Do you use your iPhone or iPad in your bed before you go to sleep at night, thinking that it will help you to get tired? Maria Konnikova writes in an article for the New Yorker that doing so makes it harder for you to go to sleep. She cites a Harvard Medical School study that finds that the blue light emitted by these devices is interpreted by your body as daylight, resulting in a surge of energy instead of the melatonin release that tells your body that it is time to go to sleep. The study found that people who read a (traditional) book at night got tired over an hour before people who read an e-book at night, and the e-book readers were less alert the next morning. It’s an interesting study, and perhaps I’ll read it on my iPad before I go to sleep tonight. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Security expert Glenn Fleishman of Macworld discusses the new two-factor authentication coming in iOS 9. iOS 9 will also require six-digit verification codes, unlike iOS 8 and prior versions that allowed a four-digit code to unlock your iPhone.
Ken Segal reviewed the Apple Watch on his blog. Segal knows a thing or two about Apple — he used to work for Apple’s advertising agency, where he not only authored the famous Think Different campaign, he also came up with the name “iMac.”
Analyist Ben Bajarin wrote an interesting article on using the Apple Watch, and then not using it for a week, noting that “the Apple Watch is a modern day convenience … in the same way a dishwasher or washer/dryer or a microwave is. None of the items are absolutely necessary, yet so many of their owners can’t imagine life without one.”
Ariel Adams of A Blog to Watch reviews the Apple Watch from the perspective of someone who reviews traditional watches (including luxury watches) for a living.
The Apple website has advice for not letting your Apple Watch get too hot or too cold. “For example, Apple Watch shouldn’t sit unattended in direct sun for long periods, undergo dramatic changes in temperature or humidity, or be left in a car on hot days.”
And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting review of Apple Music. She gives some tips on using the service, including Siri tips, and also talks about the drawbacks. She doesn’t love the service, but feels that Apple has time to work out the kinks, and she pointed out on Twitter, “I also didn’t love the iPod at first.” She also prepared a humorous video to describe Apple Music, doing it in the form of a music playlist:
One of my favorite podcasts is the Clockwise podcast, and thus I was thrilled to be a guest on yesterday’s show. This podcast has a lot going for it. First, it is a podcast about technology (especially Apple technology) hosted by two of the best in the field: Jason Snell, the former Macworld Editor in Chief who has been writing about Apple since the 1990s, and Dan Moren, who wrote for Macworld from 2006 to 2014. Second, the podcast always includes two other guests, which change from week to week, so every show includes different perspectives. Third, each episode is strictly limited to 30 minutes, so it is fast-paced and doesn’t waste your time.
Yesterday’s show (Episode 94) was a good one. The two guests were me and Georgia Dow, who lives in Montreal and is both a psychotherapist and a regular contributor to the great iMore website. (She is also a two-time Canadian Jujitsu Champion.)
We started off with a pretty narrow topic — whether Apple is doing a good enough job updating the Safari web browser — and then discussed everyone’s all-time favorite Apple hardware products, the future of the iPod, and finally we speculated on what might be the next big advancement for the iPhone. So this episode features discussions of Apple technology past, present and future.
You can download the show in your podcast player of choice, or you can click here to listen in your browser or download the show. I encourage you to check it out.
LIT SOFTWARE is one of the best publishers of iPad apps designed for lawyers. The TrialPad app lets you present evidence at trial. The TranscriptPad app lets you review and annotate deposition transcripts (and is one of the most useful apps in my law practice). Yesterday, LIT SOFTWARE released its third app for the iPad, and it is called DocReviewPad. To me, DocReviewPad is sort of like TranscriptPad for documents. The app lets you easily review, annotate and apply codes to documents as you review them on your iPad, and then export documents for production. The app applies Bates numbers as you import documents. You can use the app for a document production from your own client, marking documents as relevant, privileged, etc. as you review them, so that when you are done you can produce all of the relevant documents, plus create a list of documents for which you will need a privilege log. You can also use the app to review and annotate documents as you work up your case — either your own client’s documents or documents produced by other parties in the litigation.
A few days ago, LIT SOFTWARE gave me a free review copy of this $89.99 app. (Note also that LIT SOFTWARE has been a sponsor of iPhone J.D., although the company is not a sponsor this month.) While I haven’t yet had the opportunity to make real-world use of this app with one of my litigation files, I did kick the tires on the app over the Fourth of July weekend to get a feel for it. Overall, I’m impressed. The app lacks some of the features that you find in similar software for the desktop computer, but there is still quite a bit in this 1.0 version of this app, plus this app is far easier to use than any similar software (such as Summation) that I have used on my PC.
Importing documents
The app can import documents in PDF format, which is what I typically use, but can also handle TIF, JPG, PNG and TXT. It is far easier to have each document in a separate file before you import into DocReviewPad. For example, if your opponent produces a single 200-page PDF file in response to a request for production of documents, I recommend that before importing into DocReview Pad, you use your computer (or have an assistant do so) to break up that single PDF file so that each file corresponds to a document. It is possible to split up a document within the app: press Select, tap the document, press Edit, tap on Extract Pages, and choose a page range to export. (The Bates numbers will be retained.) But in my tests, it was faster and easier to handle this task on a PC or Mac before importing in to DocReviewPad.
[UPDATE: Version 1.1 of the app, released on 7/16/2015, makes it faster to split a document as you review by using the new Split button to split the document at the current page.]
There are lots of ways to import documents. I suspect that most folks will import from a cloud storage service, and the supported services are Dropbox, Transporter, Box, Citrix ShareFile and WebDAV. You can also connect your iPad to your computer and import documents using iTunes, or you can import an attachment to an email simply by opening the attachment in the DocReviewPad app. The app asks you to assign a case for the imported documents, or create a new case if this is the first set of documents for that case. [UPDATE: Version 1.1.1 of the app, released 7/31/2015, lets you import documents from email attachments or other apps using the “Open in…” function.]
Next, you tell the app how to apply Bates numbers to each page of each document. You can decide what prefix to use, how large the Bates number should be, where it should be placed, etc. By default the app assigns the numbers sequentially; for example, if your last import finished with ABC-001234, then the next import will begin with ABC-001235. But if you need to change that, you can manually adjust the starting number.
A quick note on Bates numbers. I know that some attorneys purchase expensive desktop software, such as the Pro version of Adobe Acrobat, primarily because that software can assign Bates numbers. Because DocReviewPad includes this feature, this $90 app may make it unnecessary for you to pay for much more expensive software on your PC or Mac.
[UPDATE: Version 1.1 of the app, released on 7/16/2015, lets you skip Bates number on import, or even skip it entirely, useful if you are working with documents that already contain Bates numbers.] [UPDATE: Version 1.1.1 of the app, released 7/31/2015, lets you remove or add Bates numbers at any time.]
Once your documents are imported, you will see a list of each document on the left, and the document itself will display on the right. A magnifying glass icon indicates that a document was OCR’d before you imported it (and thus searchable).
Reviewing and annotating documents
To read a document, just tap it from the list in the left. If you press the double-arrow button at the bottom of the screen, the list disappears so that you can review a document using the full iPad screen.
Swipe left and right to move between pages of a document. Swipe up and down to move between documents. You can also use scroll bars on the right and bottom to navigate between pages or between documents.
The three main tools that you will want to use as you are reviewing documents are at the top: Review, Annotate and Flag.
Review. The review tab lets you tag a document as Confidential, Privileged, Relevant or Responsive. You cannot change those four tags. However, you can create your own Issue Codes, and they work just like Issue Codes in the TranscriptPad app.
Review codes and issue codes make it quick and easy to indicate which documents are important and why they are important. But note that you have far fewer options than when you use more sophisticated (and expensive) computer-based document review software. For example, there are no fields for document date, author, recipient, etc. You can approximate many of those typical fields by creating appropriate Issue Codes, but it is not quite the same thing.
Thus, if your primary reason for reviewing documents is to place them in chronological order, DocReviewPad isn’t a great solution. But if instead you want to indicate which documents are important and assign them to general or specific categories that you create for your case, DocReviewPad works great.
Annotate. Use the Annotate button to annotate the document. A long press on the button will bring up a list of tools that you can use: the highlight tool, and a pen — either one that lets you write freely, or one that creates lines.
If you just tap the annotate tool, it will automatically select the last tool that you used. This is helpful if you just want to highlight one useful passage after another.
The highlight tool works by creating boxes — tap at the top left corner, then drag down to the bottom right corner of the box. It works this way even if you OCR a document. Thus, unlike the highlight tool in many PDF apps, it does not just annotate individual words and sentences. Having said that, the app highlights the correct way — it doesn’t just produce an opaque box that makes the words underneath harder to read. The underlying text remains black (or whatever color it originally was) with a yellow box on top. It looks great.
Flag. Finally, the flag function is a way for you to write something important about the document. It is the digital equivalent of writing a few words on a sticky note and sticking that on the document. But unlock a sticky note, you don’t have to worry about it falling off of a piece of paper.
Reports
Once you have reviewed your documents, you can create reports. The report is a table that includes the document name, Bates number range, number of pages in the document, any Flag notes that you created for that document, any tags that you assigned, etc.
Export
There are two ways to export documents. If you just want to export a single document, use the Share button at the top right (the box with an arrow coming out of it). This lets you email, print, upload to cloud storage or export to iTunes on a connected computer. You have the option to include or exclude the annotations, the Bates numbers, and a Summary Report.
The second option is to tap the Export button at the bottom of the list on the left. This lets you export multiple documents from within a folder, or from all of the folders in a case. You have lots of options on what to export. You can include or exclude documents that you have yet to review. You can include or exclude document that you tagged as confidential, privileged, relevant or responsive, plus you can include or exclude documents that you have tagged with issue codes.
When you export multiple documents, you have fewer options than when you export a single document. For example, you can remove or exclude annotations, but you cannot remove Bates numbers. Also, your destination options are limited to two: (1) the TrialPad app (useful to prepare the documents that you want to display at trial), or (2) iTunes, which you use by connecting a USB cord between your iPad and your computer. I wish that the app included a third choice to export to a cloud service. I realize that document productions can get large and uploading hundreds of documents using Wi-Fi to a cloud service could take a very long time. But I’d still rather have the option, especially for those times that I just want to upload a small number of documents that I, for example, tagged as being relevant to my motion for summary judgment.
Pricing
The app itself costs $89.99, but LIT SOFTWARE also offers bundles that can make the cost of the app much less. For example, the Ultimate Litigation Bundle costs $249.99, which includes DocReviewPad, TrialPad and TranscriptPad — a $60 savings over purchasing each app separately.
With Apple’s Complete My Bundle option, you can often take advantage of the savings if you own other apps. For example, if you already own TrialPad and TranscriptPad, and if you previously paid full price for those two apps ($129.99 and $99.99), then Apple gives you credit for the $230 that you already paid and you just pay the extra $20 to get DocReviewPad. LIT SOFTWARE sometimes puts its apps on sale (and I often announce those sales on iPhone J.D.), so if you bought the other apps at a deep discount then Complete My Bundle might not save you money, but it is nice to have the option in case you did pay full price.
[UPDATE 7/8/2015: The below link to the Ultimate Litigation bundle is now working.]
Conclusion
This is a very powerful and useful app. I have long found it easier to review documents on my iPad rather than on a computer screen, and in the past I have used general purpose PDF apps such as GoodReader to do so. Those apps are useful for annotations, but don’t have any of the other features of DocReviewPad such as tagging, issue codes, Bates numbers, etc. It is great to be able to use an iPad to review documents in an app that has a full set of tools designed for this specific function. There are a few features that I would like to see included in this app, but it is very full-featured for a version 1.0. And if the company updates this app the way that it has updated TrialPad and TranscriptPad over the years, then this app will become even more powerful over time.
If you are a litigator, this is a great app. And even if you are a transactional attorney, you may still appreciate the ability to apply Bates numbers, annotate and code documents. LIT SOFTWARE has another hit on its hands, and I appreciate all that the company does to make the iPad even more useful for attorneys.
Click here for DocReviewPad ($89.99):
Click here for Ultimate Litigation Bundle ($249.99):
If your office is closed tomorrow (like mine is) then I hope you enjoy the long Fourth of July weekend. If you are looking for something to keep your weekend entertaining, I strongly recommend that you update your iPhone to iOS 8.4 so that you can start to use the new Apple Music service. I’ve been using it for the last two days, and I’m really impressed. It is great fun to listen to any music I can think of. For example, I had been thinking about checking out the new albums from Barenaked Ladies and the Indigo Girls, and with Apple Music it was quick and easy to do so. I even listened to the ultra-famous Taylor Swift album 1989 yesterday, the first time that I had heard it all of the way through, and I see why it has been so popular. I doubt I would have ever purchased an entire Taylor Swift album, but I’m glad that I heard it.
Also, I really love the For You tab. I usually rely on a small group of friends to alert me to new artists and new songs, but with the possible exception of one friend of mine (yes, Bill, I’m talking about you), they cannot know everything about music that might appeal to me. But the For You tab has been giving me a great mix of music, from old favorites that I hadn’t heard in a while to new groups that I never knew about. Last night while on the treadmill finishing up the circles on my Apple Watch, I listened to a group called Of Monsters and Men that I had never heard of before, and they were fantastic. (Why haven’t any of you told me about that group yet? No, don’t say it, it’s too late for you to apologize now.) The For You tab is a great way to find music that you are likely to want to listen to, even if you didn’t know it yet.
Finally, I’ve even enjoyed listening to the Beats 1 station more than I thought I would. There seems to be a lot of rap music that doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ve also heard quite a few songs that are really good. Also, the energy and enthusiasm of DJ Zane Lowe is contagious, and the lack of commercials makes this unlike any radio that I’ve ever heard. (Beats 1 just has occasional sponsor mentions, sort of like public radio.)
Overall, this is a great service. Apple has rekindled my love for music this week. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s time to pull out your headphones and enjoy some great music. And now, the news of note from the past week, which is mostly about Apple Music:
Barrie Hadfield of Workshare recommends his own app but some other good ones too in a post on Law Technology Today listing some good apps for lawyers.
Christina Warren of Mashable also wrote a great overview.
If you value using DRM-free music, you should read this post by Serenity Caldwell of iMore with theories on why Apple is adding DRM to songs in Apple Music.
Julia Mayhugh of the WatchAware podcast (a podcast devoted to the Apple Watch) showed off her Apple Watch home screen on the MarkDMill blog, and it is fun to see what a color-coordinated group of icons looks like.
And finally, the full trailer for the upcoming Steve Jobs movie was released yesterday. Here it is:
A big thank you to Bushel for becoming a new sponsor of iPhone J.D. this month. Bushel provides you with a way to manage all of the Apple devices in your organization — iPhones, iPads, and even Macs — through cloud-based Mobile Device Management.
What can you do with Bushel? You can automatically install apps from the App Store to all of the devices in your organization at once. You can see an inventory of all of the devices that you are managing in your organization. including what users are using each device, which apps you have installed on the devices. You can also automatically configure email on all of the devices in your organization, so your users can get up and running quickly. (Works with Microsoft Exchange, Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and any other IMAP or POP mail accounts.) You can configure all devices to automatically join your secure wireless networks, saving all of your users the time of typing in those long passwords. And for iPhones and iPads owned by your organization, you can configure devices automatically before users get them.
If a device in your organization is lost or stolen, Bushel gives you a quick and easy way to remotely lock the device, or wipe it completely.
Here are some screenshots that show you Bushel in action:
The first three devices that you register with Bushel are free forever, so it is easy to try out the service at no cost. Each additional device costs just $2 per month, with no contracts or commitments.
If this sounds like something that would be useful at your organization, you can learn more at Bushel.com.
The new Apple Music service starts today. And because there is a three month free trial, that means that all iPhone users are getting free music. It all starts at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern today, when Apple will make the iOS 8.4 update available. Update your iPhone (or iPad), and then you will see a new version of the Music app, including tens of millions of songs that you can listen to, for free. There is really no reason for you to not check it out, and I plan to do so. Here are the details.
Features
With the new Music app and the Apple Music service, you get basically three things.
Streaming music. First, you can stream any song in the Apple Music catalog. If someone mentions a song or an album to you, or if you suddenly find yourself thinking about that song that you remember from your youth, or if you hear about some new artist and want to find out what all of the buzz is about, you can just play the song. You don’t have to first buy the track(s) from iTunes. And even if you cannot think of something to listen to, the new Music app will make recommendations tailored for you, based on the songs that you already have.
Siri is also smarter with the new Music app. You can now ask Siri to play the top songs from 1987. Or if you like a song that you are listening to, tell Siri to play more music like this. Or say things like, after this song, play Cheeseburger in Paradise.
It’s not the entire iTunes catalog; some artists don’t make some of their songs available for streaming. But Apple says that it has tens of millions of songs, so you’ll have quite a few choices.
What if you want to listen to music that you already own, which is already in iTunes on your computer or already on your iPhone? Well that works too. Apple scans your library and makes a copy of anything it doesn’t already have so that it can stream it to you. For example, The Beatles are not currently on any streaming services, Apple Music included, but if you already own Beatles songs, you’ll be able to play them along with the music that you stream on Apple Music. So feel free to make a playlist that includes both Lady Gaga and The Beatles; Apple won’t judge you. (And yes, this part of Apple Music is identical to the current iTunes Match service for which Apple has been charging $25; it looks like you can cancel your iTunes Match subscription if you will be using Apple Music.)
And even though this is a streaming music service, you can listen to music offline, such as when you are on a plane. I’m not yet sure how this works; you might have to press a button or add a song to a playlist to tell the Music app to download it for you.
Radio. Second, Apple Music includes live, 24/7 streaming radio. The flagship station is called Beats 1. It features the DJs Zane Lowe (formerly of BBC1) who will work out of Los Angeles, Ebro Darden (formerly of WQHT) who will work out of New York, and Julie Adenuga who will work out of London. And apparently many celebrities and others (such as Elton John) will have shows too.
In addition to Beats 1, there are also other “stations” that feature music without a DJ. This part sounds similar to the current iTunes Radio. And Apple Music also retains the feature where you can choose a song and Apple Music creates a radio station based on that one song that you like. In the past, though, you had a limited number of times that you could skip songs every hour with those stations; with Apple Music, you can skip as many times as you want, assuming that you are a paid customer or you are in the free trial period. (For folks who decide not to pay for Apple Music after the three month trial, you go back to the old system of a limited number of skips.)
Connect. Finally, Apple Music introduces a service called Connect. It provides a way to interact with artists. You can hear exclusive music, read posts by the artists, comment on those posts, etc.
Cost
The first three months are free. If you like the service, you can subscribe for $9.99 a month. Better yet, for $14.99 a month, you can get the family plan that works with up to six people. Just turn on iCloud Family Sharing, a service that Apple had already been offering which lets you share media that you own with others in your family.
If you already buy a lot of music, paying $10 a month for an all-you-can-eat plan sounds pretty good, especially considering that you can let your entire family use the plan for only $15 a month. But keep in mind that if you decide to stop paying for Apple Music in a year, you’ll no longer have access to those songs — as opposed to music that you buy on iTunes that you can continue to listen to essentially forever.
Conclusion
If you want more details, Serenity Caldwell of iMore put together a very comprehensive FAQ on Apple Music. But in light of the generous three month trial subscription that we all get starting today, my advice is just to try it out and see what you think. That’s what I plan to do.
The radio and Connect features don’t hold a lot of interest for me right now, but I’ll check them out, and who knows, maybe they will appeal to me. It is the streaming music part of Apple Music that appeals to me the most right now. I’ll try it, and if it seems worthwhile, I’ll start paying for the service in October. If not, I’ll just go back to buying music one song, or one album, at a time.
Whatever you decide to do come October, enjoy your Summer of Free Music, courtesy of Apple Music.
A family law attorney wrote me this week to say that she is looking for a way to take text messages between her client and the adverse party and present them in a format that looks good at trial — something better than just a series of screen shots. I told her that I have heard of attorneys using the Stitch It! app for this purpose, an app that aligns screenshots to produce what looks like one long screenshot. But perhaps some of you have a better way to make iPhone text messages look good at trial, and if you do, please post a comment to this post or send me an email. And now, the news of note from the past week:
California attorney William Ha decided to give up the practice of law and write iOS apps instead. Zach Abramowitz of Above the Law interviewed Ha to find out how and why.
California attorney David Sparks explains why he loves using his Apple Watch for walking directions. I agree 100% with that post. Although you can use the Map app on an iPhone for this purpose, when you walk around a city looking down at your iPhone as you walk, you stand out way too much. Having your watch give you silent taps to indicate which way you need to turn is so much better, and safer — not only to avoid looking like a target, but also so that you can pay attention to where you are walking and don’t bump into a person, a pole, etc.
The 1Password app — a fantastic password manager — is a free app, but there is normally a $9.99 in-app purchase to get all of the features. But there is currently a sale so you can pay only $4.99 in-app to get all of the pro features.
Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal reviews the new Nest Cam, a high-resolution camera that you place in your house so that you can monitor your house from your iPhone wherever you are.
John Moltz of A Very Nice Website reports that if you have a foreign language keyboard in use on your iPhone, then your Apple Watch will give you foreign language default replies to text messages.
And finally, for those of you who remember using System 7 on a Mac in the 1990s, developer Nick Lee figured out a way to get it running on an Apple Watch. Useful? Not at all. Cool? You bet! Here is the video:
Thank you to GoodCase Apps, publisher of the CaseManager apps for the iPad and iPhone, for sponsoring iPhone J.D. CaseManager was created by New York civil rights attorney John Upton as a fast and inexpensive solution for sole practitioners and attorneys with small firms who want to use mobile devices to manage their law practice. The app has a great interface, which I showed off in my September, 2014 post, and you can use the app to keep track of the key information in your cases: events, tasks, contacts, time and expenses, plus the facts, notes and documents unique to each case.
You’ve also been able use CaseManager on a PC for a while now, and this week CaseManager added a Mac version. So now you can work with your data on both your mobile device and your work computer, regardless of whether you use Mac or PC. (Also, I know that some iPhone J.D. readers use an iPad and an Android phone, and for you there is also an Android version of CaseManager.)
Click here to get more information on CaseManager. The iPhone and iPad apps are only $20, and the PC and Mac versions are only $40, so you can be up and running for less than the cost of a single billable hour.
Click here to get CaseManager for iPhone ($19.99):
There has been a lot of talk of the new features coming in iOS 9 later this year, but there is another new technology that Apple enabled this month: HomeKit. HomeKit is essentially an interpreter that lets your iPhone or iPad understand and talk to your home automation devices. When you use compatible hardware, you can use your iPhone to do things like turn lights on and off, or dim them. Better yet, you can simply use Siri. Tell your iPhone to turn on the lights in the kitchen, or dim the lights in the dining room to 40%, and it just works.
Only a few manufacturers currently have HomeKit compatible hardware. One such company is Lutron, with its Lutron Caséta Wireless product line. I had previously purchased a Lutron dimmer that I installed into my TV room when it was renovated earlier this year, and for months I’ve been using it either as a normal dimmer (controlling it by pressing the buttons on my wall) or with a small remote control. When HomeKit came online earlier this month, I purchased a second dimmer for my living room and a Smart Bridge, a key piece of hardware that uses HomeKit to serve as an interface between your wireless devices and your iPhone. Everything has been working quite well for me. Here are more details on the components, and how they all work together.
Lutron Caséta Wireless Dimmer
The component that I had purchased earlier this year is the wireless dimmer, which you can buy for about $60 on Amazon. The dimmer looks like many other modern dimmers, mostly flat buttons that you put in a wall plate. If you already have an old dimmer in a room, installing this unit is incredibly simple. Believe me, I have minimum skills when it comes to electricity, and even I had no trouble. Just turn off the breaker so that there is no power in the room, unscrew the old unit using a screwdriver, disconnect some wires from the old unit and connect the new Lutron unit, and use a screwdriver to put everything back.
The end result looks modern, and is easy to use. Buttons at the top and bottom are used to get 100% light or to turn the light off, and the two triangle shape buttons in the middle are used to dim the lights.
In my TV room, I installed the dimmer next to a normal (non-wireless) switch, all of which was in a standard size double wall plate.
The $60 version comes with a small remote control that you can use from anywhere in the room to control the lights.
You can buy the dimmers in different colors. I used a white one in my TV room, but I purchased an ivory model on Amazon ($55 without a remote control) for my living room. It didn’t come with a wall plate, but it was easy to purchase a plastic ivory wall plate at Home Depot for 79¢. (You can also buy the Lutron Caséta dimmers at Home Depot.)
Lutron Plug-In Dimmer
I haven’t tried this product myself, but I see that you can also purchase a plug-in style dimmer that works with lamps for about $55. It plugs into a wall outlet and has two plugs, one on each side, so you can plug in two lamps and control them wirelessly (simultaneously) the same way that you would control built-in lights using an in-wall dimmer.
Lutron Caséta Wireless Smart Bridge
Now that you have your dimmers, the second piece that you need is the Smart Bridge. This is a tiny box that connects to your home network, talks to your Lutron dimmers, and passes instructions back and forth from the dimmers to the iPhone app. Note that you need to actually plug in an Ethernet cord to the Smart Bridge, so you’ll likely put it in the same room that has your router. I use an AirPort Extreme in my house (which I described in this post earlier this year) and it has three Ethernet out ports, so I used one of those three ports to connect the Smart Bridge. (The Smart Bridge doesn’t have to be in the same room as your lights.)
Note that there are two versions of this Smart Bridge and you need to use the right one. For about a year now, Lutron has sold the L-BDG-WH, and it is still sold on Amazon with no indication that it is an old product. The new version, the one that came out this month and works with Apple HomeKit, is the L-BDG2-WH, which costs $120 on Amazon.
One complaint that I have about the Smart Bridge is that there is a thin white light that goes around the device. It serves as a visual indicator that the unit is turned on, but I wish that there were a way to turn the light off.
Lutron app
Once you have your dimmer(s) and your Smart Bridge, you can download the free Lutron App for Caséta Wireless. It is an iPhone app, although like any iPhone app you can run it on your iPad in iPhone compatibility mode if you want to do so.
When you first run the app it connects to your Smart Bridge (you enter a serial number) and then you configure all of your lights. That’s a one-time chore. On subsequent launches of the iPhone app, the first screen of the app shows you the current status of your lights. (And the status of your shades, if you also install Lutron shades that you can control to go up and down; I didn’t try them.) You can tap the icon for any light and control it — on, off, dim, etc.
You don’t have to be in the same room to turn the lights on and off. Indeed, you don’t even have to be in the same house. I was looking at the app while sitting in my office one afternoon and turned off the lights in my TV room just to see what would happen and turned them back on again. Sure enough, my wife texted me a few seconds later because my kids were wondering why the lights went off, then on again, while they were watching Scooby Doo. So from anywhere in the world, you can use your iPhone to see if your lights are on or off, and control them.
You can also create schedules. For example, you can have your lights automatically turn on — either 100% or at a specific dimness level — at a certain time of day. You can program one or more lights to go on at sunset and turn off at sunrise. If you want to have lights go on when you are not home as sort of a crude way to deter burglars, this app can do that.
You can also create scenes, sort of like a macro for your lights. For example, if you always want the lights in your TV room to be set to 20% when you watch a movie, you can create a scene called Movie Mode. Just tap that buttons to set the lights accordingly.
You can also use geofencing with the app, which means control your app based on where you are located. (Well, where your iPhone is located, but presumably your iPhone is the same place that you are.) For example, for the last week, I’ve had the lights in my living room configured so that they come on automatically when I come home. That way, even if I come home late at night, there is always a light on in the first floor of my house so that I don’t fumble around in the dark.
The Lutron app also has an Apple Watch app, although for now it is pretty basic — which is not the fault of Lutron, but instead a result of Apple not yet allowing native apps, plus limited HomeKit integration on the Apple Watch. More features are coming in watchOS 2.0 later this year. For now, you can launch the app on your Apple Watch and then see whether lights are on or off. Four bars give you a rough indication of the level of dimness. You can tap on the icons to turn lights on or off, or to dim them.
Hopefully we will see a native Lutron app with more features later this year, such as the ability to use the Digital Crown to dim lights more precisely.
Siri
All of these features are useful, but by far my favorite feature is the Siri integration. Indeed, I suspect that most consider this a hallmark feature of the new HomeKit. Rather than taking the time to launch the Lutron app on my iPhone and find the right button, I can just start Siri and tell my iPhone what to do.
To set this up, you name your rooms and/or zones in your house (such as Upstairs and Downstairs). I selected the names TV (for my TV room) and Downstairs (for my living room, located in the middle of the first floor of my house). I simply hold down the button on my iPhone and tell Siri “Turn on downstairs light” and it comes on at 100%. Or I can say “Set TV light 25" and the light is dimmed to 25%. Or, when it is time to go to bed, I can leave my living room lights on until I get to my steps (so that I don’t trip on anything as I walk through a dark house) and then as I am walking up the stairs I can tell Siri to “turn off all lights,” which turns off both the lights in my TV room and the lights in my living room.
It would be even faster and more convenient if I could use Siri on my Apple Watch to control lights. That way, I could just lift my wrist and say “Hey Siri, turn on the lights.” That feature doesn’t work now, but I believe is coming in watchOS 2.0 in a few months.
Siri is simply the fastest way to control your connected HomeKit lights. And it is also the most fun; you feel like you are living in the future when your lights respond to your voice. Once Siri for HomeKit comes to the Apple Watch later this year, it wouldn’t surprise me if I never use the iPhone app again, instead just talking to my watch to control my lights.
Etc.
I know that I am just scratching the surface of what HomeKit can do. As noted above, you can use the Lutron app to control not only lights but also window shades. I see that the app also works with certain smart thermostats made by Nest and Honeywell. I suppose that means that you could talk to Siri to make it colder or hotter in your house.
You can grant access to another iPhone user, useful if both you and your spouse want to be able to wirelessly control the lights from your iPhones (or Apple Watch).
Lutron also sells starter kits, so you can get a single box with the Smart Bridge, remote controls, dimmers, etc. Here is one on Amazon for $226 that contains two in-wall dimmers and other accessories, which is cheaper than buying the components individually.
Finally, there is a rumor that Apple is close to releasing a new model of the Apple TV. Whenever Apple does so, I’m sure that it will have some sort of HomeKit integration built-in. I don’t think that the Apple TV would replace the need for a Smart Bridge, but I’m not sure how the Apple TV will fit in. If you are interested in this technology but not in a hurry to buy anything, you might consider waiting until later this year to see if Apple releases a new Apple TV and how it works with other wireless devices such as Lutron dimmers.
[UPDATE: I see that Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal also reviewed HomeKit today. He had less success using Siri than I did, and I’m not sure why. Every once in a while I have to give Siri a command twice, but almost all of the time it works for me well, and quickly, on the first try. And I’ve been using it every day for several weeks now.
Fowler also states that you need to use an Apple TV to control your lights when you are not at home:
Regardless of your particular appliances, you’ll need one other piece of hardware: a $69 Apple TV. It serves as a secure bridge from your iPhone back into the house—by way of Apple’s encrypted computers—when you’re away from your home Wi-Fi network. (The Apple TV won’t be required when Apple integrates HomeKit with iCloud in iOS 9 this fall.)
I do own an Apple TV, so perhaps it is serving as a bridge without me knowing it.
Fowler also points out that Apple baked a lot of security into HomeKit so that a hacker cannot take control of the lights in your house. That is a big advantage of HomeKit that I should have mentioned.
And while Fowler’s article notes that he has troubles with HomeKit today, he still thinks that it is going to get better in the future and is a good thing for consumers:
There’s reason to believe Apple can get things right, and plenty to like in what Apple has laid out. I agree with Apple that voice commands should play an important role around the house. And HomeKit has the right structure to make devices from lots of different makers play well together. In my tests, HomeKit got this deceptively hard function right: With the Insteon+ app, I could create scenes around my house that combined Insteon and Lutron devices.
Clearly, these are early days for HomeKit, but I think it has a promising future.]
Conclusion
The Lutron app works well for controlling lights in your house, either manually or automatically based upon the time of day or your location. But it is the Siri integration that really makes you feel like you are living in the future. Later this year, with software updates and potentially with a new Apple TV, I suspect that all of this will work even better. But even in its current generation, I’ve found the Lutron Caséta devices to be very useful, and also quite fun.
Click here to get Lutron App for Caséta Wireless (free):
This week, Lauren Sherman wrote an article for Elle explaining why she recommends getting an Apple Watch. (And yes, this is the first time that I’ve linked to an article in Elle on iPhone J.D.) I particularly enjoyed this line: “The Apple Watch represents the future, so why not start enjoying the future now?” I enjoy using my Apple Watch because of what it can already do today, but it is obvious that this current generation of hardware and software is just a tease of what is to come in the future. For some, this is a reason to wait for the next model, and I totally understand that. The 2.0 version of anything will be better than the 1.0 version. Of course, using that logic, you would wait for the 3.0, then the 4.0, etc. Suffice it to say that as much as I enjoy using my Apple Watch today, it is also fun getting what seems like a sneak peak of the future. And now, the news of note from the past week:
New York attorney Nicole Black discusses some of her new favorite iPhone apps in an article for The Daily Record.
Kentucky attorney Hiram Ely tells me that he used to enjoy using a dual dock when he and his wife both used iPhones with 30 pin connectors, but he has been having trouble finding a good dual dock that works with iPhones with Lightning connectors. And I don’t think that I have seen one either, something that charges to iPhones side-by-side. If you have any recommendations, please post a comment to this post.
Brent Zaniewski of iMore discusses the five smart hubs on the market that you can use with HomeKit, which means that you can control lights and other items in your house using your iPhone and Apple Watch. I’m currently having very good results with the Lutron Caseta Wireless Smart Bridge, and I plan to write a post on it soon.
One of the new features being added to the Apple Watch in a software update later this year is support for third party complications. I think that this is huge. So does Macworld contributor Michael Simon, who explains that it is an even bigger deal than native watch apps. I agree.
Jim Dalrymple of The Loop explains in two posts (1, 2) how he used an iPhone app, and more recently his Apple Watch, to lose 40 pounds. His first post also serves as an overall review of the Apple Watch.
Bryan Wolfe of AppAdvice explains the difference between iTunes Match and Apple’s new music service. I’m still waiting to learn whether Apple Music subscribers would have any reason to also subscribe to iTunes Match. It doesn’t seem to me that there would be any reason to pay for both, but I wish Apple would clarify this.
And finally, I came across this picture posted by Simon Sugar on Twitter, and it made me smile. As he describes the picture: “How to sell a chalkboard. #marketing.”
