Jeff Richardson

When you are using an iPhone or iPad and you do not have convenient access to a power outlet — perhaps you are out of the home or office, or perhaps you are just in a room where you need to use your device and you are not seated near an outlet — it is incredibly useful to have an external battery for when you need to recharge your device.  Lots of companies make external batteries, but I’ve been very impressed with the Lumsing Harmonica Style Power Bank that I reviewed back in 2014.  That one is a 10,400 mAh battery in a nicely styled case that can charge two devices at once.  Lumsing recently sent me a free review unit of a similar device with even more capacity called, and yes this is a mouthful, the Lumsing Most Compact Grand A1 Plus 13400mAh Portable Charger External Battery Power.  The device currently costs only $27 on Amazon.  I’ve been testing it for about six weeks and I can definitely recommend it.

Design

I like the way that Lumsing designs its chargers.  Like the Harmonia Style device that I reviewed last year, this one has curved sides so it feels good in your hand and doesn’t have any rough edges to scratch anything else in your briefcase or purse. 

There are two USB outlets on one end, and unlike the battery I reviewed last year, you can use either USB outlet to give an iPad the full 2.4 amps of power that will charge it most quickly.  The device can sense what you are charging, so it sends the right amount of power — more for an iPad, less for an iPhone.  The device can output a total of 3 amps of power at a time, so you can charge two iPhones at the maximum speed.  If you charge both an iPad and an iPhone at the same time you get a little less than maximum charging speed, but it is still more than enough to get the job done, albeit a little more slowly than just charging one at a time.

The input for the device is a Micro USB cable (included).  It takes about eight hours to fully charge the device, so when it is empty you’ll want to charge it overnight.

You can press a button on the side to see one to four blue lights depending upon whether you have 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% charge.  Or if you hold down that button for a few seconds, a small flashlight turns on.  It’s not very bright so I doubt I’ll ever use the flashlight, but I suppose there is no harm in it being there.

The device weighs 9.3 ounces.  That’s slightly more than the Harmonica Style battery from Lumsing that I reviewed last year (which was 8.35 oz).  I found that the weight of this device is heavy enough that I can tell that it was in my briefcase, but light enough that it hasn’t bothered me to keep it in there all the time.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to carry it in a pocket.

The size is almost 4 inches long (98mm), about 3 1/4 inches wide (79mm), and just over 3/4 of an inch tall (21mm).

The unit sent to me is silver with blue highlights.  There is also a black model with orange highlights and a gold model with white highlights.

Capacity

As the name tells you, the battery has a 13,400 mAh capacity.  Lumsing says that is enough to charge an iPhone 6 five times or an iPad Air more than once.  From my tests, that seems about right.  I haven’t yet tried to charge my iPad Pro from zero to 100% using this charger, but I believe that the iPad Pro has a 10,307 battery so this charger should be able to give you at least one full charge.

Utility

Putting aside the numbers, in my real life experience, this battery has given me all of the extra power that I need.  I’ve never had to recharge my iPhone more than a few times before I had access to a power outlet, nor have I ever had to recharge my iPad more than once in a day.  I’ve used this charger on trips that I have taken where I put heavy use on my devices but didn’t have easy access to a wall charger.  I’ve used the charger in depositions where my iPad was getting heavy use but no outlet was near me and I also needed to charge my iPhone because its cellular connection was being shared with my iPad.  I’ve shared this charger when I was charging my iPhone and someone next to me needed to charge his iPhone too.  This charger has always been up to the task.   So whenever this charger was with me, suffice it to say that I always had all of the power I needed.

It is really useful that there are two USB ports on this device.  Often I need to just charge one device at a time, but sometimes near the end of a long day I’ll want to recharge both my iPhone and my iPad at the same time, such as when I am waiting for a plane to head home, and I want a charged iPad to use on the plane and a charged iPhone to use when I land.  This device can do that, without my needing to locate one of the rare seats in the waiting area that has an outlet nearby.

Conclusion

I usually carry two batteries in my briefcase:  a small battery that can recharge an iPhone and that is small and light enough that I can carry it in a pocket, plus a large battery.  For that small battery, I continue to like the Powerocks Super Magicstick that I reviewed in early 2014 and which I see is now selling for only $13 on Amazon.  But for a larger battery that can charge an iPad, or even an iPad and an iPhone at the same time, I’ve been very satisfied with this Lumsing device.  The retail price is $56.99, but you can get it on Amazon for only $26.99.

Click here to get Lumsing Most Compact Grand A1 Plus 13400mAh Portable Charger External Battery Power on Amazon ($26.99)

The big news this week was the introduction of the iPad Pro.  I’ve been using one since Wednesday, but I’m still not ready to write a review because I’m still trying to decide what I think of it.  For some tasks, the larger size is amazing.  Pictures and videos are stunning, and it is so much easier to read documents on the large screen.  But for other tasks, it seems too big for me, although I know that I am still getting used to it.  And I’d really like to try the Apple Pencil, but they don’t seem to be in stock yet in the Apple retail stores, and the one that I ordered online isn’t expected to ship until December 7 or later.  If you have already purchased an iPad Pro and have some initial thoughts on using it in your law practice, I’d love to hear from you.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• If you use any of the great Lit Software apps — TrialPad, TranscriptPad and DocReviewPad — and you own or might soon own an iPad Pro, be sure to check out the post on the Lit Software blog with everything that you need to know about using Lit Software apps on the iPad Pro.  I was using TranscriptPad on my iPad Pro yesterday, and it was nice to have a larger screen to read and annotate transcripts.
• In an article for Above the Law, New York attorney Nicole Black writes about how attorneys at the Fennemore Craig law firm in Nevada are using iPads in an interesting way — to send a video demand letter earlier in the litigation.  Haven’t heard of that one before.
• California attorney David Sparks writes on his MacSparky website about Apple TV tips and tricks for using the remote and using Siri.
• Florida attorney Katie Floyd discusses using the Apple TV for cord-cutters (folks who don’t subscribe to cable or satellite TV).
• Massachusetts lawyer Bob Ambrogi writes that two more states (New Hampshire and New York) have adopted the duty of technology competence for attorneys.
• Earlier this week, I wrote about Google Cardboard.  Oklahoma attorney Jeff Taylor of The Droid Lawyer has been using Google Cardboard for a while on Android devices, and he recommends some other things that you can do with Google Cardboard, such as Roller Coaster VR by FIBRUM, which is a free and fun app.
• Attorney Jeremy Horwitz of 9to5Mac has a good list of iPad Pro details that you should know before buying one.
• Ryan Smith and Joshua Ho of AnandTech wrote a long, detailed review of the iPhone 6s, with lots of technical details.
• I’m not a fan of posts on sites like Macworld that are broken into a slideshow so that you need to click to read through the article.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed this one by Christopher Phin of Macworld:  16 weird, crazy apps for the new Apple TV, a good list of apps that you might not have known about.
• Ian Paul of Macworld / PC World writes that the Firefox browser is now available for iOS.
• Mike Beasley of 9to5Mac writes about updates to Apple’s iWork apps.
• This has nothing to do with the iPhone or iPad, but because I am such a Star Wars fan, I loved reading this interview with J.J. Abrams by Scott Dadich in Wired.  It’s a great read.  Actually, it does mention Apple’s Jony Ive in the article, so I suppose you could say that it has some lose connection to Apple products.
• And finally, we all know that it is more secure to use long, complex passwords, but this video of a password used by a Japanese Twitter user is probably more than you really need.  Someone please show this guy Touch ID: (via Cult of Mac)

地下鉄にすげー奴がおるんやけど… pic.twitter.com/xw55SutbA8

— 寺下義人 (@yossy1999116) November 7, 2015

Just over a week ago, Apple provided select journalists an iPad Pro, with the restriction that they could not post reviews until yesterday morning.  Normally, Apple lifts the embargo on reviews a day or two before new products go on sale, but this year, the iPad Pro started to show up in Apple Stores the same day that reviews were posted.  Thus, I was reading the brand new reviews of the iPad Pro on my iPhone just moments before my local Apple Store opened and I bought one for myself.  I’ll need to spend more time with my own iPad Pro before I’m ready to post my own review, and I hope to soon get access to an Apple Pencil (which I don’t believe are yet in any stores).  But I can say this about my first day with the iPad Pro:  the screen is huge!

If you are wondering whether the iPad Pro is right for you, here are the reviews that I found most informative from folks who have had a week to kick the tires on the new iPad Pro, the new Apple Pencil and the new Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro — plus some of the interesting things that they said in their reviews:

• John Gruber of Daring Fireball:  “The iPad Pro is ‘pro’ in the way MacBook Pros are. Genuine professionals with a professional need — visual artists in particular — are going to line up for them. But it’s also a perfectly reasonable choice for casual iPad users who just want a bigger display, louder (and now stereo) speakers, and faster performance.  Anyone tying themselves in knots looking for a specific target audience for the iPad Pro is going about it the wrong way. There is no single target audience. Is the iPad Pro meant for office workers in the enterprise? Professional artists creating content? Casual users playing games, watching movies, and reading? The answer is simply ‘Yes’.”
• Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal:  “The Pro may seem wedged between iPads and MacBooks, but it will be your main computer in the future. As our phablets push smaller tablets into retirement, the big tablet and its accessories will do the same for our traditional computers. For now, however, it may be easiest to step back and see the Pro as a… really good, really big iPad.”
• Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch:  “This new iPad is powerful — and for various reasons, this is the first time I feel that it’s actually possible to tell. Between this and the Apple TV, we’re seeing Apple’s A-series chips get pushed really, really hard for the first time, and what this thing can do is pretty damn impressive. It’s pushing over 5.5 million pixels at all times, but never stutters or lags.”
• Scott Stein of CNET:  “You’d think a super-large iPad might feel absurd. But over time, it grew on all of us. It’s beautifully made, and its extra space can be surprisingly useful at times. But it still wasn’t a complete stand-in for an everyday computer for any of us…although it’s priced like one.”
• David Pierce of Wired:  “The iPad Pro is plenty powerful, and it’s plenty big. But to call it ‘just a bigger iPad’ is like calling the Millennium Falcon ‘just a bigger falcon.’ In making it bigger, Apple made the iPad Pro different. This is Cupertino’s attempt to prove a tablet can replace and outgun your laptop. Perhaps more importantly, it is Apple’s best idea about how to give you a tablet that is more than a slightly bigger version of your big smartphone. This tablet does things your phone and your laptop can’t do.”
• Federico Viticci of MacStories:  “The device is noticeably heavier than the iPad Air 2, but not too heavy: upon picking it up for the first time, I noted how I was expecting it to be much heavier – again, looking at the Pro’s body tricked my brain into thinking I was about to pick up an object as heavy as my 13-inch MacBook Air.  Instead, the iPad Pro is surprisingly well-balanced: its weight distribution doesn’t make the device annoyingly bottom or top-heavy – in portrait and landscape orientations, both sides of the Pro feel equally balanced and sturdy.”
• Walt Mossberg of The Verge:  “Apple has managed to design something thin and beautiful, yet capable.  [However,] I found it just too big and bulky to hold and use comfortably for long periods. And that was when held horizontally. Held vertically, it was worse, because it felt unbalanced to me.”
• Ben Bajarin of Techpinions:  “Your first reaction when you see it will be ‘it’s so big!’ Then you will pick it up and you’ll say ‘It’s so light!’ I had the same reaction, as did most people around me, when we first saw and got to touch and hold the iPad Pro at the launch event. It really is big and surprisingly light. That makes it easier to hold in a number of different contexts, from sitting on the couch and watching TV or reading the news, even holding while walking around. This is important for not just consumers but the many commercial uses for iPad I’ve studied over the past year. Doctors using them in the field, or on construction sites being used to replace 1000’s of pages of manuals and blueprints, or in colleges to replace a backpack full of textbooks. All these applications will benefit from the added screen size while not sacrificing the portability they need out in the field.”
• Sam Grobart of Bloomberg Business:  “It’s a very nicely weighted implement that feels great in your hand. Working in concert with an amped-up, hyper-precise touchscreen, the Pencil can mimic pens, pencils, markers—you name it. Adjust the angle of the Pencil, and the width of your stroke changes. Press harder, and a darker line is drawn. Use a watercolor, and you can watch the color bleed into the ‘paper’ after you’ve taken your brush off the page. And, unlike with a lot of other stylus/tablet combos, the screen reacts instantly, with no lag or any interference to ruin the illusion you’re putting pen to paper. It’s uncanny.”
• Christina Bonnington of Refinery29:  “It is entirely possible that this tablet is faster than your current laptop, and that is bonkers.”
• David Pogue of Yahoo Tech:  “It’s safe to say that you’ve never used a stylus that’s more responsive than this one: the ink never lags behind your movement. If you’re scoring at home, the screen checks for the pen tip’s position 240 times a second. You can rest your wrist on the screen as you draw, no problem. You can also draw with your finger. And you can press harder for thicker lines. You can even draw with the side of the Pencil, for very fat strokes… Very, very cool.”
• Harry McCracken of Fast Company:  “I’ve been living with the iPad Pro and its accessories, provided by Apple for review, for more than a week. They have their limitations, quirks, and at least a few outright bugs, and will be dependent on third-party developers updating their apps to take full advantage of what’s new. But if the idea of using an iPad for serious work strikes you, like me, as an appealing proposition—rather than a waste of time or an impossibility—they add up to a breakthrough package.”
• Daniel Bader of MobileSyrup:  “The iPad Pro gives an awkward first impression. The human brain can quickly adapt to scale, but when you’re used to something being a certain size and weight, there can be an adjustment period. Upon first picking up Apple’s 12.9-inch slate, I had a disorienting Brobdingnagian feeling of being suddenly shrunken, the object before me a precise recreation of an object I know and use nearly every day.  But whereas the iPad Air 2 mainly resides on my bedside table, for reading and catching up on Twitter, I could tell right away that the iPad Pro would likely live in the office.”

UPDATE:  A few other reviews I found interesting after this post originally went up:

• Jim Dalrymple of The Loop:  “iPad Pro represents the start of something completely new for Apple and its developers. The power, versatility, and promise of iPad Pro has not been seen since the original iPad.”
• Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica:  “The iPad Pro’s sheer size makes it a less-than-ideal fit for certain use cases, though. Holding the tablet with one hand for any length of time gets uncomfortable quickly, not because the tablet is especially heavy (at 1.57 pounds, it’s not drastically heavier than the 1.5-pound original iPad, something Apple pointed out onstage in September), but because it’s large enough that holding it that way feels unbalanced.  That means there’s a class of apps that works well on the iPhone and smaller iPads but doesn’t work as well on the iPad Pro, particularly games that expect you to use the tablet with one hand while controlling action on the screen with the other hand. Admittedly, most people aren’t going to drop hundreds of dollars on an iPad Pro just so they can play Shooty Skies or Ridiculous Fishing on it, but it’s worth noting.”
• Lance Ulanoff of Mashable:  “The responsiveness is exquisite and the Pencil tip material offers just the right balance between friction and smoothness on the iPad Pro’s touch screen. Pressure sensitivity is about as close as you’re going to get to actually drawing on real paper. It even supports shading, letting me hold the Pencil at an extreme angle to access a the virtual long-edge of a graphite pencil or wide magic marker. What’s more, there is almost no perceptible visual space between the Pencil tip and the digital line that appears on screen. All that combined with the iPad Pro’s impressively large canvas (I have room for a full drawing and reference material) make this a fantastic drawing experience.”
• Lauren Goode of The Verge:  “So fundamentally, I know that the iPad Pro can’t do all of the things my MacBook Pro can do. And, as of right now, the iPad is still not quite the computing savior that Steve Jobs predicted it would be five years ago.  But I would still consider this a worthy runner-up to a laptop, or the one (non-smartphone) device I would take with me next time I travel — something I’ve never felt confident about before when it came to the iPad. This new iPad is powerful, it’s fast, it has a large display, and it never lagged when I was multitasking or switching between apps. It’s not better than my laptop, but makes far fewer sacrifices than I expected.”

Apple announced yesterday that the new iPad Pro can be ordered online starting tomorrow, November 11, and will be available in Apple Stores “later this week.”  Because Apple is not calling the online order a “pre-order,” that makes me think that Apple will start shipping at least initial online orders right away, which should mean delivery by Friday or possibly even Thursday.  As for the sales in brick-and-mortar Apple Stores “later this week,” Apple traditionally start to sell new products on Friday mornings, so I presume that is when you will start to see iPad Pro models in your local Apple Store.  And you may even be able to order on Wednesday with in-store pickup on Friday so that you can be sure that an iPad Pro will be waiting for you in the store when you get there.  Thus, if you want to be one of the first to get an iPad Pro, my guess is that whether you order online or shop in a physical store, you can likely get one starting on Friday. 

[UPDATE 11/11/15:  Apple started to take online orders at 4 am Eastern time on Nov. 11.  If you opted to pick up an iPad Pro in an Apple Store, they were available to pick up the same day, and that is what I did.   You could also just walk into an Apple Store on Nov. 11 and buy an iPad Pro, but quantities were very limited; for example, the model I wanted was not available for walk-in customers, even those first in line when the store opened.  In many parts of the country (including for me in New Orleans), iPad Pro accessories were not available for in-store pickup, with shipping dates of 2-3 weeks.]

At the same time, you’ll also be able to order the Apple Pencil, the new stylus designed to work with the iPad Pro, and the new Smart Keyboard.

If you are trying to decide if the iPad Pro is right for you, I posted my initial thoughts after the introduction in September.  I plan to get one, and I’m looking forward to learning how much more useful it is to have a larger 12.9″ screen screen, although I’m also curious whether the larger size will make the device too heavy.  For comparison, an iPad Air 2 has a 9.7″ screen, and iPad mini has a 7.9″ screen.

When the Sunday New York Times showed up on my front porch yesterday morning, I was surprised to discover that there was a package with it — a free Google Cardboard device.  I had heard of Google Cardboard before, but it wasn’t until I tried it myself that I saw how neat it really is.  Google Cardboard is an inexpensive box made of cardboard with two lenses in it.  If you don’t subscribe to the New York Times, Google has a website where you can buy one for around $20, or Google even gives you instructions to make your own.

Once you have the Google Cardboard hardware (if “hardware” is the right term to use for something made mostly of cardboard), you place your iPhone (or Android phone) in the Google Cardboard and run an app designed to work with Google Cardboard.  The app displays two images on your screen which line up in front of the two lenses, and when viewed through Google Cardboard, everything looks like it is in 3D. 

It’s similar to the View-Master that you probably used as a kid, but with some big differences.  First, you are looking at video, not still images.  Second, as you move your head around, the iPhone senses your movement and adjusts the image accordingly.  So you can look up to see what is above, look down to see what is below, or move around to see what is around you.  The virtual reality videos are created using special 360° cameras. 

Last week, in anticipation of giving out the free viewers to the over 1.1 million subscriber to the Times, the paper launched an app called NYT VR to provide you with content to view. The app is free and you can even use it without Google Cardboard; the app also lets you play the video in a non-Google Cardboard mode in which you move your iPhone to look around you.  Try that out to get a sense of it, but keep in mind that the video is far more compelling when you are using Google Cardboard.

The initial content includes a compelling video called Displaced which lets you see and hear from three children who had to leave their homes because of conflict — 11 year old Oleg from the Ukraine, 9 year old Chuol from Sudan, and 12 year old Hana from Syria.  As you would expect from The New York Times, the videos are compelling without the virtual reality, but when you watch the video in Google Cardboard, you truly feel like you are there.  You can look around and see the destruction from war, and even look up to watch a plane from a relief organization drop food.  The virtual reality is not just a gimmick; the video comes alive.  I was much more moved than I would have been just watching a YouTube video with the same content.

Another video called Walking New York shows the making of a cover of the New York Times Magazine from earlier this year.  The whole video is fascinating, but it is also worth it for a single scene in which the 360° camera is next to a helicopter and you get an amazing aerial view of Manhattan.  Wow.

There a few other videos included with great content.  You can also download the free Vrse app to see other VR content.  (Vrse created the app for the Times.)  I particularly enjoyed watching the Celebrity Jeopardy sketch from Saturday Night Live’s recent 40th anniversary show.  The sketch itself was funny (even though I had seen it before), but it was fascinating to turn my head away from the actors and see the cameramen, folks holding cue cards, audience, etc.  Watching all of the activity that wasn’t the focus of the main TV camera was even more interesting than the comedy sketch itself.

Some videos even feature 3D audio.  There is a U2 video in the Vrse app where you are in the middle of the band and can hear what is to your left and right.  It’s a great way to experience a music video.

According to an article by Adi Robertson of The Verge, the Times will release more video next month and throughout 2016.  Kudos to the Times for embracing this emerging technology and using it to tell more compelling stories.  If you don’t have Google Cardboard yourself, consider getting one so that you can follow along with me to experience the VR videos released by The New York Times in the coming months.

Click here to get NYT VR (free): 

The big iOS news of this week was actually tvOS news — lots of folks discovering tips and tricks on the Apple TV.  For example, I wish I had known the trick about pressing play/pause to shift from lowercase to uppercase back when I was first setting up my own Apple TV and entering passwords.  This tip and many more are included in the news items of note from this past week:

• Ohio attorney Paul Unger discusses the upcoming iPad Pro in an article for Law Technology Today.
• Massachusetts lawyer Robert Ambrogi notes on his Law Sites blog that we are now up to 15 states that take the position that attorneys have an ethical duty of technology competence.
• Loyola Law School (New Orleans) Prof. Dane Ciolino discusses new West Virginia Bar guidelines on the use of social media.
• Debra Weiss reports for ABA Journal that Harvard Law School is scanning most of its law books and making the digital images available for free on the Internet.
• Marc Newson is a famous designer who helped Apple to design the Apple Watch.  He is now an Apple employee and spends about 60% of his time working for Apple.  James Chessell of the Autralian Financial Review posted an interesting interview with Newson.
• We are in the first week of the new Apple TV, so it was in the news quite a bit this week.  Jason Snell discusses the future of Apple TV in an article for iMore.
• Josh Centers wrote a great Q&A on the Apple TV for TidBITS.
• Joe Rossignol compiled a good set of Apple TV tips and tricks for MacRumors.
• Susie Ochs of Macworld compiled a good list of tips and tricks for the Apple TV’s Siri Remote.
• Jim Dalrymple of The Loop discusses his initial impressions of the Apple TV.
• One of the nice features of the Apple TV is that you can connect Bluetooth headphones, so that you can watch a show or play a game without disturbing others in the same room.  Brent Zaniewski of iMore recommends Bluetooth headphones to pair with an Apple TV.
• Security expert Rich Mogull gets to the bottom of reports that a security broker recently paid $1 million for a browser-based iOS 9 hack, in an article for TidBITS.
• The Joy of Tech comic created some fun lyrics for the song Welcome to the Hotel CaliFacebook.
• And finally, in this video, Robin Rhys of AppAdvice shows how you can use a $2 app to create create live photos to use as faces on your Apple Watch:

As attorneys, we often make arguments that parties are bound by the terms of their contractual agreements.  Thus, I won’t ask you how many times you yourself have tapped a button on your iPhone or iPad acknowledging that you have read the iTunes Terms and Conditions; you would have to plead the Fifth, because we both know that you haven’t actually done so.  The current version (revised Oct. 21, 2015) is 20,624 words long.  It is a running joke that virtually nobody has ever read it.

New York artist Bob Sikoryak is famous for his masterful cartoons drawn in the style of other artists, such as his Masterpiece Comics collection which combines classic literary works with modern comics (for example, The Stranger by Albert Camus as a Superman comic).  This year, Sikoryak has been working on a new comic book in which each page is drawn in the style of another famous comic book artist.  Sikoryak explained to Brady Dale of the New York Observer how he came up with the subject for his latest work:  “So I was thinking, ‘What would be an interesting thing to adapt?’ And I made a joke to someone that: ‘I should do the iTunes agreement.’ And the more I thought about it, I realized, I had to do it.”

The end result is an illustrated version of the iTunes Terms and Conditions.  All of the words that you know and love are there, and they are incorporated into wonderful illustrations that feature a cartoon version of Steve Jobs.  But each page is different — and thus each Jobs is different — because each page is done in the style of a different artist.

For example, here is page 6 of the comic book, illustrating the ‘Pre-Orders” section of the agreement, done in the style of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts:

And here is page 15 of the comic book, illustrating the “Automatic Delivery and Downloading Previous Purchases” section of the agreement, done in the style of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes:

(All images posted with permission of R. Sikoryak)

Sikoryak is posting each page of his book to a Tumblr page called iTunes Terms and Conditions:  The Graphic Novel.  He started in September and he is now up to page 49.  New pages are added to the top, so if you want to read in order starting at the cover and then page 1, page 2, etc., you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of that page and then page up towards the top of the page.

This graphic novel is great fun.  You’ll find pages done in the style of:

• Rex Morgan, M.D. (Dal Curtis, Marvin Bradley, John Frank Edgington)
• Dilbert (Scott Adams)
• R. Crumb
• Little Lulu (John Stanley and Irving Tripp)
• Amazing Spiderman (Stan Lee and Steve Ditko)
• The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard)
• Archie (Dan DeCarlo)
• Garfield (Jim Davis)
• Cathy (Cathy Guisewite)
• Richie Rich (Warren Kremer)
• Dennis the Menace (Hank Ketcham)
• The Flash (John Broome and Carmine Infantino)
• Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker)
• Rube Goldberg
• Tintin (Hergé)
• Saga (Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples)

…and many, many more. 

I never thought it was possible for someone to come up with a way to make me want to make my way through every page of the iTunes Terms and Conditions, and then want to go through and look at it all again, but Sikoryak has definitely done it.  Sikoryak has truly found a way to turn the iTunes Terms and Conditions into a page turner. 

Bravo on a job well done, and I look forward to the upcoming additions!

The fourth generation of the Apple TV went on sale this past Friday.  I bought one and have had a chance to use it over the weekend.  If you have used either of the two prior models of the Apple TV (the second generation came out in 2010; the third generation in 2012), there is much that is similar.  You still have a home screen with icons, and you scroll down to see more icons.  Some features have barely changed at all from the prior model except for an updated interface, such as the ability to use Home Sharing to stream your music, photos and videos (purchased or home videos) from a Mac on your home network that is running iTunes.  But one thing is very different, and it has the potential to make the Apple TV infinitely better than prior models:  the ability to download apps.

Third Party Apps

When the iPhone App Store was introduced on July 10, 2008, there were 500 apps available.  A year later, there were 65,000 apps, and today there are well over a million apps.  But even on day 1, many recognized that the true value of the iPhone App Store was its potential.  Developers could create apps to give the iPhone, and then the iPad, capabilities that their creators at Apple probably never dreamed of.  For example, we now have a large number of fantastic legal-specific apps. 

Apps on the Apple TV have the same potential.  There are a limited set of TV apps available today, and some of them — like Netflix and YouTube — provide the same capabilities that that had been baked-in to previous versions of the Apple TV.  But already we are seeing some pretty neat TV apps.  Games were a popular app category on the iPhone, and I’m sure that the same will be true on the TV.  For example, this weekend my kids and I enjoyed playing Beat Sports, which is pretty fun.  And while I’m normally not a big fan of Crossy Road on the iPhone or iPad, I must admit that my kids and I had a ton of laughs when we played the two-player version on the Apple TV (using an iPhone as a controller for Player 2).  There are some interesting non-game apps already available; here is a list of some from Rene Ritchie of iMore.

But again, what really interests me is not what is there today, but the idea that the App Store can grow in quantity and quality.  Many attorneys use an Apple TV in trials, mediations and meetings so that they can display information on an iPad for others to see.  It is probably a question of when, not if, before we will see Apple TV apps designed for lawyers.

Siri remote

Another new feature of the fourth generation Apple TV is the Siri Remote.  As the name implies, you can press a button on the remote to activate Siri and ask it to play movies or TV shows, or even search for specific episodes.  This is nice because the alternative way of entering input into a TV device — using a small remote to select letters, one letter at a time — is slow and maddening. 

Unfortunately, right now Siri is mostly limited to videos, although there are a few other questions that it can now handle (and I’m sure that this will improve in the future).  For now, you sometimes need to provide other text to the Apple TV, such as a username or password, and you have to use the old, slow and maddening method.  Fortunately the Apple TV removes a little of that misery by offering to connect to your iPhone and learn some basic information from it, such as your WiFi network and password.  Every little bit helps.

The Siri remote also has a touch surface at the top where you can swipe and click to navigate the Apple TV.  I find this much easier to use than the old Apple TV remote.

The Siri remote can also measure movement, so you can use it to play Wii-style games on your Apple TV. 

Volume buttons on the remote can control the volume on your TV or even on your receiver.  There is a fantastic interface for learning your receiver without having to type in four digit codes or anything like that.  Just follow the instructions and hold the volume up and down buttons on your receiver’s remote when asked.

Unlike the iPhone 6s and Apple Watch, the Siri remote does not include the ability to sense how hard you are pushing down (Force Touch / 3d Touch).  That might be a useful feature for a remote, so perhaps we’ll one day see an updated version of the Siri remote.

I like the new remote because it is both easy to use and powerful.  My main complaint is that sometimes it is hard to figure out which end is up, especially in the beginning, but that is no longer an issue for me now that I added Apple’s $13 Remote Loop to the bottom, making it easy to see which end is up (and preventing my kids from flinging the remote across the room while swinging a bat in Beat Sports).

Speed and Responsiveness

The new Apple TV uses a much faster processor inside.  This is important because the unit is very quick to respond to your controls, which makes the experience of using the Apple TV much better.

Apple also did a nice job with the user interface, with all sorts of little touches that make it super easy to move around the screen.  The nice interface makes the Apple TV seem easier to use.

Responsiveness is especially nice when you are watching a video and want to move forward or backward (scrubbing).  You can tap the left or right side of the touch pad to jump forward or backward 10 seconds, and doing so is incredibly fast.  Or you can slide your finger across the touch pad to move through the video timeline.  On many other TV-connected devices, scrubbing is so difficult that I often just don’t do it.  But on the new Apple TV, this feature works amazingly well.

Note that Apple sells both a $150 32 GB version and a $200 64 GB version.  The more expensive version has the potential to be even faster because it can store more data locally without the need to stream it.  Apple says that the 64 GB version is recommended if you plan to download and play a lot of games.  I opted for the 64 GB version just in case it is noticeably better and because the $50 difference is not large, but at this point I have no idea whether the extra memory makes a big difference.

4th generation = 1.0

Apple calls this the fourth generation of the Apple TV, but because this is the first version to run the tvOS system, a close cousin to iOS, in many ways Apple TV has the hiccups of a new version 1.0 product — even when it comes to technology that is under Apple’s own control.  For example, Apple TV doesn’t work with Apple’s own Remote app on the iPhone, which is a huge surprise and disappointment because it means that for those times when you need to enter text on the Apple TV, you cannot just use the familiar keyboard on your iPhone.

Another noticeable omission:  iCloud Photo Library.  My iPhone and iPad now have access to every single one of my almost 50,000 digital photographs because they are stored on iCloud.  But this feature doesn’t exist yet on Apple TV.  For now, there is a workaround that I noted above — make sure that your computer is on the same network and running iTunes, and use Home Sharing.  But the Apple TV would work better with the same full photo access that exists on iOS devices.  I’m sure that this is coming in an update, but I was surprised that it wasn’t ready on Day 1.

I’m sure that Apple was eager to get something on the market in time for the holidays and had to leave a few unfinished features for a future update.  Nevertheless, it is a shame that the device has some missing pieces.  Fortunately, other functions on the Apple TV work great, and I have no doubt that Apple will soon release software updates to address these and other initial limitations.

Conclusion

The 2015 version of the Apple TV has a few missing features, but it is still an amazing device today and will get even better with a few updates.  It is clearly the first step towards a much better TV experience.  It will be great fun to see what developers come up now that they can create apps.

Click here to get the Apple TV ($149 / $199) from Apple.

Whenever there is a discussion of lawyers using iPads, a frequent topic is when is it appropriate to use an iPad instead of a computer.  Thus, I thought it was interesting when I saw a post on Twitter this week about the most famous iPad-using lawyer in the country, President Obama.  Pete Souza, the Chief White House Photographer, posted a picture this week of President Obama working at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.  Then, in response to a question about why there isn’t a computer on President Obama’s desk, Souza explained that the President just uses an iPad.  Feel free to tell folks that if it is good enough for the President, then it is good enough for you, if someone asks why you are using an iPad to get your work done.  And now, the news of note from this week:

• Speaking of Pete Souza, most of his presidential photographs are taken with a high-end camera, but he also uses an iPhone to take and post pictures on Instagram (and Twitter).  This week, I enjoyed listening to an interview of Souza on Episode 20 of the Hashtagged podcast, in which Souza discusses how he started to use an iPhone to take official White House pictures.  He also discusses this famous photograph taken in the situation room on May 1, 2011 during the mission to find Osama bin Laden.
• Des Moines, Iowa attorney Victoria Herring explains why she likes wearing an Apple Watch in an article for the ABA’s GP Solo website.
• The Apple TV officially goes on sale today.  I enjoyed watching a short interview on CNN Money with Apple Senior VP Eddie Cue in which he discusses the Apple TV.  The easiest way to watch both parts of the interview is to start at this post by Dave Mark on The Loop.
• Ben Thompson of Stratechery discusses why Apple is doing just fine, notwithstanding what some stock analysts might say.
• Jason Snell writes for Macworld about the big takeaways from Apple’s 2015 Q4 earnings call this week.
• Lance Ulanoff wrote an interesting article on Mashable about Apple’s drive to make the perfect device.
• Steven Levy, who knew Steve Jobs and frequently interviewed him, isn’t a fan of the new Steve Jobs movie.  Levy posted an interesting interview this week with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin about the liberties taken in the movie.
• If you want to switch from Evernote to Apple’s Notes app, you can move all of your notes using a program on a Mac.  David Pogue of Yahoo Tech explains the process.
• Based on analysis by Chris O’Brien of VentureBeat, it appears that Apple has sold more than $1.7 billion worth of Apple Watches.
• Need a costume idea for Halloween?  Evan Killham of Cult of Mac points out that you can just ask Siri.
• Law Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University visited New Orleans this week and posted a few fun pictures, and discussed lawyering in the Big Easy.  No, this doesn’t have anything to do with the iPhone, but I’m always happy to see lawyers (and others!) have a good time down here in New Orleans.
• And finally, now that I’m off the topic of the iPhone anyway, I’ll conclude today with a link to this silly video of a Jeopardy game that I think I could totally win (via The Loop):

The Apple TV has always been the best way to display content from your iPhone or iPad on a television.  You can show off pictures and videos that you took on a large HDTV, and you can mirror your screen so that others can see web pages, apps, etc. that you are using on your device.  Additionally, the Apple TV has provided a way to stream video from services such as Netflix and HBO.  Starting this Friday, Apple will start selling the new (fourth generation) Apple TV, which can run its own apps and works with the new — and very cool — Siri Remote. 

Apple gave review units of the Apple TV to select journalists, and their reviews started to go online last night.  If you have been wondering whether a new Apple TV is right for you, here are the reviews that I found interesting:

• John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed:  “Apple says the future of TV is apps. That may or may not prove true, but after a couple days with the new Apple TV, it’s a compelling argument. Turns out custom-building a TV from a broad palette of apps that includes everything from pay TV channels and games to travel accommodation services and Periscope is a great way to get exactly the TV experience you want — or close to it, anyway. The new Apple TV isn’t just an upgraded set-top box, it’s the first ‘true’ Apple TV, one that articulates Apple’s vision of what the TV viewing experience should be. It’s an appealing vision.”
• Christina Bonnington of Refinery29:  “If you are an iPhone user and you own a TV, you’re going to want the new Apple TV.”
• Christina Warren of Mashable:  “The remote is, in a word, fantastic. It’s slightly larger than the old Apple TV remote and it includes a few more dedicated buttons for menu, home, play/pause and Siri. … It feels awesome in the hand. If you’ve ever used a trackpad on a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro — you’ll be familiar with the experience.  Swiping faster on the touchpad moves faster across the interface, slower goes slower. Movements are extremely precise and never felt out of control. The remote is Bluetooth — not IR — so you don’t need direct line of sight to navigate — which is nice. On some Bluetooth-based remotes, I’ve noticed lag between a selection and what happens on screen but the Siri remote always keeps up.”
• Nilay Patel of The Verge:  “I asked for ‘‘80s movies with Tom Cruise on Netflix’ and Siri found me Top Gun and Risky Business, for example. Delightful. Once you select a movie or show, Siri will open a universal landing page that deep links you right into the various services that offer the content. So if you search for Game of Thrones, you’ll see that you can buy it on iTunes and stream it on HBO Go or HBO Now, and you’re off to the races. In terms of iterative improvements to the Apple TV, this is the most important thing Apple could have done, and the execution here is among the best in the game.”
• Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal:  “I think the Apple TV lays the best foundation for what I want TV to become.  The Apple TV’s greatest edge is its remote control. That may sound trivial, but other efforts to make apps work on TVs have been comically complex. …  The Apple TV gets the Internet TV remote right by reaching for the same touch-screen feeling that makes the iPhone intuitive to a 2-year-old. The new remote has a glass touchpad on one end that you swipe and tap around with your thumb as if it’s an iPhone. Without having to look down, you feel connected to what’s happening on the big screen.”
• David Pogue of Yahoo Tech:  “Apple has taught Apple TV to recognize natural voice commands in four categories: finding videos, navigating playback, opening apps, and asking questions. … It’s clear that Apple worked its fingers to the bone on this; it works unbelievably well. You have to give a lot of commands before you find a failure.”
• Brian Chen of The New York Times:  “Even for those more basic elements, the device is better at streaming video content than less expensive products from Amazon, Roku and Google, all of which I tested over the last month. While the new Apple box has flaws, it also has a cleaner interface for finding things to watch and a niftier remote control — not to mention more compelling apps and games.”
• Walt Mossberg of The Verge:  “Apple TV has become a sort of iPhone or iPad for the TV, a platform for apps usable across a room. By making the box another vessel for its giant assortment of third-party apps and home-grown services, Apple is putting itself in a position to host programming the networks and studios are increasingly streaming, as well as new kinds of TV content.”
• Patrick O’Rourke of MobileSyrup:  “In true Apple fashion, my initial impression of the Apple TV is that it feels exceedingly refined, similar to most Apple products. It’s clear this revamp of Apple’s set-top box has been in development for a number of years; everything from the device’s new iOS 9-based user interface (UI) – dubbed tvOS – to its sleek Siri Remote is both visually and functionally impressive.  But is the Apple TV a better device than the plethora of already released Android set-top boxes, or my current favourite streaming device, the Roku 3? In most respects, yes: The new Apple TV is significantly ahead of the competition in terms of design and hardware, especially when it comes to the device’s UI and Siri Remote.”