Five years ago, I posted a review of Immigration, an app by San Francisco immigration attorney Josh Adams that lets you access the text of the Immigration & Nationality Act and related law and resources such as the Code of Federal Regulations. I recently received an email from New Jersey immigration lawyer Paul Gilbert telling me that the Immigration app is more useful than ever due to some recent updates. Although I don’t practice immigration law myself, I — like much of the rest of the country — now have a heightened interest in immigration law as a result of the policies of the Trump administration. Paul was nice enough to volunteer to write a guest review so that iPhone J.D. readers could hear about this app from someone who actively uses the app in a law practice. Take it away, Paul!
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The Immigration app was first reviewed in iPhone JD in 2014, where I first heard about it, and I have been using it ever since. I recently asked Jeff to consider an updated review due to some new features, and he asked me if I would be willing to write a guest review.
Disclaimer: I did receive a free copy of the app when the pricing scheme was a onetime payment of $25 (it is now offered as a free app with a subscription plan for additional features – more on that in a minute), because I did some early bug reporting and helped to spread the word among colleagues, and I am mentioned in the Credits Section of the app for this.
This app is for iPhones and iPads and is designed to be a tool for attorneys practicing immigration law (in private or government practice), law professors and students, and anyone else who needs to refer to immigration law primary materials. It contains the text of the INA (Immigration and Nationality Act), Title 8 of the CFR, and the Immigration Court and BIA (Board of Immigration Appeals) Practice Manuals.
The first screen of the app is the INA:
Swiping to the left will reveal the 2 PMs.
Tapping the screen opens a box showing several options, depending on where you are in the app:
The Show Section option presents this:
Similar boxes appear when tapping on sections of the CFR or PM screens.
I find it useful to have this app open on my iPad while I’m on the computer drafting a document. Having the ability to jump to a corresponding section of the CFR while viewing the INA is very helpful, as is the ability to search for a particular term using the search box at the top of each screen (results are highlighted in red), and to copy and paste text for insertion into a document (I usually open my Word document on my iPad using OneDrive and just paste the text there, and then go back to the document on my computer, or you could copy the text you need into Evernote or a similar app, or email it to yourself, and then open it on the computer and copy it into your document).
I also use Immigration in Immigration Court if I need to refer to a primary source. (Unfortunately, I cannot currently do this when appearing before a USCIS Officer due to their policy of no electronic devices during hearings – hopefully this will change soon.)
I find the interface to be simple and intuitive. It is possible to save bookmarks for sections that you find yourself referring to regularly, and the developer recently updated the app to include a feature where text can be highlighted, and the highlights saved, for future reference. This will be useful when you are trying to go back to a particular section buried deep within a sub- sub- section of CRF (e.g. 204.2(d)(2)(vii)(D)).
There are also customizable settings and a help screen.
The developer of the app is a former ICE attorney and is now a full-time app developer (he worked as a software developer prior to going to law school). He is very responsive to suggestions and the occasional bug report (when I suggested the highlighting feature, he wrote back to me within 10 days with a sample of what he would be providing in the next update, and the update appeared as promised).
The current version of Immigration (Version 3.2) is a free app. To get updates to the primary source materials you must subscribe ($1.49 / month, auto renewing but can be cancelled at any time). All of these primary sources are available elsewhere of course, whether in print or online, but it is certainly much more convenient to have all of them in one app which updates them regularly. I would recommend Immigration to any anyone who has to refer to these materials on a regular basis.
Paul Gilbert is a life-long resident of New Jersey, and a graduate of Rutgers College and Rutgers-Camden School of Law. He has been practicing immigration law since 1977, first as a General Attorney with the (then) INS, and for the past 37 years in private practice. He is doing his best to go, if not paperless, than at least “less paper”, which would not be possible without an iPhone and an iPad.
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A big thanks to Paul Gilbert for taking the time to write this review, and thanks to Josh Adams for his continued development of this app over the years. We need good immigration attorneys in this country, and hopefully this app will help them to be more effective in their practice.
Yesterday, Apple sent an invitation to select members of the press inviting them to its campus in Cupertino, CA on March 25, 2019 at 10am Pacific. The invitation says that it is for a “special event” but the invitation also features an animation of a film reel counting down to 1 with the tagline “It’s show time.” Here are two tweets from Matthew Panzarino showing the invitation:
I think it is pretty obvious that this is the event at which Apple will unveil its new streaming video service. I’m sure that the service will work on the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and other Apple devices. It will be interesting to see what other devices will work with the service, what will be available to watch, the cost, and just about everything else about this new service for Apple. For those of us who did not receive an invitation from Apple, the Apple website states that a live stream of the special event will also be available.
There is a rumor that Apple is also planning to unveil a newspaper and magazine subscription service, and possibly even new Apple hardware too. We’ll see.
One of the presentations that I gave at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago this year was devoted to useful iOS tips, apps, and hardware accessories, a presentation that I gave with Brett Burney. Brett and I were asked by Laurence Colletti, host of the On the Road Podcast on the Legal Talk Network, to share just a dozen of those tips, apps, and gear recommendations in an episode of his podcast that was recorded in the Expo Hall of ABA TECHSHOW. If you want to get a sense of the audio portion of the presentation that Brett and I gave, this short and fast-paced ten minute podcast is worth a listen. Click here to listen in the Overcast app on your iPhone or on the Overcast website, or you can listen using the embedded player right here:
Today is Mardi Gras day in New Orleans, the culmination of many weeks of parades and parties with family and friends. There has been more rain than one would prefer for Mardi Gras season this year, but it has still been a lot of fun. Whether you are in New Orleans today in person or just in spirit, have a Happy Mardi Gras!
Last week, I attended ABA TECHSHOW 2019 in Chicago. It was a great conference; I learned a lot, and had fascinating and fun conversations with lots of interesting people. Here are a few pictures from the conference, along with some information that you might find useful even if you were not at the conference.
The Expo Floor had lots of booths of interest to attorneys using an iPhone or iPad. Smile had a booth to show off ways that lawyers can use TextExpander. The primary person manning the booth was Jeff Gamet, who recently became a Smile employee but who you may know from his 13 years covering Apple-related news for The Mac Observer, or from one of his numerous podcasts such as The iOS Show.
Sharon Stewart was part of the crew from Bellefield showing off iTimeKeep, a great app for entering and tracking your time on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. I first heard about iTimeKeep many years ago at ABA TECHSHOW, and now it is a product that I use almost every day.
Ed Walters, the CEO of Fastcase, was a speaker at the conference and was also showing off all of the new technology that Fastcase is using to improve legal research.
I had an interesting conversation with Dan McCade, the Chief Information Officer at Casemaker. A while back, Casemaker purchased an app called Rulebook which contains sources of law (like a state’s code of civil procedure) as well as other useful legal texts, most notably The Bluebook. I’ve been frustrated with that app for a while now because it has some bugs and I was wondering if the app had been abandoned. McCade ensured me that the app is still being developed, and he even showed me a beta of new version of the app which he said should be out very soon. He showed me that it (finally) restored hyperlinks to the index at the back of The Bluebook — thank goodness. I love having The Bluebook and other rules right there on my iPad and iPhone, so I am really looking forward to the next update to this app.
MyCase was doing lots of things at ABA TECHSHOW. For example, Niki Black was interviewing folks to ask about a good tech tip (here was mine). They also had one of their programmers, Quy Phan, programming code for the next update to MyCase right there in the booth. His Javascript programming was way over my head, but it was still neat to see and hear him describing what he was doing to add new features to the service. Here he is with Niki:
There were two companies offering iPhone apps with the same basic goal: give you a way to have a text message conversation with a client, but include a way to preserve the conversation so that you can store a copy in your document management system. One of the companies is a new startup called JurisBytes, and their app was so impressive that they were the winners of the 2019 Startup Alley competition, as Jason Tashea of the ABA Journal reported in this article. For their product, your client can use whatever normal app he or she uses to text, but the attorney uses the JurisMS app to text and there is a special phone number (that can be in your normal area code) to provide to clients to reach the attorney via text.
The folks from EIE Legal had a similar product. For their app to work, both sides have to text within the special EIE app. Once again, you can get a PDF document for preservation purposes containing the entire conversation.
And finally, Rocket Matter had a Game of Thrones theme at its booth, and its CEO Larry Port was dressed up as character Robb Stark to get in the mood.
Of course, the sessions are the best part of TECHSHOW, and I attended some great ones that related to the iPhone and iPad. Craig Bayer and Stanley Louissaint discussed Mobile Device Management:
Brett Burney and John Simek discussed collecting and preserving evidence and other information from mobile devices. If you have access to someone’s password (such as your client’s) there is a lot of information you can get from an iPhone. If you don’t, you probably won’t be able to get anything off of the phone at all, although some companies claim to be able to crack certain devices for a large fee.
Antigone Peyton and Bob Ambrogi discussed legal issues surrounding the Internet of Things, an interesting issue as we find ourselves surrounded by more devices, such as the Apple Watch and smart home technology, which record lots of information that could be relevant in litigation.
Friday morning, Sharon Nelson and I gave a presentation on selecting the best technology for your law firm. MyCase hired artist Leah Silverman to create cartoons to record what was discussed during certain presentations, including the one. Thus, if you missed our session, you can get the gist of it from this cartoon. (Click to enlarge.) Also, Jason Tashea of ABA Journal wrote this article about our session.
I also teamed up with Brett Burney to discuss a huge number of iOS tips, app recommendations, and hardware accessory recommendations. It was a fast-paced and fun presentation with an enthusiastic audience, as you can see.
The last session I attended was a presentation by David Sparks and Craig Bayer with tips for improving security on iOS devices.
On Thursday night, David Sparks and I hosted a Taste of Techshow dinner, and it was great fun with a really fantastic group of old and new friends: Neil Squillante who publishes TechnoLawyer, Jeff Gamet of Smile, Prof. April Dawson of NCCU School of Law, Brett Burney of Apps in Law, Oklahoma prosecutor Russ Cochran, Judge Joseph Adams of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvnia attorney Evan Kline, Louisiana attorney Gregg Tweed, Idaho attorney David Cummings, and Michigan attorney Tom Howlett.
It was great catching up with so many of you in Chicago, and I hope that we can do it again soon!
I’m headed to Chicago today for ABA TECHSHOW 2019. If you will be there too, please say hello!
On Thursday night, California attorney David Sparks of MacSparky and Mac Power Users and I will co-host one of the Taste of Techshow dinners. While our dinner is currently sold out, there are still spots open for other dinners.
On Friday morning, you will not find me 7am at the 3rd Annual TECHSHOW 5K, but congrats to all of you who are completing the circles on your Apple Watch that early in the morning. You will find me presenting a session at 8:30 a.m. in Room Columbus GH with Virginia attorney Sharon Nelson, a former TECHSHOW chair, a former president of the Virginia State Bar, publisher of Ride the Lightning, and the current President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a digital forensics, cybersecurity and information technology firm in Fairfax, Virginia. Our session is titled Vetting Technology: Avoid Indecision Paralysis. We will be giving advice on the types of technology that you should consider purchasing for your law firm and then provide tips on selecting what technology is the best for your firm. Sharon has worked with many smaller law firms and I have experience as the Chair of the Technology Committee at my (relatively) large law firm, Adams and Reese. This will be the first time that I’ve done a presentation with Sharon, but I’ve known her for years and she really knows her stuff. I’d love to have you join us.
Then at 10:30, you can join me in Room Columbus AB where I will team up with legal tech consultant Brett Burney of Apps in Law, who is also a former ABA TECHSHOW chair. Our topic is Get Your Mobile Ninja On: Top iOS Tips, Apps, and Gear. Imagine the old 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session that used to be at TECHSHOW, add on top of it a session full of iOS tips, and then add on top of that some hardware accessory recommendations. Yikes! It’s a huge topic, we have tons of cool things to talk about, and Brett is one of my favorite people to present with on iOS topics. You won’t want to miss it, and we’ll do our best to squeeze it all into one hour.
I need to leave the conference on Friday — after all, it is Mardi Gras in New Orleans this weekend! — but on Thursday and Friday I look forward to seeing lots of iPhone J.D. readers, especially all of you who I have gotten to know at prior conferences. If you are staying in Chicago through the weekend, consider attending the live recording of Mac Power Users on Saturday night.
Mardi Gras season officially kicked off in New Orleans a while back, but it kicks into high gear this weekend with the first of two big weekends of parades. If you find yourself here in the Crescent City this weekend, enjoy yourself, and I hope that you catch some great throws. And now, the news of note from the past week:
In an article for Law Technology Today, Illinois attorney David Buddingh describes EIE (Encrypted Information Exchange), an app he developed to provided encrypted end-to-end communications between attorneys and clients while also keeping a record of the conversation. The app will be exhibited at ABA TECHSHOW next week.
On his own Six Colors website, Snell explains the setup he used to record podcasts using an iPad Pro instead of a computer. He came up with a solution that works well, but it still seems way too convoluted to me. Hopefully Apple will make it easier for multiple apps to work with audio files in the next update to iOS for iPad.
If you want to use a VPN service on your iPhone or iPad to protect your security, Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac discusses some of the best VPN services for iOS.
And finally, maybe it’s just because I have an interest in photography, but I think that this new ad from Apple called Bokeh’d is one of the funniest Apple ads in a long time. The actresses do a perfect job with their lines. (It makes me miss the days of the funny “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ads.) Worth watching:
One of the most useful apps for an attorney using an iPad is an app that can be used to read, annotate, and manage PDF documents. For many years, the app that I used and recommended was GoodReader. Last year, I grew frustrated waiting over four years for an update to that app, so I started to look for the best replacement. After a lot of research, I settled on PDF Expert by Readdle, and I’ve now been using the app for many months. This is a fantastic app, and I recommend it without hesitation for any attorney using an iPad. As I noted earlier this month, the long-awaited version 5 of GoodReader is now available, and it is also an excellent app. But after going back and forth between the two, there is more that I like about PDF Expert, so if I was asked to recommend just one app for working with PDF documents, PDF Expert is currently my favorite.
Viewing documents
PDF Expert does an excellent job of displaying PDF files. Pages load quickly and it is fast to go back and forth between pages. Normally, a menu bar appears at the top of the screen, but you can tap of the middle of the screen to make the menu bar disappear, which means that the entire screen is devoted to your document. An indicator at the bottom right shows you what page number you are viewing in the document, although you can turn that off in the app settings or choose to have it appear and disappear automatically.
If you tap the button with the letter A at the right of the menu bar, you can select if you want to be in continuous scroll mode (where you continue to flick up or down to page through the entire document), single page view (where you swipe left or right to move between pages) and a view with two pages side-by-side on the screen. That two-page mode is useful when you want to skim a document.
There is also a Crop mode switch. It only works in documents that have been OCR’d, and unlike some other apps like GoodReader where you can adjust the crop margins yourself, in PDF Expert the app automatically crops the blank margins. I don’t like that you can’t adjust how much or how little crop there is, but sometimes the automatic cropping works well, and when it does it becomes easy to hide the margins on a document so that you can make the text portion even bigger and easier to read.
To quickly scroll through a document, you need to drag a very tiny gray rectangle on the side of the screen. Once you grab it, it works, but the rectangle is so small that I often find it very hard to grab, especially when it is all the way the top or all the way at the bottom. This is actually one of my largest gripes with this app. It is easier to grab it when using the precise tip of an Apple Pencil, but I wish it worked better with a finger. Simply making the rectangle bigger would probably be an easy solution. I prefer the way that GoodReader handles scrolling through a document — placing small page preview thumbnail images along the bottom of the screen so that you can drag your finger left or right to quickly scroll.
Tap the magnifying glass icon to search for specific words in the document you are viewing. This is fast and works very well.
You can apply bookmarks within a document to make it easy to return to a page in the document that you previously considered important.
If you tap the Pages button on the toolbar you can see thumbnail images of every page. This is a nice way to scroll through a document and look for a specific page. You can also select one or more pages and manipulate them in various ways, such as moving pages around, exporting specific pages, rotating specific pages, etc.
Annotating documents
Tap the Annotate button at the middle of the menu bar to enter annotation mode. Assuming that the document has been OCR’d, you can easily select text and then choose from the pop-up menu what to do, such as highlight or underline.
The other way to annotate is to tap on the tools on the toolbar that appears after you tap Annotate to choose a specific tool, such as a pen, a circle or square, underling, strike-through, a stamp, etc.
There is an undo button at the very bottom of the toolbar. Tap it once to undo the last action. Hold it down to undo or redo several actions, a useful feature I haven’t seen in other apps.
When you tap the pen tool on the toolbar, four pens appear on the toolbar. The top two pens are normal pens with a specific color and thickness that you can select. I personally find the 1 pt a little too narrow and the 2 pt a little too thick; I prefer GoodReader where you can also select 1.5 pt. The bottom two pens are pressure sensitive pens. Again, you can select the color and thickness, and here you can select more thicknesses such as 1.5 pt. The pressure sensitive pens make the ink thicker when you press down and thinner when you apply less pressure. I’m sure that this is nice for artistic drawings, but when I am annotating a brief sent to me by opposing counsel, I find pressure-sensitive pens to be unnecessary and even annoying. Fortunately, it is easy enough to ignore the bottom two pens, and it is nice to be able tap one of the top two pens to quickly switch between two previously selected pens, such as a thicker red pen or a thinner blue pen. You can also adjust the opacity of pens, but I always keep mine set at 100%.
After you have made an annotation, you can tap on it to change it, such as change the color of something that you wrote, make the pen ink thicker, change the opacity, delete the annotation, etc. You can also use a rectangular-shaped lasso tool to select multiple annotations at once and change them or delete them.
You can tap an icon at the top of the screen to see all of your annotations in a document, making it quick to jump to a specific place. If you used highlight or underline, you see the actual words to which you applied the annotation, which is helpful. If you handwrote something, you only see a pen icon to show you that you did so; there is no preview of what you wrote or anything like that.
Overall, while there are a few additional annotation features I would like to have available, the annotations tools in PDF Expert work well and give me almost all of what I want.
Managing files
While viewing and editing documents is critical, it is the file management feature which makes an app like PDF Expert so useful for my law practice. I can carry around thousands of documents on my iPad so that everything that I might possibly need is there. And this is where PDF Expert really shines.
A Sidebar Menu on the left side lists sources of documents on your iPad, such as folders that are synced or local documents, followed by links to cloud sources such as Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. You cannot have iCloud Drive documents listed there, but PDF Expert does give you access to iCloud Drive in other ways, such as tapping the big plus sign at the bottom right corner of the documents screen.
At the bottom part of the Sidebar Menu, you can show either your recent files or the files / folders you have starred as a favorite.
In the main part of the screen on the right, you see a list of folders and files. Tap on the three dots at the end of a row to see a menu of options such as move, rename, duplicate, zip, etc. If you hold down on a file name for a second, you can then drag-and-drop that file to another location.
For documents that you keep in a cloud service such as Dropbox, PDF Expert does an excellent job of syncing. Unlike GoodReader which syncs either manually (when you press a sync button) or on a timetable you select (like every hour), PDF Expert syncs often, and it does so quickly. (The manual says that it syncs every 10 minutes, but it must also do so whenever you launch the app. Suffice it to say that in my experience, the new files I need are virtually always either already there or are in the process of syncing.) For example, if I put a file in a Dropbox folder on my computer and then turn to my iPad, the file is quickly — almost instantly — updated on my iPad. This is one of the features that I like the most about PDF Expert.
Searching
I mentioned above that you can search within a document. Another incredibly useful feature in PDF Expert is the ability to search within a folder or all documents on your iPad, either by file name or by content. (GoodReader can search by file name, but not by content.) For example, if I am working on a federal appeal, I will have a folder with each volume of the federal record. Most documents on PACER are OCR’d already (although exhibits typically are not). If I want to search across the entire record, I can enter a word and PDF Expert will show me every file that contains that word. Then when I tap on the file, PDF Expert lets me search for that same word within the file so I can quickly get to what I’m looking for.
I really like this search feature, and it is another one of the big reasons that I prefer this app over GoodReader for most tasks.
Etc.
Although these are the most useful parts of the app for me, there are lots of other features. You can zip and unzip files. You can view file types other than PDF files, although you cannot annotate other file types such as Microsoft Word files. You can fill out PDF forms.
For an additional $9.99 in-app purchase, you can enable the feature of editing a document. Although I paid for this feature, I find that I never use it because I virtually never have a need to change a word in a PDF document. But if this feature appeals to you, you can purchase this option.
You can flatten PDF documents, but PDF Expert lacks some of the more sophisticated security features found in GoodReader, such as the ability to remove all metadata using the Secure Photocopy feature.
PDF Expert works on the iPhone as well. Although most of my work takes place on an iPad, it is sometimes nice to view or manipulate a file on my iPhone.
Conclusion
PDF Expert is a fantastic app. It is no exaggeration to say that I use this app every single day that I am working. Having all of the files that I need with me at all times is useful, the annotation features are great, and PDF Expert has lots of options for manipulating files. There are a few features in GoodReader that I’d love to see added to PDF Expert, and I still find myself using GoodReader for some tasks. But overall, PDF Expert is my favorite app for working with PDF documents on an iPad. This app helps to make me a better lawyer.
Click here to get PDF Expert by Readdle ($9.99):
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This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award on February 25, 2019. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
The big Apple news this week is just a rumor, but it comes from enough sources that it may well be true. John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed reported that on March 25th, Apple will hold a big event for the press at the Steve Jobs Theater at its new Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. Paczkowski says that at the event, Apple will unveil its new subscription news service, which I presume will let you pay one price to read lots of magazines and newspapers on your Apple devices. And then, in an article for Fortune, Mark Gurman and Anousha Sakoui reported that this is also the event at which Apple will unveil its video streaming service, which I presume will be a competitor to Netflix. The Fortune article says that Apple will have some Hollywood stars at the event, which could include Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner, and J.J. Abrams. Janko Roettgers and Cynthia Littleton of Variety report that the streaming video service won’t actually launch until the summer or fall. Only Apple knows all of the details, but this looks to be an interesting event. Add these new services to its existing Apple Music service, and subscription services could soon become a major part of Apple’s portfolio. And now, the other news of note from the past week:
I’m currently preparing a presentation that I will be giving with Brett Burney at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago in two weeks. Our presentation will be full of useful tips, app suggestions, recommended hardware, and more for the iPhone and iPad. I’m looking forward to it, so if you will be at TECHSHOW, I encourage you to attend our session on Friday, March 1, at 10:30 a.m.
Another presenter at ABA TECHSHOW 2019 is California attorney David Sparks. This week he explained why he enjoys using an app for the Mac called AirBuddy, which makes it easy to switch between using your AirPods with your iPhone and your Mac.
Sara Salinas of CNBC reports that Gene Levoff, the lawyer at Apple responsible for stopping Apple employees from conducting insider trading, has himself been charged with insider trading.
Speaking of President Trump, yesterday his press secretary Sarah Sanders announced on Twitter that the president would sign a government spending bill but would also declare a national emergency so that he can build a wall even without congressional approval. I don’t want to get political on iPhone J.D. so I won’t share my thoughts on that, although believe me I have many, but I did think it was interesting how Sanders made the announcement. Instead of just posting a normal tweet, Sanders made the announcement by typing in the Notes app on an iPhone, creating a screenshot, and then posting that picture. (It looks like she also accidentally put a black dot on the screen using the Markup feature when she cropped the image.) Folks often use a Notes screenshot circumvent the 280 character limit of a tweet. This message was only 300 characters so it may have been possible to edit a few words and post a normal tweet, but nevertheless it is interesting to see an official government communication using the same app that I use for a simple grocery list. (After I wrote that sentence, I learned that Trevor Noah found a more funny way to say the same thing. That’s why I’m a lawyer and he hosts The Daily Show.)
Apple released iOS 12.1.4 yesterday. This update fixes a number of bugs, including the security hole in Group FaceTime which someone calling you could use to listen to you before you even accept the FaceTime invitation. For anyone who loves being able to FaceTime with multiple people at once, you are up and running again. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses the latest update to CARROT Weather (my review) which adds new complications for the Apple Watch. I hope that more developers create this high level of customization on their Apple Watch apps, and I hope that Apple provides new avenues for developers to do so.
Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch reported this week that many companies are watching what you do with their apps, recording every button that you press, how long you take to do so, etc. Or perhaps I should say that they “were” doing so. Whittaker followed up yesterday to report that Apple notified the developers who were doing so to stop immediately because they didn’t get permission from the users to do so. Companies involved included Expedia, Hollister, Hotels.com, Air Canada, Singapore Airlines, and Abercrombie & Fitch.
Yesterday, Netflix enabled a feature called Smart Downloads on the iPhone and iPad. When you finish watching a TV episode, the app will automatically delete it and then download the next episode, so that it will be ready to watch even if you are on a plane or otherwise have no signal or a poor signal. You can turn the feature off if you don’t like it. When I start watching a show on Netflix or Amazon, I usually download the entire season to my iPad and iPhone, but it’s nice to know that Netflix will do something similar even if I forget.
The Apple Watch Series 4 can detect when you fall. It gives you a warning that it sensed it, and if you don’t respond after a period of time, it can call emergency services for you. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that this feature may have saved the life of a man in Norway. After I read that story, I turned on the feature on my own Apple Watch (it is turned off by default for most users). Later that day, as I reached for the door on my car door, I got an alert saying that the watch thought that I fell. I tapped the screen to say that it was a false alarm, and it hasn’t happened again since. I’m not sure what it was about swinging my hand towards my car door that triggered the alert. Hopefully I won’t get many more false alarms; for now I’m keeping this feature turned on just in case.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is going to be the commencement speaker at Tulane University’s graduation on May 18, 2019, which will once again occur in the Superdome. As a New Orleans resident and a former adjunct professor at Tulane, I’m thrilled for all of the Tulane students who will get to hear him speak. I wonder if he was convinced to come down here by Lisa Jackson, who is in charge of environmental, policy, and social initiatives at Apple. She grew up in New Orleans and graduated from Tulane before going on to bigger and better things, including four years as the EPA Administrator. Tulane and Apple announced that Cook was coming here by releasing a fun video created in the Clips app.
And finally, the new 2019 Emojis are here! Or at least, they are coming. Here is a video from Emojipedia showing off all of the new ones. These are Emojipedia’s own graphics, so the pictures will look somewhat different when Apple implements them later this year — or at least I assume that is when we will see them — but this video gives you a preview of what is coming:
