After Hurricane Katrina, lack of dependable cell phone service was one of the major problems for those of us who were in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. And when I say “surrounding” I don’t just mean the Greater New Orleans area; I’m talking about over hundred miles away. Katrina caused huge areas in Louisiana and Mississippi to lose power, and also damaged many cell towers. At the same time, people had an even greater need to use cellphones to try to locate friends and families, putting even greater strain on the networks. As a result, it was incredibly difficult to use a cellphone to make a call. I remember driving around Mississippi to find a spot with weak cellphone connectivity and then having to redial over-and-over again to try to get service. And I remember how relieved I was every time I was able to confirm someone’s safety and whereabouts. Back in 2005, text messaging was far less popular than it is today, and many folks (me included) discovered that even if you couldn’t make or receive a call, you could often make and receive text messages. Even a limited ability to send and receive text messages made a huge difference in the recovery effort. And Katrina was not unique in this respect; I’ve heard many stories of other disasters after which it was difficult to use cellphones.
The situation in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is horrible on many different levels, but I know that one of the many problems is limited to non-existent cellphone service. Thus, I was delighted to read an article by Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch describing how better cellphone service will soon be coming to Puerto Rico through the combined efforts of many different parties. Panzarino provides the details, but in short, AT&T and Apple are tapping into a currently-unused (and unlicensed) part of the spectrum which will let working cellphone towers do more, Google is sending its Project Loon balloons to the region to provide even greater cellphone coverage, and the FCC is giving emergency licenses to make all of this possible. The article says that the additional coverage will still be limited, but it should be enough for many more folks to send text messages.
I have no doubt that this joint effort will do a lot of good as folks in Puerto Rico undertake the long recovery process.
Senator Al Franken recently sent a letter to Apple, asking about the privacy implications of the Face ID system in the upcoming iPhone X. After all, it would be a little creepy if Apple uploaded a picture of every owner’s face to an Apple server. Apple recently responded and addressed those concerns, as reported by Mikey Campbell of AppleInsider, in an article that also includes a scan of Apple’s letter. As confirmed by Apple, your face information stay securely on the phone, and is not even stored as a picture of your face — similar to how Apple stores your fingerprint on an iPhone or iPad with Touch ID. It is nice to see more confirmation that Apple treats privacy so seriously. And now, the news of note from the past week:
California attorney David Sparks has advice for using the new Siri face for the Apple Watch and explains why it is now the face that he uses all of the time. I agree with everything he says, although it is my second favorite watch face; I use the Activity Digital face even more to keep track of my activity circles.
Serenity Caldwell of iMore asks why Apple is the only smartwatch manufacturer that makes smaller versions of a watch that are more suited for many women. John Gruber of Daring Fireball says that the answer is likely that the other companies just don’t have the same ability to make the technology that small; Apple is by far the leader in this area.
Jeff Byrnes of WatchAware tells the story of how an Apple Watch helped to save a man’s life by alerting him that his heart was unusually elevated.
David Pogue of Yahoo reviews some of the first augmented reality apps for the iPhone and iPad running iOS 11.
If you use GMail, you can now make it even harder for a hacker to access your account by requiring not only a password but also a hardware dongle to login. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Motherboard explains how it works.
I see that there is an Indigogo campaign for a new product called the Bento Stack, which has lots of compartments to carry all of the power cordsa and accessories that go along with your iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Looks like an interesting design.
And finally, tonight at 5pm, Apple is opening an impressive new Apple Store in Chicago on Michigan Avenue. It is a beautiful building that sits on the river and blends in with steps going down to the river. Taylor Hartz of the Chicago Sun-Times gives a sneak peak of the newest Apple Store, and this video from the Chicago Sun-Times provides a great preview of what this store looks like:
I suspect that virtually every attorney with an iPhone or iPad uses Wi-Fi in connection with the representation of a client. And if you are on a modern password-protected network, it should be reasonably safe to do so. Unfortunately, things became more uncertain yesterday when Belgian security researcher Mathy Vanhoef revealed that it was possible for a hacker to intercept Wi-Fi communications, even over a secure password-protected WPA2 network, and even if the hacker didn’t know the password. Yikes.
Lily Hay Newman of Wired has a good explanation of the flaw, which Vanhoef calls a Key Reinstallation Attack (KRACK). And while the technical details of the risk may go over your head (mine too!), an argument can be made that every lawyer using technology such as Wi-Fi needs to keep up with this stuff. For example, ABA Model Rule 1.6(c) says that lawyers shall take “reasonable efforts … to prevent unauthorized access to … information relating to the representation of a client.” What reasonable efforts should a lawyer take? Comment 8 to Model Rule 1.1 says that “a lawyer should keep abreast of … benefits and risks associated with relevant technology ….” And ABA Formal Opinion 477 (May 11, 2017) says that “lawyers must, on a case-by-case basis, constantly analyze how they communicate electronically about client matters” and must undertake “reasonable efforts to prevent inadvertent or unauthorized access.” Of course, keeping abreast of the risks is easier said than done considering that technology changes so rapidly, as do security risks.
That’s the bad news. Fortunately, there is good news for iPhone and iPad users. First, while every Wi-Fi device is at risk to some extent, those of use who use iPhones and iPads are at less risk than folks using Android. According to Tom Warren of The Verge, 41% of Android users are at risk, especially those using Android 6.0, because of the Wi-Fi implementation on those devices. The current version of Android is 7.0, but unlike iOS users, it is typically much harder for Android users to update their devices. There are many reasons for this, including that most Android phone manufacturers have no financial incentive to update older devices so they don’t do so. Fortunately, Apple makes it much easier to update iOS devices and makes its frequent updates available for a wide range of devices, so you can expect to continue to receive security updates long after you buy an iPhone or iPad.
The second item of good news is that Apple already has a fix for KRACK, as reported by Rene Ritchie of iMore. Apple says that the fix is currently in a beta version and will soon be available for all users. I’m not sure if this update will be in iOS 11.1 which I expect to come out in a few weeks (the one with the new Emoji in it) or if Apple will release a iOS 11.0.x update just to fix the KRACK flaw. (Similarly, Apple has a fix for KRACK in a beta version of macOS. And if you use Windows in your office or home, Microsoft similarly has a fix, as reported by Tom Warren of The Verge.)
What is currently less clear is whether you need to update both your iPhone/iPad and also your Wi-Fi router to fix this, or if just updating your iPhone/iPad is enough. That article from Rene Ritchie of iMore says that whether you need to also update your router depends on the brand of router that you can using. Of course, you have some control over the Wi-Fi router in your home and office, assuming that the manufacturer of your router releases an update. But what concerns me is that if you are using Wi-Fi in another location, such as a hotel or conference or even just at another law firm, how are you supposed to know whether (1) the router is one that is vulnerable and (2) that router has been patched? Hopefully we will soon get more information on how to confront this.
Note that there is another solution: use VPN. For a long time, I have recommended using VPN with your iPhone or iPad (and computer!) if you are using a public Wi-Fi network, but you can also use VPN on a private, password-protected network to protect yourself from any hacker using KRACK on the same network. You can set something up at your own law firm so that all of your users can use VPN over Wi-Fi to connect back to your law firm network, or anyone can use a third-party VPN service. For example, back in 2014 I reviewed a great app called Cloak; the name recently changed to Encrypt.Me and the service still works really well.
You could also avoid this particular hack by using cellular data instead of Wi-Fi. I’ve been doing that more and more myself now that I have an AT&T unlimited data plan, and nowadays AT&T LTE is often faster than Wi-Fi for me.
Hopefully we will learn more about all of this very soon. And when Apple does release the next version of iOS to fix this security flaw, I encourage you to install the update so that you have more protection when using Wi-Fi.
I’ve noted in the past that you can charge an iPad Pro twice as fast by using a USB-C charger instead of the 10W or 12W charger that comes with an iPad Pro. The new iPhone 8 also supports fast charging, but the results are not the same as the iPad Pro. According to a test conducted by Dan Loewenherz reported by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a USB-C charger is much faster than the 5W charger that comes with the iPhone 8, but you can get almost the same results using a standard 10W or 12W iPad charger with an iPhone 8 as you can using a USB-C charger. Of course, if you have both an iPhone 8 and an iPad Pro, using a USB-C charger with both makes sense because then you get the fastest possible charging with both devices. I’ll be curious to find out in a few weeks if the iPhone X results with USB-C are similar to the iPhone 8. And now, the news of note from the past week:
I often link to articles relating to the iPhone or iPad written by California attorney David Sparks, who publishes the MacSparky website. This week, that website had its 10th anniversary. In addition to the iOS-related articles that I often mention here, David also writes about the Mac, technology in general, and occasionally even his favorite topic, Jazz music. (And yet amazingly, I don’t think that David has ever made it to Jazz Fest down here in New Orleans, which just makes no sense to me.) Congratulations, David, on reaching this milestone, and thanks for all of the informative posts over the past decade. I hope that you can celebrate by taking some time to relax and listen to Kind of Blue.
Chicago attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses the new drag-and-drop feature in GoodNotes, the app that I use to take handwritten notes on my iPad Pro.
If you feel like taking three seconds to vote for iPhone J.D. in a legal blog contest being run by The Expert Institute, feel free to click the VOTE box on this website. (No registration required.)
Apple is developing a video service, and news broke this week that Apple reached a deal with Steven Spielberg to bring back his Amazing Stories TV series from the 1980s. I have lots of questions about what Apple has planned, and Jason Snell of Six Colors saved me the time of asking them out loud by exploring them all in this post.
With iOS 11, many iPhones and iPads can now run apps that take advantage of Apple’s new ARKit to create virtual reality experiences. These are early days so we don’t yet have a lot of these apps, but Andrew Hayward of Macworld describes 10 of the best ARkit apps that you can try out now.
Apple CEO Tim Cook explains why ARKit is such a big deal in an interview with Andrew Griffin of The Independent.
Craig Lloyd of How-To Geek explains that in iOS 11, if someone wants to use your WiFi network, you can have your iPhone send the password, saving your friend the trouble of typing it in.
Thanks to Apple’s AirPods, which I absolutely LOVE, I haven’t needed or wanted to use a wired headphone in a long time. But if you prefer to use wired headphones which plug into a headphone jack, and you want to be able to charge your iPhone at the same time that you use headphones, the Belkin 3.5mm Audio + Charge RockStar ($35 on Amazon) is what you need. Jesse Hollington of iLounge posted this review.
And finally, here is a short but great video in which photographer Albert Watson talks about some of his most iconic photographs over the years, including the great shot of Steve Jobs which appears on the cover of Water Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. I’m sure that you will recognize many of the photos in this video. As for the Steve Jobs photograph, Watson explains: “When you think of a Mac or an iPad, it’s pretty simple. And the shot is pretty simple and direct. I said, ‘I’d like you to think about your next project, and think about that some people might not let you do it.’ And that’s where that look came from.” Here is the video:
When iOS 11.1 is released at some point in the future — my guess is in the next few weeks [UPDATE: released on Oct. 31] — one of the new features will be the addition of new emoji. Apple recently previewed high-quality versions of some of the upcoming new emoji. In case you are curious what is coming soon, take a look.
New faces include face with symbols over mouth, face with monocle, crazy face, and shushing face:
New food includes pie, broccoli, takeout box, and dumpling:
New animals include giraffe, hedgehog, cricket, and sauropod (a dinosaur with a long neck, tail, and four thick legs, such as a Brontosaurus):
New accessories include coat, gloves, billed cap, and scarf:
New lifestyle emoji include man climbing, curling stone, sled, and woman in steamy room:
New mystical emoji include mermaid, mage (wizard), woman fairy, and man vampire:
Apple will also add gender-neutral emoji, including a child, adult, and older adult, as well as an orange heart:
Another one coming is the American Sign Language gesture for “I love you”:
The 28 emoji images shown above are just a small sample of the new additions. According to Emojipedia, there should be 239 new emoji in iOS 11.1. A larger number of those are variations on a central theme; for example, many emoji come in two genders and five different skin tones. We saw an example of that last year in iOS 10.2 when Apple gave us 12 different versions of the judge emoji:
Other emoji coming in iOS 11 include face with hand over mouth, bearded person, breast-feeding, zombie, flying saucer, and coconut. And also, there is a new face emoji with one eyebrow raised, which many folks call the Stephen Colbert emoji. Colbert discussed it back in March of 2016, as you can see in this video:
This past Friday, Apple announced that Katherine “Kate” Adams will be the next general counsel of Apple. Specifically, she is the general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Here is some background on the general counsel position at Apple and Ms. Adams.
The general counsel position at Apple over the last 20 years
After almost dying as a company, Apple purchased NeXT in March of 1996 and brought Steve Jobs back to the company. Eighteen months later, Apple hired Nancy Heinen to serve as General Counsel and Secretary, a job Heinen had also held at NeXT. Heinen held the position until May of 2006, when she resigned shortly before Apple admitted to some irregularities in the backdating of stock options. Heinen eventually settled claims brought by the SEC for about $2.2 million, without admitting to any of the SEC’s charges.
It took Apple six months to replace Heinen, and the next two replacements did not last as long as Heinen. First, Apple hired Donald Rosenberg in November of 2007. Rosenberg had previously been general counsel at IBM, where he had worked for over 30 years. But Rosenberg did not stay at Apple very long, leaving after only 10 months to become general counsel at Qualcomm, a position that he still holds today. Today, Apple and Qualcomm have more than Rosenberg in common; they are also suing each other in huge litigation over Qualcomm’s cellphone patents. A few days ago, Max Chafkin and Ian King of Bloomberg Businessweek wrote an article about this litigation called Apple and Qualcomm’s Billion-Dollar War Over an $18 Part.
In September of 2007, Apple replaced Rosenberg with Daniel Cooperman. Cooperman had previously served as General Counsel for Oracle for 11 years and before that was a partner in the San Francisco office of the firm that eventually became Bingham McCutchen. Cooperman stayed at Apple for only two years, and then he returned to Bingham McCutchen. When that firm collapsed in 2014, he moved on to DLA Piper, and now teaches at Stanford Law School and advises an angel investor.
In September of 2009, Apple hired D. Bruce Sewell, the fourth and final general counsel hired during the second tenure of Steve Jobs at Apple. Before coming to Apple, Sewell had served as Intel’s general counsel for 15 years. During the eight years that Sewell has lead the legal department at Apple, Apple become the largest company in the world thanks to the iPhone. Sewell oversaw numerous complex legal issues including litigation with Samsung for copying the iPhone, efforts to return a prototype iPhone 4 that an Apple employee left in a bar, and numerous consumer privacy issues including negotiations with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world eager to access confidential information on iPhones.
Sewell announced last week that he will be retiring from the Apple at the end of 2017. “To have worked with this amazing executive team and all the incredibly smart people at Apple, especially my colleagues in legal and global security, has been the honor of a lifetime,” said Bruce Sewell in Apple’s press release. “The years I have spent in this job have been the most gratifying of my career. I’m delighted Kate is joining and I know she will be a huge asset.”
Kate Adams
Adams grew up in New York, and thanks to her father John Adams, had lots of early exposure to the law. John Adams worked as a Wall Street attorney and then a federal prosecutor, but is best known for co-founding the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970, the nation’s first litigation-focused environmental advocacy group. Under the leadership of John Adams, the NRDC was involved in some of most important environmental litigation in the 1970s and beyond.
Kate Adams went to college at Brown University, where she graduated in 1986 when a B.A. in Comparative Literature with French and German concentrations. She thought about becoming a professor of literature, but got a job after college working in the criminal justice system, and this made her decide to be a lawyer. She explained in one interview: “I got a job right out of college [at Brown University] in the Bronx criminal court system working with repeat offenders. I was exposed to lawyers and working in the justice system and got really interested in that whole arena of the intersection between law and society. I thought, ‘Maybe I should do this. It’s not a professor of literature, but I will do a lot of writing.'”
Adams then went to law school at the University of Chicago Law School, where she graduated in 1990. After law school, she clerked for Stephen Breyer, who was then the Chief Judge of the First Circuit, but would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1994. From 1991 to 1993, she worked as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, working on environmental law. From 1993 to 1994, she worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1994, Adams joined the New York office of the Sidley Austin law firm, where she had an environmental law and litigation practice for almost ten years. She made partner at Sidley in the late 1990s, and also taught environmental law as an adjunct professor at Columbia and NYU.
In 2003, Adams left private practice to work as Deputy General Counsel at Honeywell. In 2009, she was named general counsel at Honeywell. She worked to improve Honeywell’s safety and environmental record, and reduced Honeywell’s new case filing rate through litigation prevention measures.
After working at Honeywell for 14 years, eight of those years as general counsel, Kate Adams is now the first general counsel hired in the post-Steve Jobs era of Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release: “We are thrilled to welcome Kate to our team. She’s a seasoned leader with outstanding judgment and that has worked on a wide variety of legal cases globally. Throughout her career she’s also been an advocate on many of the values we at Apple hold dear.” Adams is quoted as saying: “Apple has had a tremendous impact on the world and it’s an honor to join their team. I’m excited to help Apple continue to grow and evolve around the world, protecting their ideas and IP, and defending our shared values.”
Kate Adams seems to have the perfect background for this position. She is incredibly smart, has experience as a general counsel, has a lot of experience with patents and other technology issues thanks to her time at Honeywell, and she grew up with a deep appreciation for protecting the environment and other values that are critical to Tim Cook’s Apple. Good luck to the entire legal department at Apple during this transition, and I hope that Adams has a long and successful tenure.
UPDATE 12/8/2017: Today, Apple updated its Apple Leadership page to replace Sewell with Adams. Here is what Apple says about Adams:
Kate Adams is Apple’s general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. Kate serves on the company’s executive team and oversees all legal matters, including corporate governance, intellectual property, litigation and securities compliance, global security and privacy. Kate joined Apple from Honeywell in 2017, where she worked for 14 years, most recently as senior vice president and general counsel. At Honeywell, Kate was in charge of the organization’s global legal strategy across more than 100 countries.
Prior to joining Honeywell, Kate was a partner at Sidley Austin LLP in New York. Earlier in her career, she served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; as trial attorney for the United States Department of Justice, Appellate Section, Environment and Natural Resources division; and as law clerk for Stephen Breyer, then chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Kate earned a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University and a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.
As I type this, New Orleans is a potential target of Hurricane Nate, Enough with the 2017 hurricanes, already! But if you are tracking a hurricane or just wondering when it will rain next, here are two weather apps that I have been using a lot lately and that I can recommend. First, I like Hurricane HD, a great app that focuses just on tracking hurricanes. Second, for a long time I put off trying CARROT Weather because it has a reputation for being snarky, which seemed like just a gimmick to me. But I’ve been using the app for a few weeks now, and it has quickly become my favorite weather app. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Massachusetts lawyer Bob Ambrogi discuses the Clio Cloud conference which just took place in New Orleans, and will be here again in 2018.
In iOS 11 on an iPad, you can put the most important apps in the dock. California attorney David Sparks shows off how you can put all of your apps in the dock, leaving a blank screen. Interesting.
Florida attorney Katie Floyd reminds us all to watch out for emails that appear to be, but are not really, from Apple.
If you use a Mac, you should check out 60 Mac Tips, Volume 2, a collection of video tips and tricks for the Mac by California attorney David Sparks and Brett Terpstra.
Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, was interviewed earlier today at the New York TechFest. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac has a transcript of the interview.
And finally, Apple released a new ad this week to show off the Portrait Lighting feature of the iPhone 8 Plus. This feature will also be part of the iPhone X being released next month:
Thank you to Westlaw for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. Westlaw is incredibly useful on a computer, but it also works really well on an iPhone or iPad with the fantastic Westlaw app. With the Westlaw app, you can extend the power and collaboration capabilities of Westlaw so that research begun in one place can be continued on your mobile device and vice versa. The Westlaw app has long been useful on the iPad, and as I discussed last year, the update to support the iPhone made the app even more useful.
There have been countless times when I was in court and I suddenly needed to pull up a case or statute. With the Westlaw app on my iPhone or iPad, I was able to do so quickly and easily. And using KeyCite, I could quickly see if there were cases distinguishing the jurisprudence cited by opposing counsel..
Even when I have been in my office with my computer on my desk, and thus I don’t technically need to use Westlaw on a mobile device, I often find that it is nice to be able to access Westlaw on my iPad so that my computer screen can be devoted to a brief that I am writing. I can lean back in my chair and review cases on my iPad, and then pull back up to my desk when I’m ready to type again on my computer. The Westlaw app lets you run searches and filter the results, review prior research in folders, and add notes and highlighting.
If you haven’t yet checked out the Westlaw app for iOS, or if it has been a while since you did so, use it the next time that you perform legal research. It’s a great tool for any attorney with an iPhone or iPad.
It wasn’t that long ago that photographs were rare and special. You only had a limited number of photos on a film roll, so you wanted to save your film for just the good shots. And then you had to bring the film to a store and wait for the film to be developed. Sharing photos meant going through the trouble of ordering additional prints. Suffice it to say that there was a lot of hassle, and it meant that people took and shared far fewer pictures than they do today thanks to digital photography. There were digital cameras as far back as the 1990s — I have some pictures taken with an Apple QuickTake 100 back in 1995 — but picture quality and storage on those older models was limited. It wasn’t until I bought my first digital camera in 2005 (a Nikon D50 DSLR) that I was able to start to enjoy the freedom of taking unlimited, high-quality photographs that I could see (almost) instantly on my computer without having to find the nearest Fotomat. I suspect that most of you can similarly remember when you transitioned from film to digital photography.
It has been a year since Apple introduced the Memories feature of the Photos in iOS 10 and on the Mac. I’ve always considered Memories interesting, but thanks to updates in iOS 11 (and macOS High Sierra), the feature is becoming much more useful. If you haven’t paid much attention to the Memories feature in the past, I hope that this post encourages you to check it out more often.
Curate collections of photos (and videos)
The goal of Memories is to automatically create curated collections of your most meaningful photos and videos. When the feature was first announced, I thought that it would be mostly useful for folks who don’t take the time to organize their photos. I figured that for people like me — who take the time to delete bad photos and then put the good remaining ones into an event with a title such as “Mom’s Birthday” or “Christmas 2016" — the feature would be largely irrelevant. Surely my ability to organize my own photographs would be better than a computer.
Now that I have used Memories for the past year, I see that my first impression was wrong. Sure, for folks who don’t take the time to organize their photos, Memories can handle much of that function. For example, it is smart enough to notice that you have a bunch of photos taken when you were on vacation at the beach, and it can automatically put those photos together into a single memory.
But Memories will also collect photos based on categories other than date, and that makes Memories useful for everyone, even people who take the time to curate their photo libraries. For example, I can see that Memories put together a collection of some of the best photos and videos in my collection that were taken in Chicago from 2012 to 2016 (much of which is photos from ABA TECHSHOW).
I also see that Memories recently put together a collection of what Memories thinks are some of the best pictures of my wife from 2006. Suffice it to say that Memories often comes up with collections that I wouldn’t have taken the time to create, and it does it all without me having to lift a finger.
Below the pictures and videos, you will see thumbnails indicating the people whose faces appear in the Memory, the locations where pictures were taken in the Memory, and other Related Memories.
In iOS 11, Memories does an even better job of creating collections based on something other than a specific date range and/or place. Apple says that iOS 11 adds “[m]ore than a dozen new memory types including pets, babies, weddings, and sporting events.” I’ve seen reports that other new ones include sporting events, performances, outdoor activities and nights out with friends. Sure enough, just yesterday Memories was able to figure out my wedding date and put together some great pictures for me from that special day. When I first saw this happen, I have to admit that I was a little surprised. How did Memories know the date I got married over 20 years ago? I suppose it was smart enough to figure out that if I was wearing a tuxedo (certainly not an everyday occurrence) and my wife was wearing a white dress, well then that must be a wedding. And a few days ago, Memories put together a memory called “Go Team! New Orleans 2015" which included some great pictures of my kids playing soccer that year.
I hope that Memories continues to add new themes which connect photos taken in different years and/or in different locations. These are the collections that I often find most interesting because they are the ones that I rarely take the time to create myself.
Surface great photos (and videos)
Another reason that I’ve grown to love Memories is that you get new collections frequently. Thus, whenever I tap the Memories tab in the Photos app, there is a good chance that I will see something new. Some are better than others; a “best of the last week” collection isn’t that impressive if I didn’t take particularly noteworthy pictures at that time. But more often than not, Memories will suggest that I look at a nice collection of pictures that I would not have otherwise thought to look at
Sometimes I will see an “on this day” collection that will remind me what I was doing on this same day many years ago. Or maybe it will surface pictures from a family vacation or a holiday many years ago. Sure, I could have searched for and found those pictures on my own if I had thought to do so, but I love the serendipity of Photos just nudging me as if to say: “Hey Jeff, remember these great pictures from that such-and-such event?”
Sometimes I disagree that a Memory is worth being a Memory. Memories recently offered to show me pictures from September 9, 2005, a day when I was taking pictures of what must have been the last apartment in Baton Rouge, LA that was still for rent after Hurricane Katrina, when a large part of the Greater New Orleans population tried to squeeze into the state capital. I really didn’t need to see those pictures again.
But far more often than not, Memories surfaces a memory that I do want to think about again, and jumping into those photographs and videos makes me smile.
Compared to the old days of film photography, I far prefer the world of digital photography, in which it is easy and virtually free to take lots and lots of photographs. But the downside is that there are so many pictures that it is easy to forget about them. I see that I have over 45,000 photos in my collection right now, so there are tons of pictures that I wouldn’t even think about looking at again if Photos didn’t bring back that memory. Thus, the ability to surface great photos from the past is one of my favorite parts of Memories.
Presenting a Memory
All of this would be useless if Photos just dumped hundreds of pictures on me every day. Perhaps the best part of Memories is that it automatically creates a nice little slideshow of some of the best photos and videos. Just tap on the play button at the bottom right of the banner image for each Memory. If the high quality versions of the photos and videos are not already downloaded to your device, you need to wait a little while (often just a few seconds) for your device to download those images from iCloud, and then the movie will start.
Apple calls this a “Memory movie” and the word “movie” is appropriate because it truly is more than just a slideshow; it features nice transitions, zooms in on the people in the pictures, and uses great background music. Each photo doesn’t stay on the screen for very long — just enough to time for you to say “oh yeah, I remember that!” And it does a fantastic job with videos — including videos associated with Live Photos — because it creates very quick video segments, which can be far more interesting than, say, sitting down and watching the entire dance recital again.
The final effect can be really dramatic, making it sometimes look like Ken Burns himself had created a documentary based upon your collections of photos. In fact, the movies are so nice that sometimes they are out of proportion to the subject matter. Allison Johnson of Digital Photograph Review recently said: “The misses are all much funnier because of the slightly dramatic treatment: panning, gentle transitions and music give the impression of something that’s been carefully curated to invoke nostalgia. It’s all very serious, and works very well for a post-hike selfie with a majestic backdrop. It’s downright laughable when it’s a photo of some acne-treating serum I took a picture of to send to my sister.”
Strangely, the Memory movie feature is currently missing from Photos on the Mac (although I suggest a workaround below). But it works on the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, and I’m sure that it will come to the Mac soon. If you own an Apple TV, this feature is really nice because it is such a great way to share with family and friends who are sitting around your televtion. There have been many times when my family has sat down to watch a movie but first we take a quick look at a new Memories slideshow. And then we watch a related Memory, and then another, and the next thing you know we have laughed for an hour as we walk down memory lane.
If you are just looking at Memories by yourself on your iPhone, even that experience is better in iOS 11 because Memories now optimizes its slideshows for both portrait and landscape view. Thus, no matter how you hold your iPhone in your hand, the slideshow will look great.
You can also send a Memory movie to someone else. Start to play the Memory movie, then tap the screen to show the edit options. In the bottom left you will see the share button (a square with an arrow pointing up). Then choose how you want to share the movie — Messages, Mail, save it to Dropbox and then give someone else a Dropbox link, iCloud Photo Sharing, etc.
And if you really like a Memory, you can scroll to the bottom and select “Add to Favorite Memories.” Over on the Albums tab, you will see a folder near the top called “Favorite Memories” with every Memory you designated as a favorite. This makes it much easier to find that Memory in the future, and saves you the trouble of scrolling through newer Memories in the Memories tab to find that older one that you really liked.
Editing a Memory movie or creating your own
If you want to make some quick fixes to a slideshow, Memories makes it easy to do so. Just tap on the screen and pause the slideshow. There, you can easily change the length of the movie to short, medium or (if there are enough photos in the collection) long. You can change the mood of the movie, which changes the font of the title screen, the transitions and the background music.
While I don’t consider myself much of a “Club” person, I like the diagonal transitions that the “Club” setting uses. Check it out.
For more advanced edits, tap the Edit button at the top left, which brings you to a screen where you can change the words and style of the title and the picture displayed behind the title. You can also add or delete specific photos or videos from the Memory movie. And you can choose an exact duration.
For the background music, you can add any song from your own music collection, but I find that the movies work great if you select one of the dozens of Memory Soundtracks (some of which are also in the Clips app). Soundtracks are grouped by mood: Dreamy, Sentimental, Gentle, Chill, Happy, Epic, etc. At the very bottom there are Special soundtracks, which Memories only selects automatically under very special circumstances, such as a Happy Birthday soundtrack only used for birthdays, a song called Girls of Waikiki which is only used automatically for photos taken in Hawaii, etc. Most Soundtracks are just instrumental, but a few feature vocals, such as the nice song “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri (Apple Music link) located in the Sentimental section. By the way, that song is one that that Memories will sometimes automatically select for wedding movies. Memories does a great job of adjusting these Soundtracks so that they last the right amount of time for your movie and so that pictures change with the beat of the song.
As sophisticated as all of this is, of course it doesn’t come close to what you can do in an expensive program like Final Cut Pro. Nevertheless, I love that I can just spend a few minutes to get in and get out and then have an even better slideshow to show off to others.
In addition to editing a Memory movie that was created automatically, you can also instruct Photos to create a Memory movie from a collection of photos. First, you can tap the Photos tab at the bottom of the Photos app, which is where you see your pictures organized into Years, and then Collections (pictures taken around the same general date and place), and then Moments (pictures on a specific day and usually in a specific place). For each set, just above the set of pictures, you will see bold words with the place where the pictures were taken and then the date just underneath (or sometimes, if there is no place, just the date in bold).
If you tap on those words, Photos will start to create a Memory for that collection of photos and videos.
If you like what you see, you can scroll all the way to the bottom (just below the related Memories section), and on the bottom left tap on the word “Add to Memories” to add this collection to the Memories tab in Photos.
You can also instruct Photos to create a Memory movie from an album that you created yourself. In other words, you can collect any photos you want, taken at any time or place, and make that a Memory. In Photos, tap the Albums tab at the bottom right. Then select any album that you created. Then at the very top left (just above the first picture in the album) you will see bold words with the title that you gave the album and the date(s) underneath. Tap those words to create the Memory. Once again, if you like what you see, scroll all the way to the bottom and you can choose to “Add to Memories” so that this one appears in your Memories tab.
The ability to share Memories also provides a sort of workaround for the current limitation of not being able to create a Memory movie on the Mac. You can create your own Memory collection using Photos on a Mac, then choose Add to Memories on your Mac, then go to your iPhone or iPad and you will see that same Memory, and from there you can create the Memory movie and then use the share function to send the finished movie back to your Mac. It’s a clumsy workaround, and will hopefully soon become unnecessary as Apple expands the Photos app on the Mac.
Conclusion
Memories is an example of Apple at its best: simple to use but professional results. If you don’t want to do any work, you can just tap the Memories tab and scroll through to see what the Photos app has already created for you. You are sure to find something interesting, and then you can enjoy the Memory movie. Although you can stop there, with just a few seconds of effort you can often dramatically improve the movie by adjusting the mood and the length. And then if you want to fiddle around for a few minutes, you can take out the photos you don’t like, add in some really good ones, pick some great background music, and end up with something really special that would have taken you hours to create without the Memories feature. And whether you send the Memory movie to others, share with family and friends on an Apple TV, or just enjoy the movie yourself on your iPhone or iPad, there is a darn good chance that you will smile as you walk down memory lane.
Apple released iOS 11.0.1 this week. As noted by Samuel Axon of Ars Technica, the update fixes a bug that could have stopped your iPhone from sending emails if you (or your company) uses Microsoft Exchange 2016 or some other Microsoft products for email. I never had a problem with the email at my law firm, and hopefully not of you did either. In the meantime, Apple is already giving developers access to the beta version of iOS 11.1. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Florida attorney Katie Floyd discusses some useful and inexpensive gadgets for your home.
Horace Dediu of Asymco does the math and explains how Face ID on the upcoming iPhone X could save the equivalent of over 12,000 lifetimes.
Dedui also estimates that 33 million Apple Watches have been sold.
It often seems like a waste to pay for Gogo in-flight WiFi when you just want to send or receive a simple text message. Fortunately, Delta announced this week that starting October 1, passengers will be able to use iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for free. It will only work for text; no photos or videos.
Killian Bell of Cult of Mac reports that Netflix now provides HDR video when available if you have a premium subscription (the $11.99/month “Ultra HD” plan), resulting in a better image on the iPad Pro, iPhone 8 and iPhone X.
Jason Snell explains, in an article for Macworld, Apple’s decision to unveil both an iPhone 8 and an iPhone X this year.
Unlike the iPhone, there is not a built-in calculator on the iPad. Fortunately, Calcbot for iOS — a very good calculator app — has been updated for iOS 11, so you can use it in the split screen modes.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac has some great tips for customizing the new Siri face on Apple Watch in watchOS 4. I’m very impressed with the Siri face and I use it frequently.
And finally, if you are a fan of the HBO show Silicon Valley (like I am), you’ll appreciate this Funny or Die video imagining how the characters in that show would react to the new iPhone X:
