We all have so many passwords for online retailers, banks, courts, etc. that you need to have some way to track them all. That’s why I recommend that everyone consider getting a password manager app. There are quite a few good ones out there, but I really love the one that I use: 1Password. The app gives me a central location to store all of my passwords in a super secure fashion on my iPhone, plus the app syncs the passwords so that they are also available on my iPad, my PC and my Mac. The idea is that you just have to remember your one master password, and then type in that password to get access in the app to all of your other ones — which you no longer need to remember, so they can be long and complicated, and thus more secure. Better yet, with a new iPhone or iPad, you don’t even have to type your master password and can instead just use your fingerprint to start the app.
The most recent update to 1Password was late last month and it added a great new feature called Login Creator. It used to be that when you went to enter a new website password into the 1Password app, you were always presented with the same blank form so you had to fill out the fields from scratch. But with the new Login Creator, the app already knows about hundreds of popular websites.
For example, as you start to enter your Amazon password, as you type the first few letters of “Amazon” the app recognizes the service. Just tap the service as it comes up, and now you don’t have to spend as much time creating the entry. You need to provide your username and password (or let the app create a secure, random password for you), but the app already knows other details such as the website address.
If you have been using 1Password for a while, you have already entered your most frequently used passwords like your Amazon password. But if you haven’t yet started using 1Password, with the new Login Creator, it is even faster to get up and running.
And 1Password is not just for passwords. Last year, I wrote about how you can use 1Password to create a digital wallet with copies of your license, credit cards, etc. just in case you ever lose your wallet. I also love the Secure Notes feature of 1Password, which gives me a place to type private information that I don’t want anyone else to see — such as if I let one of my kids use my iPhone to play a game. I use it to store both secure personal data and some private client-related information that I want to keep privileged and confidential.
If you have been thinking of getting a password manager, I encourage you to try 1Password on your iPhone. If you like it, then you’ll also want to get a copy for your computer, but you can start with just the iPhone/iPad app to see if it is right for you. The app itself is free so that you can easily take a test drive, and then with a $9.99 in-app purchase you can take advantage of all of the advanced features such as automatic sync, the ability to use folders, additional categories for items like a driver’s license and passport, etc.
Click here to get 1Password (free; $9.99 in-app for pro features):
I recently received an email from Baton Rouge, Louisiana litigator Ross Dooley of Roedel, Parsons, Koch, Blache, Balhoff & McCollister. He is looking for a quiet external keyboard that he can use with his iPad to take notes in court. He told me that he was recently using his iPad with the Apple Wireless Keyboard during a hearing when the judge’s minute clerk alerted him that his typing was too loud. This was a courtroom in which the court reporter was wearing headphones and speaking into a stenomask, and apparently the sound of the typing was somehow amplified in the court reporter’s headphones.
I don’t often encounter a court reporter using a stenomask, but even so, I rarely type using a keyboard with my iPad in court because I do think that the noise can be distracting. If I am going to use my iPad to take notes, I instead use a quiet stylus like the Wacom Bamboo Stylus duo and an app like GoodNotes. But I cannot write using a stylus as fast as I can with a pen, so for those times in court when speed matters, I just use pen and paper.
On the other hand, in depositions, I use a keyboard with my iPad all the time. In that setting, I have never found the Apple Wireless Keyboard to be too loud, nor have I found the sound of other keyboards to be too distracting.
Dooley tells me that he has been looking at Logitech Keys-to-Go keyboard, which Dooley said didn’t seem to be quite as ergonomic as the Apple Wireless Keyboard or the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover, but it does appear to be very quiet thanks to the rubber keys. It is $69.99 on the Logitech website. [UPDATE: Here is a review of that keyboard by David Chartier on his Finer Things in Tech website.]
If you have a recommendation for a Bluetooth keyboard that is so quiet that it can be used in a courtroom without distracting anyone, I’d love to hear from you via email or in the comments. Perhaps there are some good solutions out there that I’m not thinking of.
If you use a Mac as your home computer (as I do) and if you take photographs (as I certainly do), you’ll be interested in Apple’s successor to iPhoto on the Mac, which will be called Photos. It won’t be out for a few months, but Apple released a developer preview yesterday, so now we can start to see how it will work. While I’m a little nervous about losing the Events feature, there does seem to be a lot to like about it. One neat feature is that all photos are synced between your Mac, iPhone and iPad via iCloud — although if you have a lot of photos you will likely have to pay for extra iCloud storage space. Edit a photo on your Mac, and the edited version show up on all of your devices in a few seconds; delete a bad picture from your iPhone, and it goes away everyone else too. David Pogue of Yahoo Tech wrote a good article on the new app, as has Chris Breen of Macworld. Other good first impressions of the software come from Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica and Josh Lowensohn and Nathan Ingraham of The Verge. And now, the news of note from the past week:
I posted a formal review of GoodNotes back in 2012, but the app has changed a lot since then. In 2014, the app was updated to version 4, which was a brand new app. But I’m still a huge fan of the app, and it is what I use every time I use my iPad and stylus to take handwritten notes. A few months ago, the app added automatic handwritten recognition, so that you can later go back and search your notes for a specific word. I don’t have the neatest handwriting, but it has worked great for me — although note that I write in print, not script, which may make it easier. A few days ago, the app was updated to version 4.5 which takes the searchable text feature and embeds it upon export. Thus, you can now take handwritten notes, then send the notes to your computer as a PDF file, and you can do a full text search on the notes. This makes it easy to take notes on your iPad but then find the right part of notes on your computer. And if you use a document management system, you should be able to find notes using full text searching. It’s a nice improvement to an app that is already really good. Click here for GoodNotes ($6.99):
Tim Baran of Rocket Matter recently asked me and a bunch of other attorneys how we use Dropbox.
If you want an external keyboard for your iPad that fits in an iPad case, the Logitech Ultrathin has long been a favorite pick. Antonio Villas-Boas of PCMag reviews the latest version of that keyboard for the iPad Air 2.
And finally, I didn’t run across anything too silly in the world of iPhone this week, so I dug back into the iPhone J.D. archives to find something to end today’s post. Way back in October of 2011, Jonathan Mann recorded this music video of him and Siri singing a duet, and it is still fun to watch:
For years, the Wi-Fi at my house has been just OK. In the midst of some other renovations, I upgraded my Wi-Fi last month, and the results have been fantastic. I’m writing this post in case it helps someone else who is looking to improve the Wi-Fi at their home used by their iPhone, iPad, etc.
The Internet at my house is pretty fast. Cox is the cable internet provider in New Orleans, and the Cox Internet Ultimate package provides up to 150 Mbps download speeds. My cable modem is in my study, which is at the front of the second floor of my house, and because the cable modem is right next to my computer (an iMac), my computer uses Ethernet cords (not Wi-Fi) to get Internet access. Using the Ookla Speedtest website, I’ve never seen 150 Mbps download speed on the iMac, but I usually get in the 100 Mbps to 125 Mbps range, which is plenty fast.
I’ve long used Apple’s Wi-Fi products, all of which have AirPort in the name, and for the last few years, the farther away that I got from the study in that upstairs front room of my house, the slower the Wi-Fi would get. In my downstairs family room I would sometimes get 5 Mbps but often much less, and in the room where my TV is located — at the back of the downstairs of my house, as far as you could possibly get from my study — the Wi-Fi speeds were slow enough that watching any sort of streaming video was hit and miss, and mirroring my iPhone or iPad screen to my Apple TV was often frustrating. I did use two older models of the AirPort Express to try to boost the Wi-Fi signal throughout my house, and after some trial and error I found strategic locations to place them that did help, but it wasn’t really enough. Using my Apple TV, I’d have to wait a long time for videos to buffer, and they would often pause in the middle of watching a video to buffer again. This would upset me and my kids when we were trying to stream a movie from the free Amazon Prime video service. And streaming a home movie from my iMac to the Apple TV connected to my TV was rarely worth it. Also, I would often have trouble watching a movie on YouTube on my iPhone; it would often start out fine, but then would stutter and stop. It got to the point where I would frequently have to disable Wi-Fi on my iPhone when I wanted to use YouTube on my iPhone so that I could instead stream it using my AT&T connection, which was much faster.
So in the process of doing some other renovations to the downstairs of my house, I decided to do something to address the slow Wi-Fi. First, I bought a “new” AirPort Extreme for my study. Although this was a big upgrade from the older model I had been using, I put “new” in quotes because the current model of the AirPort Extreme, the 6th generation, actually debuted in in June of 2013; it is new to me, but about a year and a half old. Nevertheless, it uses 802.11ac, which Apple says is up to “triple the previous 802.11n standard” with “up to three times faster Wi-Fi” and also includes “double the channel bandwidth.” You have to use a device that supports 802.11ac to take full advantage of the increased speed, but both the iPhone 6 and the iPad Air 2 do. The AirPort Extreme retails for $199, but I bought it on Amazon for a little less than that at $184.99.
And I actually bought two of them. The key part of my upgrade is that I also hired someone to run a Cat 6 cable from my study to the room where my TV is located. This cost me a total of $250. I probably could have paid less if I had shopped around, but I decided to go with a professional recommended by someone who I trusted. Perhaps some iPhone J.D. readers know how to run cables like this though your walls, but that’s way beyond my expertise, and one of my wife’s few (and reasonable) requests was that it be done professionally by someone who can make it look nice. I placed the second AirPort Extreme near my TV, connected it to the other end of the Cat 6 cable that originated in my study, and configured it using the AirPort Utility software on my iMac to act as a bridge.
The end result is that the AirPort Extreme in my study creates a Wi-Fi network, and the second AirPort Extreme at the other end of my house also creates that same Wi-Fi network. In my study or in my TV room, the Wi-Fi on my iPhone and iPad is now incredibly fast, typically 100 Mbps. And even in traditionally difficult parts of my house, the Wi-Fi speeds are now at least 15-20 Mbps. YouTube videos on my iPhone load instantly with no stutter.
Better yet, with the AirPort Extreme in my TV room, I can use its three Ethernet ports to provide a wired Internet connection to my Apple TV, my DVR and my Blu-Ray DVD player — all of which offer streaming services. This has given my Apple TV a new life. I can instantly watch on-demand shows on HBO and other channels on the Apple TV, and even those home movies which used to take so long to stream now load up instantly.
As a side note, many years ago I took just about all of my old home videos that were shot in the 1990s and even the 1980s using VHS-C and digitized them on my computer. It’s a good thing that I did so because those VHS-C tapes were all but falling apart and were not going to last much longer. The quality of those videos are pretty low by today’s standards, but it is fun to be able to press a few buttons on my Apple TV and instantly see those old movies, some of which feature beloved family members who passed away long ago. I wonder if my kids will one day look back at the home movies I am taking now and lament that they are “only” in HD 1080p format and don’t feature 3D holograms or whatever it is that will be all the rage in the future.
As another aside, I opted to get an Apple AirPort Extreme instead of a third party router because I always find networking in general to be very tricky but I have always found the Apple products to be easiest to use, plus they work well with other Apple products. Having said that, if you want to consider non-Apple products, just a few days ago, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal reviewed the newest wireless routers (and produced a funny video on the subject).
With the two AirPort Extreme base stations and the Cat 6 installation, it cost me a total of $620 to replace and improve my home network. It was definitely worth it. It has given new life not only to my Apple TV and other devices connected to my TV, but it has also vastly improved the Wi-Fi throughout my house — especially for the new iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2, but also for older iPhone and iPad models as well as my wife’s MacBook Air laptop. And I presume that this new setup will work well for many years to come. If your own home network is in need of some oomph, hopefully you can take some of the same steps that I did to upgrade.
Over the last year, Microsoft has been releasing some great software for the iPhone and iPad. Last year, Microsoft released Word, Excel and PowerPoint — first for the iPad, and then universal versions that also work on the iPhone. Those apps were excellent when they were first introduced, and they have been improved with new features every few months. If you want to work with Word files, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides, there are no better apps for doing so on the iPhone or iPad. As we started 2015, there was only one major part of the desktop Microsoft Office package that was not yet on iOS: Outlook. That changed last week when Microsoft released the Microsoft Outlook app, a free universal app that works on both the iPad and iPhone.
The Outlook app is actually not a new app at all. In April of 2014, an app called Acompli debuted, a free email app with some innovative features. Microsoft acquired the app on December 1, 2014, and the new Outlook app is — for now — essentially the old Acompli app with a new name. But Microsoft promises updates in the future, and now that Microsoft owns the app, I’m sure that the app will continue to work well with Microsoft Exchange, which is used by so many offices, including law offices. Note, however, that the app doesn’t require Exchange; it also works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail and iCloud email.
I never tried the Acompli app, but after using the Outlook app for a few days, I am very impressed. The app includes many useful features that do not exist in the iPhone and iPad built-in Mail app. I start this review by noting the key features of the Outlook app, many of which are great. I then note some of my concerns — especially a potentially serious security concern that might cause attorneys to pause before installing this app. But let’s start with the good stuff.
FEATURES
Sending Attachments
The built-in Mail app has support for attachments, but it is limited support. Of course you can read and work with attachments to any email that is sent to you, but if you are initiating an email in the Mail app you cannot start typing a message and then decide that you want to add a file as an attachment, unless that file is a photo or video from your Camera roll. For example, you cannot suddenly decide to attach a Word file to an email that you are typing. Instead, you need to go to another app that can open the Word file, then use that app to create a new email with that file attached.
But in Outlook, any time that you are composing a message, you simply tap the paperclip icon to add one or more attachments to your email. You can add as attachments photos or videos from the Camera Roll (the same thing that you can do in Mail), or you can add attachments from your Dropbox, in which case the file itself is not attached but instead a link is created so that the recipient of your email can click the link to see a preview of the file on Dropbox.com and have the option to download the file.
But the feature that I think many people will like the most is the ability to attach any file that was an attachment to any of your recent emails. This is a feature that I have wanted for a very long time. It makes it easy to forward a document without having to forward an entire email. It also lets you gather attachments from multiple different emails and attach them to the email that you are composing.
Even if Outlook had no other unique features, this one feature alone would make me want to have the Outlook app on my iPhone and iPad to make it easier to add attachments to messages.
Quick Filter
Just above the list of emails, there is a button called Quick Filter. Tap that button and you have three choices: Unread, Flagged and Files. Tapping Unread will instantly show you only the unread emails in your Inbox (or whatever folder you happen to be viewing). Tapping Flagged instantly shows you flagged messages.
But the most useful one (for me) is Files. Tapping that button immediately shows you only the email that have files attached. Sometimes I am looking at my email specifically because I want to find an email that had a file attached. It takes less than a second to tap Quick Filter and then tap Files, and suddenly I am only seeing the emails that have files attached, making it that much faster to find the email that I needed.
Files
Speaking of files, one of my favorite buttons in Outlook is the Files button at the middle of the bottom of the screen. Tapping this button instantly shows you a list of attachments in your recent email messages, listed in order of when the email with the files was sent to you, with the most recent ones near the top.
I often open the Mail app not because I want to find an email but instead because I just need to get a file that was attached to a recent email. This single button makes that task incredibly fast. Tap on an attachment and you see a preview of it, and you can then attach that file to a new email, save that file to a cloud service such as Dropbox or iCloud, or share the file by opening it in another app.
Calendar Integration
Outlook is an email client, but it also integrates with your calendar. Yes, this means that you can view your calendar from within the Outlook app, just by tapping the Calendar button at the bottom of the screen. But at least in its current version, Outlook does not does not replace the need to use the built-in Calendar app or full-featured third-party calendar apps such as the excellent Fantastical. For example, you cannot edit a calendar entry in Outlook, although you can create a new one. Instead, Outlook integrates the calendar features that you are most likely to want to use when you are handling emails.
For example, if you need to tell someone in an email when you would be available for a meeting, you can tap the calendar icon (which is close to the attachments icon), then look at your calendar to see your upcoming appointments. Tap one or more 30 minute intervals on your calendar, and if you select contiguous times the app will merge them, so if you tap 3pm and 3:30 the app will understand that you are available from 3pm to 4pm. (You can only select 30 minute intervals, so you cannot indicate availability starting at 3:15.) Then hit Done. This creates an email with a table indicating when you would be available for a meeting. It looks like this:
In the past, I have never had a problem switching from the Mail app to a calendar app to look at my schedule, and then going back to the Mail app to type when I am available. But the calendar integration in Outlook is certainly fast and easy to use, and I suppose that the table that it creates looks nice.
People
The Outlook app looks at all of the people with whom you send and receive email and creates a list of important people. Tap the People icon at the bottom of the screen and you are presented with a list of the recent people with whom you have interacted. Tap a person’s name and you will see all of the recent emails that you received from or sent to that person. And thanks to the calendar integration and advanced file features, you can also see a list of upcoming meetings that you have with that person and files that you have received from that person. You can also tap the compose icon on the right near a person’s name to send that person an email without having to start typing their name in the To field.
Swipe Gestures
The built-in Mail app has useful swipe gestures, such as the ability to swipe to the left on a message in the list of messages to delete. You have some control over these gestures by going to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Swipe Options. This lets you assign to swipe left or swipe right the functions of mark as read, flag and archive.
Outlook has even more swipe gesture options and give you greater control over customizing them. Tap the Settings button at the bottom right of Outlook and tap Swipe Options. From here, you can assign to swipe left or swipe right the following options: None, Archive, Delete, Schedule, Move, Mark as Read/Unread and Flag.
Schedule
One interesting function in Outlook is the Schedule function, a function that makes an email go away for a period of time and come back to you later.
You can access this function by assigning it to a swipe gesture, or you can initiate it whenever you are viewing a message in your Inbox by tapping the icon at the top with a triangle in a circle (the same place where you can opt to move a message to another folder or mark the message as unread). Then choose whether you want the message to come back in a few hours, this evening, tomorrow morning, or at a specific time and date that you select.
When you schedule a message, the message is moved out of your Inbox and moved into a special folder on your mail server called Schedule. Then, at the time you select, the Outlook app moves the message back to the Inbox, marks it unread, and places at the top of your Inbox with a clock icon next to it — an indication that the message is not really the most recent message, but instead that it appears at the top because it is being delivered pursuant to a schedule. There have been many times when I have received an email and knew that I would have to deal with it later, so it is interesting to see a function devoted to this specific need. In the past I have simply kept the message marked unread to remind me to go back to it later, but the Outlook approach does seem better.
Note that if you view your Inbox using the built-in Mail app, or using your computer, before the designated time, you won’t see the message in your Inbox at all. Instead you need to open the Schedule folder that the Outlook app crates in your Inbox and the message will be in there. At the designated time, while the message will appear at the top of the list of Inbox messages in the Outlook app, if you instead view your Inbox using the built-in Mail app, the message will appear in normal date order. It will be marked unread so that should remind you that you still need to read it, but the Schedule function works best if you continue to use the Outlook app.
Send Location
When you are composing an email, the third icon next to the attachment and calendar icons is a location icon. Tap that button and Outlook will figure out where you are currently located and send a small map with a picture of your current location and the street address of your current location. This is certainly a very fast way of telling someone else where you are located without you needing to type an address. I haven’t yet decided how useful this feature will be for me, but if you want a very fast way to send someone your current location, you’ll like this feature.
Focused Inbox
One interesting feature of Outlook is that it can provide you with a Focused Inbox. If this feature is turned on in Settings, then when you are looking at your Inbox you will see at the top the words “Focused” and “Other.” When you are in the Focused view, you only see the emails that the Outlook app considers to be the most important. To see the other messages in your Inbox that are not in the Focused view, tap Other. It looks to me like Outlook mainly takes mailing lists and emails from vendors and puts them in the Other view, whereas emails from “real” people go into the Focused view.
This is a very interesting feature, but I have to admit that I didn’t much care for it I don’t like the idea of Outlook telling me what is important and what is not important. I’d rather see all of my Inbox emails in one place and then I can decide whether I don’t need to read an email right now. But I recognize that others might like this feature more than I do. For example, I was trading messages this weekend with Ohio attorney Chad Burton, and he told me that he has been using the Acompli app for some time, and now uses the Outlook app, and he loves this feature. He mentioned that he has the app configured so that he only gets notifications when he has a Focused email, not when he receives an Other email. That way, a new email from a merchant advertising a sale, an evite invitation, mailing list emails, etc. will not result in a notification, but an email sent from a “real” person will pop-up a notification of a new email.
If you like this feature, then you will appreciate it being included in Outlook. But if it is not for you, it is easy to turn this feature off, just by using the Settings button in the app. Try it and see what you think.
PROBLEMS
While Outlook has some great features, there are a few problems, or at least potential problems, with this app.
Bugs
Quite a few times, the app froze when I was using it. It never caused me to lose any data, and I was always able to force quit the app and get back to work. Hopefully these bugs will be ironed out in the future, but it is annoying that they are there at all. Apple’s own Mail app has been rock solid for me even though I use it all of the time.
Security
This is my biggest concern about the app, and it is one that I still don’t feel I have gotten to the bottom of. In fact, I am posting this review today not only so that you know about the features of this app, but also because I hope to get feedback from others on this issue.
First, it appears that the Outlook app, like the old Acompli app, gets your emails from your mail server and then the emails pass through an Acompli (now, Microsoft) server before the email is delivered to your device. I believe that this means that all of your emails, attachments, calendar items, and contacts pass through the company’s server. Here is how Acompli explains it on the Privacy page of its website:
We provide a service that indexes and accelerates delivery of your email to your device. That means that our service retrieves your incoming and outgoing email messages and securely pushes them to the app on your device. Similarly, the service retrieves the calendar data and address book contacts associated with your email account and securely pushes those to the app on your device. Those messages, calendar events, and contacts, along with their associated metadata, may be temporarily stored and indexed securely both in our servers and locally on the app on your device. If your emails have attachments and you request to open them in our app, the service retrieves them from the mail server, securely stores them temporarily on our servers, and delivers them to the app.
I don’t have a problem with storing my email on my iPhone, but storing my email (and calendar events) on Acompli’s website — which that paragraph says that Acompli “may” be doing — raises some red flags me. Acompli has a Security page on its website that states that full security measures are on place while its servers touch your data, including TLS encryption when the information is in transit and hardware accelerated encryption while the data is stored on its servers. That sounds good, but I feel like I need more information to understand the potential security risks here.
Second, there may be a security issue with Acompli storing your email address and password on its server. App developer René Winkelmeyer has a series of posts (1, 2) in which he discusses this risk, and his first post was reported on by Zack Whittacker of ZDNet.
The folks at Microsoft are smart and generally have a good understanding of corporate security needs, so at this point I feel like I need to lean more. For example, an article by Tony Remond of WindowsIT Pro suggests that the security concerns noted above are overblown. Remond quotes from a new document prepared by Javier Soltero, who had been the CEO of Acompli and is now leading the development effort for the Outlook apps at Microsoft, in which Soltero explains how Microsoft is addressing security issues with the app. For example, as for the security of providing the app your Exchange password, Soltero says: “This architecture means that in order to gain access to your password, you would have to have access to both our cloud service and have physical access to the unlocked device.” And as for what information is stores on the Acompli/Microsoft server, he says that “we store a subset of email, calendar information and files in a cloud service to facilitate fast, secure delivery down to the device.”
Perhaps the security risks are not as large as I fear. But obviously, lawyer emails and attachments often contain very confidential and privileged information, so lawyers need to think long and hard about who has access to them. I realize that many lawyers use services like Gmail every day to store their confidential communications, and they don’t have a problem with Google having at least the theoretical ability to read the content of those emails. At this point, I simply recommend that you keep the potential security risks in mind as you consider whether to use this app. And this is an issue that I intend to continue to research.
Other Issues
I’ve noticed a few additional, minor, issues as I have used this app over the last few days.
Like the built-in Mail app, Outlook for iOS does not show you when a message is marked as important (which shows up as an exclamation point on the desktop software), nor can you mark as important a message you are sending from the Outlook app.
In the built-in Mail app, you can choose whether or not you want to organize related messages by thread. (Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Organize by Thread) In Outlook, you cannot control this feature. Messages are always organized by thread, and when you tap a message to read it the related messages are indicated in abbreviated format either above or below the message that you are reading depending upon whether they were sent earlier or later. If you like the Organize by Thread feature, the way that Outlook handles it makes sense. But if you don’t like this feature, you are stuck with it in Outlook.
CONCLUSION
Although Outlook could be a replacement for the iPhone and iPad’s built-in Mail app, I think it is most powerful as a supplement to those apps. For example, I can see it being the go-to app for when you want more control for working with attachments. At this point, however, I still need to get my arms around the privacy and security issues before I can recommend this app. If you have thoughts on these issues, I’d love to hear from you, either via email or in a comment to this post, and I can update this post if I get additional information on this topic.
Click here to get Microsoft Outlook (free):
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This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
It has now been five years since Steve Jobs first introduced the world to the iPad on January 27, 2010. I was definitely intrigued when the product debuted, but at the time even I wasn’t sure whether an iPad would prove useful for me; my first post on the iPad was actually devoted to what the debut of the iPad might mean for the iPhone. It wasn’t until later in 2010 that I started to use my own iPad. Today, five years later, the iPad has become a central part of my law practice, plus something that I love to use at home. And today’s iPad Air is infinitely better than the first generation iPad. I wonder what the iPad will be like five years from now, in 2020? And now, the news of note from the past week:
St. Louis attorney Dennis Kennedy considers some of the must-have apps for lawyers in an article for ABA Journal.
The App Store just started a sale on many productivity apps and there are some great ones current discounted, such as Fantastical ($2 instead of $5) and GoodNotes ($3 instead of $7). California attorney David Sparks points out some of his favorites that are now on sale
Apple released iOS 8.1.3 this week. I installed it on both my iPhone and iPad, and it works great. It fixed a problem that I had been having on my iPad where I tried to swipe with four or five fingers to switch apps and it wasn’t working, unless I went into Settings and turned off Multitasking Gestures and then turned the on again. It also fixes other bugs and makes it so that your device doesn’t need quite as much free space to install future updates.
After making waves in 2014 by releasing Word for iPad, and then Word for iPhone, this week Microsoft released a version of Outlook for the iPad and iPhone. I’ll have a full review of Outlook next week after I have tried it out some more, but I can already tell you that there are some parts of it — like the way it works with attachments — that are great.
The Super Bowl is this weekend, and Jordan Kahn of 9to5Mac has advice on how you can watch it on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or Mac.
According to a test run by iClarified, the speaker on the iPhone has gotten louder over the years with new releases, and the iPhone 6 currently has the loudest speaker, about 10 dBA louder than the second generation iPhone. According to this page, a 10 decibel level increase sounds about twice as loud.
Looking to use your iPhone or iPad while outside in the cold winter weather? Clifford Agocs of The Wirecutter recommends the best touchscreen winter gloves.
Serenity Caldwell of iMore explains how to upload and edit photos that you take with a DSLR camera on your iPad. I’ve done this many times using Apple’s Lighting to SD card reader and a photo editing app.
I enjoyed reading this article by Megan Chovanec, a college freshman, about how the garage at her grandmother’s house just happens to also be the birthplace of Apple.
According to an article by Megan Geuss and Jonathan Gitlin of Ars Technica, the iPhone helped to cause the SkyMall catalog to go into bankruptcy.
And finally, this week Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the Apple Watch will start selling in April. One of its features is the ability to swap out watch bands. With that in mind, I was fascinated to see that Leatherman is developing Tread, a $150 watch band in which each link contains tools, such as Allen wrenches, screwdrivers, box wrenches and even a bottle opener — a total of 25 tools. Will we see Tread or something like it for the Apple Watch? My guess is yes. Here is a video that shows what it can do, or you can read more on the product page: (via The Loop)
Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2015 fiscal first quarter (which ran from September 28, 2014 to December 27, 2014, and did not actually include any days from calendar year 2015) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically Apple’s best quarter of the year because of holiday sales. It turned out to be Apple’s best fiscal quarter ever, with revenue of $74.6 billion (compared to $57.6 billion this time last year) and record quarterly net profit of $18 billion (compared to $13.1 billion this time last year). Apple also set new a new record for iPhone sales. It was a heck of a quarter for Apple, and according to Greg Kumparak of TechCrunch, it was the most profitable quarter for any company, ever.
If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha, or Jason Snell of Six Colors prepared an almost verbatim transcript of many parts of the call. Apple’s official press release is here. As always, however, I’m not as concerned about the financial details as I am the statements of Apple executives during the call that are of interest to iPhone and iPad users. Here are the items that stood out to me:
iPhone
During the past quarter, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones, the most that Apple has ever sold in a fiscal quarter. The previous record was the 2014 fiscal fourth quarter, in which 51 million iPhones sold during the late 2013 holiday buying season. To not just beat that record but to do so by almost another 50% is impressive, and shows an incredible demand for the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. It wasn’t that long ago (fiscal 2011) that Apple sold 72.21 million iPhones in a full year, and now the company is selling more than that in a single quarter.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said that demand for new iPhones has been “staggering, shattering our high expectations, with sales over 74 million units, driven by the unprecedented popularity of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. This volume is hard to comprehend. On average, we sold over 34,000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, every day of the quarter.” Wow.
Apple didn’t reveal the iPhone 6 sales versus iPhone 6 Plus sales, but Cook did say that the iPhone 6 was the most popular phone overall that Apple sold last quarter, although Cook did note that in some parts of the world, the iPhone 6 Plus was far more popular than in other parts of the world.
Obviously Apple sells a lot of iPhones to people who want to upgrade an older iPhone, but Cook said that only a small percentage of current iPhone owners — “a number that’s in the mid-teens or barely in the teens” — have upgraded to an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus as of yet. New iPhone sales were also a big part of the 74.5 million iPhones sold. Cook also noted that after the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus launch, there were more people buying an iPhone for the first time than Apple had seen after any other iPhone launch.
Cook said that he sees even more new potential iPhone buyers noting that, “given there are a fair amount of Android units out there, there is also an enormous amount of Android customers that could switch. And I’d also remind you that there is a lot of people that have not yet bought a smartphone. And I know it doesn’t feel like that when you’re sitting in the United States, but from a worldwide point of view, there’s still lots of them.”
By my count, as of December 27, 2014, Apple had sold over 664 million iPhones since they first went on sale in 2007.
As Apple sells more and more iPhones, they become a larger part of Apple’s overall financial success. iPhones accounted for $51.18 billion of Apple’s $74.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, which means that iPhones accounted for almost 69% of Apple’s total revenue last quarter.
Apple introduced Apple Pay a few months ago (the system that lets you pay for items at stores using your iPhone and your fingerprint), and it is off to a strong start. Cook said that around 750 banks and credit unions are now supporting Apple Pay. Cook predicted: “With all of this momentum in the early days, we are more convinced than ever that 2015 will be the year of Apple Pay.”
Cook also mentioned that a company called USA Technologies announced yesterday that it had added Apple Pay support to 200,000 vending machines. I actually used Apple Pay when I didn’t have exact change at a vending machine at a train station in New York over the Christmas holiday, and it worked great. I was really surprised to see the wireless payment logo on a Coke machine, but there it was. I simply put my finger on my iPhone and held it up to the machine, and out popped my beverage. And because of the security built-in to Apple Pay, I didn’t have to worry about some random vending machine having my credit card number:
iPad
While Tim Cook talked about the tremendous iPhone sales, he let Apple CFO Luca Maestri discuss iPad sales, which were down. During the past quarter, Apple sold 21.4 million iPads. Apple had sold 26 million iPads this time last year, and 22.9 million iPads this time two years ago, so iPad sales are not on the same trajectory as iPhone sales.
Cook said that he still thinks that the iPad has a “very bright future,” but part of the reason for the lower sales is that people upgrade an iPad less frequently than they upgrade an iPhone. He said that there are also some people who upgrade from an iPad not to another iPad but instead to an iPhone (which makes sense with the larger iPhone 6 Plus) or to a Mac.
Cook also mentioned the recent partnership with IBM in the enterprise market and other enterprise developments, and noted that with the iPad, “I think we’re really going to change the way people work.”
By my count, as of December 27, 2014, Apple had sold over 258 million iPad since they first went on sale in 2010.
If you put iPhones and iPads together, that is a total of 923 million sold to date. But Apple sells another iOS device too — the iPod touch — and if you add all iOS devices together, Apple crossed over the 1 billion mark this quarter. Cook said: “On November 22nd, we shipped our one billionth iOS device. It was a Space Gray 64GB iPhone 6 Plus, which we’ve saved here at Apple. One billion devices is an almost unfathomable milestone, and we are all incredibly proud to be a part of it.”
Apple Watch
The Apple Watch could one day be the ultimate accessory for the iPhone. Apple previously announced that it would start to ship in early 2015, and yesterday Cook clarified that this means April. Thus, you could be only three months from wearing a new Apple product on your wrist.
I’ve often said that the GoodReader app is the best $5 than an attorney can spend on an iPad, but apparently the word has gotten out. The last few times that I have spoken to a group of attorneys about using iPhones and iPads, more than half of the folks in the room have raised their hands when I asked who is using GoodReader … and I’m sure that quite a few more folks just don’t like raising their hand in a CLE. (I often feel that way too. Why do I even ask questions like that?) But one great feature of GoodReader that I don’t see many people using is the tabs feature, and it was improved in an update yesterday (version 4.9.1) so this is a good time to talk about it.
To start using tabs in GoodReader, you need to turn the feature on. Tap the Settings button at the bottom of the main screen, tap General, and then turn on “File tabs enabled.”
Now, every time you tap a file to view it, instead of replacing the prior file that you had been viewing, the new file will open up in its own tab. Keep selecting documents and you will get even more tabs.
Tabs in GoodReader are useful for the same reason that tabs are useful in other software, such as a web browser. Tabs provide you with a quick way to jump between documents without having to go back and select the document again. If you are comparing two documents, it is much faster to go back and forth between then with tabs. Or if you are reading something like a deposition and you have key exhibits open in other tabs, you can quickly go back and forth between witness testimony and the evidence.
The row of tabs does take up space on the screen, so when you have tabs turned on, more of your document is covered when you tap in the middle of a document to bring up all of the menus. But you can easily tap in the middle of the screen to make all menus go away, including the tabs, so that you only see the document on your iPad screen.
The new feature added yesterday is that you can now open the same document in multiple tabs. That may sound duplicative and unnecessary, but there is a good reason for it; this feature lets you quickly jump between two important parts of the same document. (Or if you have multiple documents in a single PDF file, gives you a quick way to jump between the multiple documents in the same file.)
To activate this feature, tap on the tab of the currently open document. This brings up a menu from which you can duplicate the tab to create a second tab with the same document. (It also gives you the option to delete the file or rename the file, without having to go back to the main screen of the app to do so. The rename file feature is one that I know I will be using often.)
After you tap Duplicate Tab, you will now have two tabs for the same document. Select the second tab and go to some important part of the document, and then you can tap on the first tab again to go back to the other part of the same document.
You can use up to eight tabs at a time. Once you open the ninth document, the oldest tab goes away. This means that another advantage of tabs is that you have quick access to up to the last seven documents that you opened; the tabs feature works like a document history. If you want to rearrange the tabs, just drag one left or right.
The main disadvantage that I notice when using tabs is that as you open more and more documents, you get more and more tabs even when you don’t need them. If it bothers you to have a bunch of tabs open, you need to select them individually to close each tab. But after using the feature for a while, you learn to ignore the tabs when you are not using them, but know that they are there when you need them.
If you use GoodReader but do not yet use the tab feature, I encourage you to try it out. You can always turn off the feature if you don’t like it, but I find that its many advantages make it worth it, especially after yesterday’s update.
And if you don’t yet use GoodReader, it is time for you to raise your hand and get the app. Here is my review from last year when the app was updated to version 4 explaining the many virtues of this useful app.
Click here to get GoodReader ($4.99):
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This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
I’ve long been a fan of using a stylus to take handwritten notes on the iPad. There are a lot of nice styluses on the market, and I’ve tried a ton of them, but in my opinion there is still no one perfect stylus because the iPad just isn’t designed to detect something smaller than a fingertip. Of course, Apple could change this, an there are now rumors that Apple might be creating a stylus for the iPad. Serenity Caldwell of iMore explains why this would make sense, and I would also love to see a stylus designed by Apple to work well with an iPad. And now, the other news of note from this week:
If you listen to podcasts, I strongly encourage you to check out Overcast, a fantastic app that I use every day. California attorney David Sparks explains why he likes the app.
New York attorney and iPhone J.D. reader David Rosen asked me to share that he started a new blog on New York civil procedure called Arguments & Demonstrations. In his latest post, we learn that, according to a recent New York opinion, chimps are not people with legal rights. Those damn dirty apes!
CarPlay is a technology that is just starting to be included in new cars. In theory, it should be the best way to connect your iPhone to your car. In practice, the technology is still pretty new and rough around the edges. Jason Snell of Six Colors explains how it works, and also what doesn’t yet work.
One of the more sophisticated features of iOS 8 is that apps can include action extensions, so that you can use features of one app from within another app. Allyson Kazmucha of iMore rounds of 11 good examples of action extensions on the iPhone.
And finally, what is a device that you use every day and every night? No, not your iPhone, I’m talking about your toothbrush. But don’t you wish that you could get those two critical devices to talk to each other? If that has been keeping you up at night, then you’ll want to learn about the Oral-B Electric Toothbrush with Bluetooth Connectivity, a toothbrush that pairs with your iPhone to make sure that you brush your teeth long enough and in the right way. You can get it on Amazon for only $125. Here is a video from Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal explaining why the Bluetooth in your iPhone and the white teeth in your mouth might work well together:
To take advantage of the recent three-day weekend, my family went to Disney World along with some other members of our extended family. I also went to Disney World in 2014, and after that trip I wrote about all of the useful Disney-related apps that you can use. Just about everything that I wrote in that post remains true today, but here is some additional and updated information that you can use if you have a trip to Disney World in your future. Consider this a pocket part update to my 2014 post. I doubt that very many of you are currently packing your bags to head to Disney World, but remember that this post is here, and come back to it when you do next find yourself headed to the Most Magical Place on Earth, because the most important thing that I can tell you is that an iPhone is an incredibly useful tool while you are at Disney World and will vastly improve your trip. And while I haven’t yet been to Disneyland in California, I suspect that many of these tips work for that park as well (although I’d have to defer to my friend and California attorney David Sparks, who has deep roots in Disneyland).
Wi-Fi
I should have mentioned in that prior post that there is free Wi-Fi throughout all of the Disney parks. The network is called Disney-Guest. For the most part I got a good AT&T signal throughout the parks as well, but I figured that I might as well use free data rather than use up some of my monthly AT&T data allotment. And there were many times that the free Disney Wi-Fi worked better than the AT&T signal, although to be fair there were also a few times when the Wi-Fi felt slow and I got better service with AT&T. It is nice to have the ability to switch back and forth. And if you are using a device without built-in cellular such as certain models of the iPad or an iPod touch, then having free Wi-Fi is fantastic.
Note that whenever you are using a public Wi-Fi network, there is a risk that someone else on the network, with the right tools on their computer, could monitor your unencrypted traffic on the Wi-Fi network. As I’ve discussed in the past, I recommend using VPN when you are any public Wi-Fi network, whether it be a VPN service that you have through your office or a third-party service such as the one provided by Cloak, an app that I reviewed in 2014. I’ve continued to use Cloak since I wrote that review, including throughout my recent trip to Disney World. I love that the service automatically turns itself on when you connect to a public Wi-Fi network without you having to even remember to do so.
Find My Friends
Apple’s free Find My Friends app is a great tool to use when you are with others at a large place like Disney World. Once you add someone as a friend (and they accept the invitation), you can see where they are located and they can see where you are located. So when my son and I are finished riding the roller coaster at Space Mountain, I can quickly see on a map that my wife and daughter are across the Magic Kingdom on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I can start walking that way and by the time that they are finished with their ride, I am already half-way there. Sometimes the accuracy is pinpoint perfect, and other times not quite as accurate, but in a large place like the Magic Kingdom, it always works well enough for your friends and family to have a general sense of where you are located — whether it be the general area of the same park, or even to show you that your cousin is in EPCOT while you are at the Animal Kingdom. If you ever need privacy, flip a switch to disable the app from sharing your location, and when your trip is over you can delete people from your Find My Friends list.
My Disney Experience — Walt Disney World
Besides services like Wi-Fi and Find My Friends that can be useful most anywhere, there are a number of apps that are specifically designed to assist you during a trip to Disney World. The one app that you need to get is the free official Disney World app, called My Disney Experience.
The main reason that this app is so useful is that it shows you each FastPass that you have — along with anyone else linked to your My Disney Experience account, which can be folks in your immediate family and extended family members and friends. Effective use of a FastPass can be crucial to a successful trip to Disney World. As much as I love many of the fantastic roller coasters that Disney offers, I just cannot see waiting up to two hours for a ride that lasts two minutes. But by using a FastPass, you can walk right past the long and winding line and in just a few minutes find yourself riding the train, mine cart, spaceship, etc.
Not only does the app show you each of your FastPasses, you can also use the app to change your FastPasses while you are in the park. You might want to change a FastPass to accommodate a change in your schedule that you might not have foreseen when you booked the FastPass many weeks ago — perhaps you are spending more time at lunch than you expected. Or, there were times when I saw that a ride didn’t have a long wait in the normal “Standby” line, so I cancelled an upcoming FastPass to use it for another, more popular ride. There are kiosks throughout the park that you can use to change a FastPass, but you need to find them and then wait in line to use them. With this app, you can do it all yourself, no matter where you are, without waiting.
The app also does a great job of showing you the wait times for rides, so that you can decide whether it is worth heading to Fantasyland to ride Peter Pan’s Flight, or if you should avoid that ride for now because the wait is just so long.
I discussed these features in my post last year, but what I didn’t mention is that you need to be careful because sometimes the app doesn’t show you the current wait times but instead shows you the wait times the last time that the app loaded data, which might have been several hours ago. In theory the app should refresh its data automatically, but you can always swipe down to see an indication at the top of when the app last refreshed the wait times. If you notice that you are using old data, I recommend that you force-quit the app. (Press your Home Button twice to see a list of running apps, swipe up on this app to force your iPhone to close it completely, and then launch the app again.) That trick always resulted in me getting current wait times when the app wasn’t refreshing on its own.
As that last tip indicates, one of the frustrating things about this app is that it sometimes has trouble loading data. Everyone once in a while, I would start the app to look at my FastPasses, but they wouldn’t appear. Force-qutting the app usually fixed it, but not always; there was one Saturday morning when I was in Hollywood Studios and I just could not get it to work at all, forcing me to use a FastPass kiosk. But then an hour later, it started working again. I mentioned in my post last year that the app had this problem, and to be fair it worked much better in 2015 then it did in 2014, but it still wasn’t perfect, so be warned.
Disney World Maps
For me, the most useful Disney-centric app besides the official app was an app called Disney World Maps by VersaEdge. I actually moved another app that normally lives at the bottom of my home screen to another page so that I would also have fast access to this app during my trip to Disney World. Launching the app quickly shows you a full screen map of the park and includes a blue dot to show your current location. You can zoom out to get an overall sense of the park, or zoom in to see every specific ride, restaurant, bathroom, etc. Yes, the official Disney app also includes some maps, but it isn’t nearly as fast and useful as this app.
Although the app purports to also show you the current wait times for rides, in my experience these wait times were not as accurate as the ones in the official Disney app. They were usually close enough to give me a sense of what rides were more or less busy, but for more accurate information on wait times you will want to use the official Disney app.
Disney World Dining
Another app that I mentioned last year that I also find very useful is the VersaEdge Disney World Dining app. This app is better than the dining information that you get in the official Disney app for several reasons. First, like the maps app, the dining app is very fast to use, quickly presenting you a list of restaurants organized by the area of the park. Second, this app gives you additional information. For example, the official Disney app will tell you the names of the items on a menu at a restaurant, but this app will also give you descriptions of each item. Here is an example from my 2014 post: the official Disney app (the first picture below) will simply tell you that you the Chicken Breast Provencal is an item on the menu at the new (and popular) Be Our Guest Restaurant in Fantasyland, but the Disney World Dining app (the second picture below) explains that this dish is “Pan-seared and simmered in a rustic blend of Heirloom Tomatoes, Olives, White Wine, and fresh Herbs with Seasonal Vegetables and Roasted Fingerling Potatoes.”
When we were walking through the park and wanted to quickly see what restaurants were nearby and what they offered to eat, this app was incredibly useful.
Use these apps to enhance your next trip to Disney World, and your vacation will be even more enjoyable.
Click here to get Cloak (free):
Click here to get Find My Friends (free):
Click here to get My Disney Experience — Walt Disney World (free):
