scan documents written in English, Scanner Pro is smart enough to detect a large number of languages. If you have the Latin-based languages option turned on, the app will automatically recognize English, Catalan, Danish, German, Dutch, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Filipino, and Turkish.
If you have Latin-based languages turned off, the app will recognize Czech, Chinese (Sim), Chinese (Tra), Greek, Estonian, Croatian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and Ukrainian.
Saving
Another feature that makes Scanner Pro work so well for me is that you can control how files are automatically saved after they are scanned, such as automatically uploading to a Dropbox folder. Scanned files are also accessible within the Scanner Pro app itself, where you can sort them, organize them into folders, and display them either as large or small icons. The options for organizing and browsing your files within the app improved quite a bit with the update to version 8.
By default, the files are saved with a filename in the format of YYYY-MM-DD Scan, with numbers added after the word “Scan” as needed. That’s very convenient for me because I simply change the word “Scan” to a title that I want to use, change the date if necessary, and then the filename is in the format that I prefer.
Scanner Pro also has a sophisticated Workflow feature. You can use this to change how files are named, automate what happens when you scan a file, etc.
Price
For the prior versions of Scanner Pro, you paid when you downloaded the app. Version 8 changes that. Now, you can download the app for free to give you a chance to try it out, but some of the advanced features are disabled. For example, OCR is disabled in the free version, and a Scanner Pro watermark is added when you share a file. To unlock all of the features in the free version, the app now uses a $19.99/year subscription.
What if you paid for the app in the past — perhaps as long as eight years ago like me? You can update your app to version 8 and take advantage of all of the current version 8 features without paying anything more. And Readdle says that you can continue to use those current features for as long as you want. However, in the future, Readdle plans to add additional features to the app, and you will need to upgrade to a subscription if you want to take advantage of those additional features when they are added. It is nice that Readdle is so generous to its long-time users. At the same time, I look forward to seeing what Readdle has planned for future updates.
Here is what Readdle’s Chief Product Officer and co-founder Alex Tyagulsky said about upcoming features for Scanner Pro:
We’ve invested heavily into exploring how recent advancements in AI and machine learning, as well as new APIs and services from the likes of Google and Microsoft, can be harnessed within Scanner Pro to help make life easier for the people who use it. The first fruit of this work is already live in the form of a new shadow removal algorithm. But that’s just the beginning — improved border detection, automatic document categorization, and tagging are just around the corner, while new neural network-based OCR for Latin languages is being rolled out today.
Conclusion
Scanner Pro is a fantastic app. The app gives you a fast and convenient way to use the device that is already in my pocket to turn a physical document into a PDF document, with OCR performed and saved in the location that that you designate. The app has been around for so long that it already has a robust feature set, and the app should only get better now that Readdle is announcing plans to add new features in the future. Thank you to Readdle for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month and for giving me an excuse to talk about an app that is incredibly useful to lawyers and anyone else who works with documents.
Click here to get Scanner Pro (free with subscription available):
Tom Vanderbilt of the Wall Street Journal Magazine has a very interesting interview with Jay Blahnik of Apple on the new Fitness+ service, which launches on Monday, December 14. That service costs $9.99/month, but it is also included with Apple’s Apple One subscription if you get the $29.95/month Premier plan — which also includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, 2TB of iCloud storage, and Apple News+, and can be shared with up to five other family members. If you are like me and you previously subscribed to some of those services separately, the Premier plan is great because, for about the same price that you were previously paying, you get Apple News+ and Apple Fitness+ for no additional charge. (For example, you would pay $35/month for your family to get just Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 2TB of iCloud storage.) And by the way, if you have Apple News+, that includes the ability to read Wall Street Journal articles — including the one that I linked to a few sentences ago. Just open an article on the wsj.com website on your iPad or iPhone, then tap the Share button, then share it with the News app. And now, the news of note from the past week:
California attorney David Sparks wrote a review of the WaterField Hitch Bag, which he uses to carry around his iPad, MacBook Pro, and accessories.
Apple gave a number of journalists a pair of the new AirPods Max headphones on Wednesday, and on Thursday a number of them posted their initial thoughts. Here are a few of the reviews that I thought were interesting. Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch found this product to be incredibly well-made using high-quality materials, but he did note that they are heavier than you might expect. He wasn’t a big fan of the case. He found the sound impressive and found the spatial audio feature particularly impressive.
Marques Brownlee created a video, noting that the AirPods Max seems very well made and its controls are easy to use. But he doesn’t like the case.
Attorney Nilay Patel of The Verge says that the sound is “crisp and bright, with a pleasingly wider soundstage than my Sony headphones, and no distortion at all, even at max volume.”
Judner Aura also showed them off in a video, and he was incredibly impressed with the noise cancellation and sound quality.
Justine “iJustine” Ezarik was perhaps the most enthusiastic of all in her video.
Michael Simon of Macworld reviews the iPhone 12 mini, calling it a “no-brainer purchase” for anyone wanting a small phone that is not underpowered or outdated.
Felix Richter of Statista created an interesting chart showing the growth of film camera and digital camera sales since 1951 — and then shows that after smartphones added cameras, that wiped out 40 years of camera industry growth.
Jason Cipriani of CNet has recommendations on 13 default settings to change on the iPhone 12. I myself don’t recommend changing all 13 of them, but I suspect you will find quite a few of them that are worth changing.
And finally, here is a clever promotional video for Apple TV+ that features some of their best shows. Which reminds me … one of my favorite Apple TV+ shows, For All Mankind, starts its second season on February 19, and it was revealed this week that the show was already picked up for a third season.
Apple announced the original AirPods on September 7, 2016, and for the past four years, this device has been one of the most beloved Apple products. If you use AirPods, you know why. It essentially weighs nothing, it sounds great, and it doesn’t get in your way when you are enjoying music, listening to a podcast, watching a movie, talking on the phone, etc. A year ago, Apple introduced the AirPods Pro, adding noise cancellation. At $250, the AirPods Pro is more expensive than any other headphone that I have ever used, but it works great. And during the pandemic this year, I have appreciated my AirPods Pro even more. The noise cancellation is great when you are stuck at home with other family members and want to tune out some of the surrounding noise, and they also work great on a videoconference. I even use them in my office, connected to my PC, when I am using Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
Yesterday, Apple introduced the latest member of the AirPods family: the AirPods Max. At a cost of $550, the price seems too steep for me, but I have no doubt that many folks will love this new product. It takes everything that you love about the AirPods and AirPods Pro, and puts them in an over-ear design.
Traditionally, over-ear headphones are known for providing even better sound and noise cancellation, so I assume that will be true with these as well. Apple believes that they do, stating: “AirPods Max use Adaptive EQ to adjust the sound to the fit and seal of the ear cushions by measuring the sound signal delivered to a user and adjusting the low and mid-frequencies in real time — bringing rich audio that captures every detail.” Traditionally, many people find over-ear headphones far more comfortable than in-ear headphones. We’ll have to wait for the first hands-on reviews to see if these traditional features exist on the AirPods Max, but I suspect that they will.
AirPods Max comes with virtually all of the features that people love in the AirPods Pro. They are wireless Bluetooth headphones that add all of the special Apple features, such as easy pairing to devices, fast switching between multiple devices, and spatial audio with dynamic head tracking (which makes it seem like sounds come from a specific direction). They also feature both noise cancellation mode and transparency mode. But of course, they add many new features.
Transparency mode is a great way to hear the outside world even though you are using AirPods Pro, and you can trigger this mode by squeezing on a stem for about a second. On AirPods Max, it is even easier to switch in and out of transparency mode by tapping a button.
With AirPods Pro, you can quickly squeeze a stem once, twice, or three times to do things like play/pause, fast-forward, or reverse. On AirPods Max, Apple has added a Digital Crown — similar to what is on the side of an Apple Watch — that can do all of this, plus you can turn the crown to adjust the volume, plus you can press and hold the crown to activate Siri.
AirPods Pro has a microphone on each stem and an inward-facing microphone. AirPods Max has nine microphones.
With AirPods Pro, you can use a small, medium, or large silicone tip to adjust the fit. With AirPods Max, you can move each ear cup around, extend the headband, and bend the mesh headband to get a good fit on your head. And the ear cushions attach magnetically and can be replaced.
AirPods Pro can last about four hours straight before needing to be charged, and you charge them by putting them in a case. Apple says that AirPods Max last 20 hours between charging (which you do via a Lightning-to-USB-C connector, like a modern iPhone). You can charge AirPods Max for five minutes to get another 90 minutes of use, according to Jason Snell. And when you are not using AirPods Max, you can put it in the included Smart Case, which starts a low power mode to extend battery life even more.
AirPods Pro comes in one color: white. AirPods Max comes in Space Gray, Silver, Green, Sky Blue, and Pink — very similar to the colors available for the new iPad Air. And because you can buy replacement ear cushions in those same colors, this would seem to give you the ability to mix-and-match colors.
Although this is a wireless headphone, you can plug in to an audio source if you want. To do so, you need to use a Lightning-to-headphone jack cord.
Apple released a video that does a great job of describing the AirPods Max:
Although this looks like a great, albeit expensive, gift for the holidays, you’ll find it incredibly difficult to find one in time to put it under a Christmas tree on the morning of December 25. You can pre-order them now from Apple, and technically they go on sale on Tuesday, December 15, but as I am typing this the Apple website says that delivery is now up to 12-14 weeks. However, you may be able to find them in a physical Apple Store starting December 15. And at least right now, if you decide to get them engraved, the Apple website says that they are available Dec. 30 to Jan. 7. (No, I don’t understand how getting engraving would make them available more quickly.)
I doubt that I will ever purchase an AirPods Max because the price would be hard to justify, although I reserve the right to lust after this new device. But I love that Apple is continuing to expand the AirPods family.
This week, Apple gave awards to the developers of 15 apps for making the App Store Best of 2020. The iPad app of the year is Zoom, and I’ve certainly used that app far more in 2020 than ever before. When we use Zoom as a substitute for family members getting together in person, I typically share my iPad screen to my Apple TV. That way, my immediate family can sit on the couch and see our relatives on a large TV screen, and with the iPad propped right in front of the TV, the other family members see us on the couch. The Apple TV app of the year is Disney+, and I bought a one-month subscription last weekend so that my son and I could catch up on Season 2 of The Mandalorian, which is excellent. I’m also looking forward to watching the new Pixar movie Soul on Disney+, which comes out on December 25. Fantastical won in the Mac app category, but I love to use that app on my iPad and iPhone. Congratulations to all of the winners. And now, the recent news of note:
In an article in ABA Journal, Danielle Braff discussed whether your law firm should create an iPhone app. With very rare exceptions, I don’t recommend it. Instead, use your time and money to create a good website that works well on computers, an iPad, and a smartphone. We updated my law firm’s website about two years ago, and it was a big improvement. Some of the bio pages even include a short video, which is a nice way for someone viewing the page to get a sense of the attorney. (For example, here is my own bio page.)
Although I use Zoom for many of the videoconferences in which I participate, we use Microsoft Teams at my law firm Microsoft recently announced some upcoming updates for the iPhone and iPad apps. There are new calling features, including CarPlay support (to make it easier to make and receive calls via Teams when you are in your car), and a new layout for the iOS apps.
In yet another useful Macworld article, Michael Simon recommends USB-C power adapters to use with an iPhone 12. I haven’t yet tried one of the relatively new gallium nitride (GaN) chargers, which are smaller and more powerful, but I hear great things about them.
Dan Moren of Six Colors shared a clever suggestion for using Siri and Shortcuts to make it easier to switch modes on AirPods Pro to pause your music and talk to people.
Here is a moving tweet with a picture of an unpredicted, but incredibly important, use for iPads.
The Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso is one of the highlights of 2020 for me — in a year that could use as many highlights as possible — and Michael Schneider of Variety interviewed most of the stars in a Zoom-style chat that is great fun to watch.
Almost 12 years ago, I wrote about appellate attorney David Mills because of his funny Courtoons website with legal-themed cartoons. He stopped sharing his cartoons on the site a long time ago, but he recently compiled those cartoons in a paperback book, and it is now available on Amazon for $20. Although I haven’t seen the book, I used to love the cartoons, so I suspect it would make a good holiday gift for an attorney with a sense of humor.
You might also get some lawyer legal tech gift ideas — or ideas for yourself — by listening to the latest episode of the Tech Savvy Lawyer podcast on which over a dozen attorneys (including me) share their favorite guilty tech pleasure. I mentioned using Twitter, but what I didn’t mention is that I rarely use the official Twitter app; I prefer to use the Tweetbot app.
And finally, at some point this month, Apple is going to introduce its new Fitness+ service. Here is a video from Apple to remind you of what this service is all about:
YouTube is full of useful and interesting videos. If you need to have one of those videos on your iPad for some reason, such as to view it when you don’t have Internet access or to use it as a part of a presentation, it used to be that there was no easy way to do so. But now, you can do so using the free app called a-Shell and two other free programs. This post gives you all of the steps for doing so. I realize that this post may look complicated at first, but I promise you that these steps are simple to follow.
But first, some kudos and a caveat. I first learned about this tip from a post by Federico Viticci on MacStories. He linked to a post by Greg Godwin on his website NonProfit Workflows, a website with advice for working in a non-profit organization. Although Greg’s post provides instructions, I modified his instructions for this post in a way that I think makes them easier to understand and follow. And finally, please note that you should only download a video from YouTube if you have an appropriate reason and permission to do so.
With that behind us, here are the step-by-step instructions. These instructions assume that you are doing this on an iPad, which has a larger screen and thus is better for viewing and working with a video, but I suppose these steps would also work on an iPhone.
The a-Shell app
The first thing that you need to do is download the a-Shell app from the App Store. This free app provides a text-based terminal window on your iPad — essentially taking your modern iPad and giving it the capabilities of a computer from the 1970s. Here are the first few steps to get this app and get it configured correctly.
1. Click here to download a-Shell app by Nicolas Holzschuch.
2. Open the Settings app on your iPad and scroll down on the left until you see the a-Shell app listed; tap on that. On the right, in the section called ALLOW A-SHELL TO ACCESS, make sure that Document Storage is set to On My iPad.
Download youtube-dl and FFmpeg
Next, we are going to download two free, command line, cross-platform, open-source software programs that can be used to work with video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. With a terminal like a-Shell on your iPad, you can use this software on your iPad instead of a computer.
1. Open the a-Shell app. The first time you do so, the app will ask if you want notifications. You don’t need to allow notifications for this project.
2. Type the following exactly as it appears and tap return:
pip install youtube-dl
“pip” is a package manager for the programming language Python. By typing that command, you are telling a-Shell to install the youtube-dl program. After you tap return, a-Shell will install the software and then tell you that it is successful.
[That link works great right now, but if for some reason it stops working in the future, go to this page to find the download link.]
Your iPad will ask “Do you want to download “ffmpeg.wasm”? and you should tap Download to do so. The download icon at the top of the Safari app will show you that the file is being downloaded to whatever the default download location is on your iPad.
Use the Files app
Next, you want to open up the Files app on your iPad. The left side of the app will list all of your locations — things like iCloud Drive, On My iPad, Dropbox, etc. Tap on On My iPad and you will see a list of folders on the right, folders that correspond to apps installed on your iPad. Near the top, you will see a folder for a-Shell. Tap that folder to open it.
Once that folder is open, tap the folder+ icon at the top right to create a new folder within the a-Shell folder. The Files app will do so and will give you the opportunity to name the folder. Call it: bin
Next, you want to move the FFmpeg app into that folder called “bin” that you just created. If you tap the Downloads tab on the left of the Files app, you will see the file called ffmpeg.wasm. Hold your finger down on that file for a second and a pop-up window will appear. Select “Move” — the third option. That will open up a window for you to select the destination. Tap On My iPad, then tap a-Shell, then tap bin, then tap Copy.
Note that you won’t need to directly use the FFmpeg app for the rest of this project. You simply need to have it saved in the “bin” folder because the youtube-dl app is going to take advantage of it from within the a-Shell app.
Now, you are ready to go. You won’t have to follow any of the above steps again. The next time that you are ready to download a video, just go to the next set of steps:
Use youtube-dl to download a video
Open the a-Shell app and type in a command to download a video from YouTube. The basic structure of the command that you will use is very simple, just the command “youtube-dl” followed by the URL of the YouTube video that you want to download. Note, however, that using this command will download a video in the .mkv video file format, which the iPad doesn’t know how to play unless you install an app that can do so.
A better approach is to tell youtube-dl to download the video in the .mp4 format, which the iPad can handle with no problems. And to do that, you add the following just before the URL: -f ‘(mp4)’
So to give you a specific example, let’s say that you want to download the video that I shared last year when I reviewed the Catalyst Waterproof Case for iPhone Xs. My review included a video that I posted to YouTube that I took using this waterproof case while I was in Hawaii. The short video includes some fun footage of turtles and tropical fish underwater. The YouTube link for that video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCqAKXpDIbA
So to download this video and convert it to .mp4 format, you would type the following in the a-Shell app:
If you want, you can copy the above text, open the a-Shell app, hold down on the flashing cursor for a second, and then select the paste function to save you the trouble of typing it.
The youtube-dl program will download the video and alert you to the progress while it is doing so. This one is a short video, so the process will be very quick.
Use your downloaded video
The video downloaded from within the a-Shell app is located in the a-Shell folder on your iPad. So open the Files app, tap On My iPad on the left, tap the a-Shell folder, and there is your video. You can tap it if you just want to play it — and since it is downloaded, you can play it even if you are in Airplane mode. Or, you can hold down your finger on the filename for a second and tap Share on the pop-up menu. From there, you can send the file to another app, or just tap Save Video to download it to your Photos app. Once it is in your Photos library, just about any other app will be able to access it. For example, you can put it in a Keynote video. Or you can use the iMovie app to take a clip from this video and add it to some other video.
Conclusion
Using a terminal window on an iPad may seem like the most un-iPad thing that you can do with an iPad. However, it gives you the ability to take advantage of free, open-source software like youtube-dl. After following all of the above steps, it will be quick and easy for you to download a YouTube video in the future. Just open the a-Shell app, and type in the command with the link to the video. That’s it.
Thanks again to Greg Godwin and Federico Viticci for making me aware of this great tip. And thanks to Nicolas Holzschuch for the powerful a-Shell app.
