On Thursday April 17th, criminals started a series of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on Typepad, the company that hosts iPhone J.D. (and tons of other websites). These attacks typically involve bad guys getting countless computers around the world to simultaneously and repeatedly target a server with reqeusts, so much so that the server can no longer respond to legitimate traffic, which often causes the server to shut down from overload. Sometimes the criminals just want to be destructive. Other times they demand a ransom, and if it is paid they typically then demand an even higher ransom. While it is possible to mount defenses against the attacks, the attackers will often respond by changing their tactics, starting the whole cycle over again.
As a result of the DDoS attack on Typepad, iPhone J.D. has been up and down … mostly down … for over five days. Before this incident, Typepad had an excellent track record (the company has been around since 2003). I can’t remember any time that iPhone J.D. was down for more than a few hours since I launched the site in November of 2008. Even so, it was frustrating for me and the many other folks who use Typepad to see that anyone who came to our websites simply saw the bizarre message “unknown domain: www.iphonejd.com.”
Sarah Perez of TechCrunch wrote an interesting article about this attack and how the criminals attempted to get Typepad to pay a ransom. Typepad has been working with the FBI in responding to the attacks.
iPhone J.D. came back online around 9:00 p.m. Central last night. I have no idea whether Typepad has effectively countered the attacks or if iPhone J.D. will go down again, but hopefully the worst is behind us.
If there is a silver lining to all of this, the attacks serve as a reminder that there are bad guys out there on the Internet, so it is prudent to take steps to protect yourself. Use passcodes on your iPhone and iPad. Use complex, different passwords on the sites that you visit and consider using a password manager like 1Password to make it easier to do so. (By the way, 1Password received a major upgrade yesterday and is half-price the rest of this week.) And take reasonable precautions to preserve the confidentiality of attorney-client communications and work product.
Thanks for your patience, and if it looks like everything is working correctly again, regular posts on iPhone J.D. will resume tomorrow. Fingers crossed.
It is a short work week, so here is a special Thursday edition of In the news. I hope that you enjoy the long weekend!
California attorney David Sparks reviews The Stump, an iPad stand that he really likes. On Amazon for $24.95.
Microsoft introduced a new subscription package this week that makes it a little cheaper to use Word for iPad. For $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, you can get Office 365 Personal, which includes copies of Office for a single PC or Mac plus the ability to use the Office apps including Word on a single iPad. The account that used to be called Office 365 Home Premium is now simply called Office 365 Home. It still costs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and the extra $3 a month gets you Office on 5 PCs or Macs plus Office on 5 iPads — so this is the package that provides access to your entire family. Microsoft also offers the free Office Online package, but that package doesn’t give you access to the iPad apps. Paul Thurrott discusses and explains all of these packages on his Supersite for Windows.
John Martellaro wrote a good review of Microsoft Word for iPad for The Mac Observer.
Serenity Caldwell of Macworld reviews the Olioclip 3-in-1 Macro Lens, an accessory that lets you take very cool macro photos with your iPhone. Looks like fun, and costs $68.55 on Amazon.
Liza Brown of Lifehacker offers 24 iPad/iPhone tips that “most people don’t know.” I suspect that most iPhone J.D. readers actually know many or most of these, but there are probably a few that are new to you. (A few were new to me.)
Jeffrey Taylor reviews the Ten One Design Pogo Sketch Pro Stylus on his site, The Droid Lawyer. He likes it, and I did too in my recent review.
Taylor also wrote a review of the Poweradd Pilot 2GS 10,000 mAh external battery. This sounds like a nice device. 10,000 mAh is a lot of power so it can charge both your iPhone and an iPad, and with two USB ports it can charge both at the same time. (Although Taylor doesn’t mention this, I see on Amazon that one port has 2.1 Amps for an iPad and the other has 1.0 Amps for an iPhone.) It looks small and only costs $25.99 on Amazon. Looks like it could be useful when you travel.
And finally, if you are in the market for an external battery but place a higher emphasis on “cute” than useful, meet the Mr. Pow portable charger. It has a 3500 mAh battery and only a single USB plug, but you can tell that the charger needs to be recharged because its smile turns to a frown. Cost is £24.99. (via Gizmodo)
When you use public Wi-Fi, such as the service provided in a hotel or in a coffee shop, it is possible for someone else on the same network to use hacker tools to intercept data going to and from your computer, iPhone or iPad. This makes it possible for a bad guy to get your password as you are logging on to a site, or possibly even to read your confidential attorney-client communications. Is this actually happening to you? Unfortunately, there is no way to know, so all you can do is guard against it. A good solution is to use VPN — a virtual private network — to encrypt the communications from your device to some other location. For example, your law firm may have a way for you to create a VPN to your office, so even if you are on public Wi-Fi the traffic between you and your office is secure, and then you are essentially just as safe using the Internet as you would be in your office. But for this to work, your office must have VPN, and you need to remember to establish the VPN connection.
Cloak is a service that seeks to make it easy and automatic to use a VPN whenever you are using an untrusted public Wi-Fi network. Once you install the app on your iPhone or iPad, whenever you start using a Wi-Fi network, Cloak kicks in automatically and creates a VPN connection to encrypt all of your traffic. You can tell Cloak that a specific Wi-Fi network is trustworthy — such as the one at your home or at your office — and Cloak will remember not to turn on VPN at those locations. But as soon as you connect to Wi-Fi somewhere else, Cloak turns on the VPN to protect you again.
Cloak costs $2.99/month for only 5 GB of data or $9.99/month (or $99.99/year) for unlimited data. There is a free 30 trial if you want to see how the service works, and I’ve been trying it out for the last few weeks on my iPhone and iPad. (Cloak also works on a Mac, but I haven’t tested that.) I’m really impressed with the service. It works behind the scenes so you don’t have to worry about it, it doesn’t slow down Internet traffic in any way that I could measure, and it provides protection.
When you first start the app, it will switch you over to a part of the Settings app that contains profiles, which is a part of Settings that you may never have used before. Simply click the install button to install the Cloak profile. You will need to enter your device password to confirm the installation.
Now, any time that you connect to a Wi-Fi network that you have not previously told Cloak that you trust, Cloak kicks in and establishes a VPN connection. You probably won’t even notice that it happens because it happens quickly, invisibly and in the background. But if you pay attention to the top of your iPhone or iPad screen, you will notice the letters VPN in a box to tell you that you are using a secure VPN connection.
For example, I recently traveled to Orlando on business, and while waiting in the airport for my flight, I connected my iPad to the free public Wi-Fi. Without me doing a thing, Cloak realized that I had connected to an untrusted network and so Cloak established a VPN connection, as you can see from the VPN indication at the top left:
There is a Cloak app on the iPhone and iPad that you can launch to tell Cloak that you trust a network. When you change settings such as adding a new trusted network, Cloak walks you through a simple process to sync your settings so that the same settings are applied to all of your other devices. So if you are using your iPhone and tell your iPhone that you trust your home and your office networks, the next time that you sync settings on your iPad your iPad will also know to trust those networks.
When you use Cloak, you no longer need to worry about trusting everyone else who is on the same public network — which of course is usually impossible to do. Instead, you only need to trust the guys who run Cloak not to intercept your communications. Can you trust them? I’m reminded of a story I recently saw on PCMag.com about an Android app called Virus Shield that was the top paid app on the Google Play store for a while and promised to protect an Android phone against viruses for only $3.99, but it turns out that all the app did was display a fake checkmark, only pretending that it had done something to protect the device. You rarely see something like that on Apple’s App Store, but it just goes to show you that you always need to be careful. So I asked the founder of Cloak, Dave Peck, to tell iPhone J.D. readers why we can trust his company. Here is his answer:
Q: Why should users trust your company?
A: That’s always a good question to ask for any third-party VPN service. We’ve taken our best crack at this on our blog, here: Why Trust Matters When Choosing a VPN
Q: Couldn’t one of your employees access my traffic since I am on your network?
A: Your traffic does flow through our network, so Peter, Nick, or I could indeed access it. (We’re currently a three-person company based in Seattle, WA.) However, we have strict policies that fully enumerate the information we collect and what we do with it. You can find our policies here: https://www.getcloak.com/policies/
If you click on the links you get very complete answers on why Cloak is trustworthy. The company consists of three guys who used to work at Microsoft — you can see their pictures here — and the whole point of their company is to protect your communications. Obviously, it would destroy their business model if they broke this trust, and they have been doing this since 2012 and have received really good reviews over the years. After reading all of the policies and researching the company, I feel comfortable trusting Cloak to do what it promises to do and protect my privacy — and I certainly trust them much more than I trust all of the random people sitting in the Starbucks with me. Especially that one guy in the corner over there.
Cloak offers one more feature that I haven’t found a need to try out, but it might be useful to some of you. When you use a VPN, it can appear to the outside world that you are accessing the Internet from another location. Your iPhone might be in Miami, but a secure tunnel carries your traffic to Seattle so a website might think you are in Seattle. Cloak includes a feature called Transporter that can let your iPhone or iPad appear to be in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, the United Kingdom or the United States. So if you want to stream video from the BBC that isn’t available outside of the U.K., apparently you can make the BBC think that you are in the U.K. Again, not something that interests me, but it is there if it interests you.
I’m impressed enough with this service that when my free 30 day trial ends, I plan to sign up for the basic $2.99/month service to get a sense of whether I use more than 5 GB a month on public Wi-Fi networks. The company also sells through the iPhone app a one week unlimited pass for $3.99, which could be cheaper if the only time that you use public Wi-Fi is when you travel and you don’t travel more than twice a month. Just don’t forget to buy a pass before you start using the Wi-Fi at the airport, your hotel, etc.
If you read my review of Microsoft Word for iPad Thursday morning, then you missed an update that I posted in the afternoon after I had a somewhat critical crash when using the app in a deposition. I’m still thrilled to have the Word for iPad app, but the next time that I just want to take notes in a meeting and don’t need all of the bells and whistles of Word, I might just stick with Pages. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week.
Speaking of Word for iPad, the folks who make the Niblstand — a useful iPad stand that also holds an Apple Wireless Keyboard (my review) — are producing a series of videos with iPad shortcuts. The first episode covers the basics and is pretty good (and only 50 seconds long). If you use an external keyboard with Word for iPad, I recommend that you check it out, and I look forward to future episodes.
I know that a lot of people think that closing apps saves battery life on an iPhone and iPad. It turns out that is wrong, according to Scott Loveless, a former Apple Store Genius who wrote an informative and extensive post on solving iPhone and iPad battery drain. If you ever feel that your iOS device is losing battery power faster than it should, you’ll want to read this article.
There has been a lot of discussion of the Heartbleed lately, and for good reason. If you want a good description of what it means, Adam Engst and Rich Mogull of TidBITS wrote a good article: The Normal Person’s Guide to the Heartbleed Vulnerability.
Jeff Gamet of the Mac Observer reminds us that you can switch Siri’s voice to a male if you want. I’m so used to Siri having a female voice that it seems wrong to have a male voice, but to each his own.
And finally, speaking of Siri, Microsoft recently announced its answer to Siri, a technology called Cortana that will be on Windows 8.1 devices. Arsenio Hall interviewed Siri and Cortana in a comedy sketch for his show. (Warning: the language is likely not safe for work.) It’s basically just one joke, but is somewhat amusing. Video is below, or click here.
I’ve been using Word for iPad almost every day since it was released two weeks ago. I really like it, and I’ve now used it enough to write a full review. (I wrote a first look post while I was at ABA TECHSHOW two weeks ago.) As a litigator who works with Microsoft Word documents throughout the day, it is incredibly useful to have a sophisticated and full-featured version of Word on my iPad. Word for iPad has easily become one of the most important and useful apps on my iPad, and I suspect that many other attorneys will feel the same way. The app has some limitations, and a few of them are big and I hope that they are addressed in a future update, but for 1.0 version of an app, Microsoft really did a great job.
And when I say “Microsoft” I’m specifically talking about the Mac folks at Microsoft, a group that for years was called the MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), and just recently changed its name to Apex (Apple Productivity Experiences) to reflect that they are working on more than just Mac software. Earlier this week, the Office for iPad team answered questions in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, and it was revealed that the folks at Microsoft who designed the Office iPad apps are the same folks who create Office apps for Mac.
Indeed, the Word for iPad team revealed that they started with the Mac version of Word to create Word for iPad, and Erik Schwiebert, the principal software designer in the MacBU/Apex, said that the work that Microsoft has been doing on Office for iPad is actually going to also be used for an upcoming version of Office for Mac:
The code for Office for iPad and Office for Mac is shared, as the development platforms for both are very similar. 🙂 The iPad work required us to create an all-new UI and to redesign the interface between UI and the internal logic. That work actually helps us with de-Carbonizing Office for the Mac, instead of delaying or hindering it. We’re able to create new Cocoa UI on the Mac and tie it into the new logic interface now.
It must be interesting to be a person employed by Microsoft who spends all of his or her time working on Mac, iPad and iPhone apps. Sort of like the folks who work at Apple on the iTunes for Windows software. But based on this short, fun video prepared for the Reddit session, The Mac BU looks like a good group.
(Trivia for long-time Mac users: many folks believe that Word 5.1 for Mac, released in 1992, was the best-ever version of Word on a Mac. A Microsoft employee named “Rick” said in Reddit yesterday that he been working on Word for Mac since version 5.0 and now he is working on Word for iPad. That’s quite a resume over a long stretch of time. I’m guessing it is Rick Schaut, who wrote this interesting post about some of the early versions of Word for Mac. UPDATE:Yep, it is him.)
So now that we know who made Word for iPad, let’s talk about the app itself.
Importing Documents
Unless you are starting a new document from scratch, the first step is to get a Word document into the Word for iPad app. Importing documents into Word for iPad from another app is fairly easy because you can use the standard iOS Open in… function. For example, if someone emails you a Word document, you can simply hold your finger down on the Word document icon for a second or two, then when the Open in… selection appears you can simply select Word for iPad.
What if your document is instead located on a cloud service, such as Dropbox? Word for iPad doesn’t have built-in support for any cloud services other than Microsoft’s own OneDrive service, but since all of those cloud services have their own apps, this is only a minor limitation. For example, to open a document in a Dropbox folder, just use the Dropbox app to select the document and then Open in… Word for iPad.
And as noted, Word for iPad has built-in support for OneDrive, so if a document is located in one of your OneDrive folders, you can easily open it from within Word for iPad. The app also has built-in support for documents stored on SharePoint 2010 or higher.
Basic Reviewing and Editing
The main thing that you want to do with a Word document on an iPad is likely to be (1) read it and (2) perhaps make some minor edits. For these basic functions, Word for iPad works well, and is overall better than any other iPad app.
Viewing documents works very well because Word for iPad preserves all of the original document formatting. This is no accident. As Erik Schwiebert of the Mac BU noted in the Reddit session, Microsoft uses the same text layout engine in Word for iPad that is used in Word for Windows and Word for Mac. (Another developer also said the same thing.)
The only other iPad app I’ve ever used that also does an excellent job preserving Word document formatting is Reader 7. My only real complaint with viewing a document in Word for iPad is that you cannot view a document full screen, which is a nice feature if all you want to do is read a document. For this reason, I recommend that all attorneys also keep a copy of the excellent (and free) Reader 7 app on their iPads, which has a full screen view.
Basic editing of documents also works very well, which is no surprise because this is the one function that the otherwise limited Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone also does well. So if someone sends you a brief and you want to add a sentence, delete a paragraph, move something from one section to another, Word for iPad works great. You can edit the document without worrying about messing up the document properties so that it will look wrong when sent back to a computer. And unlike the iPhone app, in Word for iPad you can also view, edit and add footnotes, a critical feature for litigators.
Typing on the on-screen keyboard works the same as most any other app. This means, for example, that in addition to typing on the virtual keyboard, you can tap the microphone button (next to the space bar) to dictate, which Siri does quite well. I often find that using Siri to take dictation is much faster than me tapping on a virtual keyboard when I just want to add a sentence or two. Note that there are currently a few dictation bugs in Word for iPad — for example, you cannot dictate in a footnote — but Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.
For more intensive editing, I recommend using an external keyboard. I use the Apple Wireless Keyboard, but I know that some people prefer a smaller keyboard that also works as an iPad cover such as the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover. With an external keyboard you can type much faster, plus you can use standard keyboard shortcuts to undo, repeat, cut, copy, paste, select all, and you can also quickly apply bold, italics or underline formatting. Word also supports standard keyboard navigation shortcuts such as Shift-Option-Right Arrow to quickly select text one word at a time. Click here for a full list of Word for iPad keyboard shortcuts.
Buttons and Toolbars
Word for iPad has a few buttons at the top left and right and toolbars in the middle.
The buttons on the left let you return to your file list, edit document properties and duplicate the document (i.e. “Save as…”), undo and redo. The buttons at the right let you do a full text search, and if you tap the magnifying glass and then tap the gear icon, you can do a Find and Replace. The button at the far right lets you share a document … more on that below.
There are five ribbons. The Home ribbon includes all of your basic formatting such font, bold, text color and highlighting, text justification, line spacing, bullets, numbered paragraphs, etc. The first button on the Home ribbon is for Styles, and I discuss that in more detail below. The Insert ribbon lets you add page breaks, tables, pictures, shapes, a text box, a hyperlink, and a footnote. The Layout ribbon lets you change the page layout and margins, including page numbers. The Review ribbon lets you track changes, and I have more on that below. Finally, the View ribbon turns spell-checking as you type on or off, turns a ruler on or off, and gives you a Word count (which includes Page count and character count).
Styles
I always use the Styles function in Word on my PC and Mac and I recommend that others do too. For example, I have pre-defined styles for Text in a brief (indent paragraph, double-space, etc.), Block Quotes (indented on both sides, single space), the text that comes after a block quote when I am still in the same paragraph that I call Post Quote (same as the Text style but not indented), etc.
The current version of Word for iPad has only limited support for styles. First, you cannot create styles in Word for iPad. So in a new document, if you want to indent, change line spacing, change the font, etc., you will need to do that manually.
Second, if you open a document that you created on your computer using styles, Word for iPad will recognize those styles and will correctly display the document formatting. But you cannot easily use those styles in your document to apply them to more text. While there is a Styles button in Word for iPad, it comes pre-loaded with 15 styles that are always there and cannot be changed (and which are mostly useless for legal documents). The Styles button will not show you the styles that exist in your document, so you cannot use that menu to select a style that exists in the document and apply it to different text.
However, Microsoft did provide one partial work-around. If you copy text in Word for iPad to which you had applied a style on your computer, and then you select a different string of text, Word for iPad includes an option to Paste Format. That option will apply all of the formatting, including the style name, to the new text. So for example, if you have a Block Quote style that you like to use, and you are editing a document that already has that style in use, you are in luck. Just copy that paragraph and then paste the formatting to a different paragraph.
Unfortunately, if the style that you want is present in the document but not currently being used, you can’t use it. My hope is that better support for styles is a feature that Microsoft is working on for a future update.
Track Changes
One of the very best parts of Microsoft Word for iPad is the track changes feature. I say this because most attorneys are unlikely to write a brief from scratch using Word on an iPad (although you could do so). Instead, most attorneys will find Word for iPad most useful when they are using an iPad away from the office and they just want to suggest some edits to a documents someone else created on a computer.
For the most part, track changes works great. Just turn it on, and new text is underlined and deleted text is stricken.
There is one quirk that I don’t quite understand. When you make an edit, it shows up in one color. You can then change what you just did for about a minute, but sometimes (and not all of the time) after a minute the color changes. When this happens, if you want to alter your edit, it shows up as a redline to your redline. I can’t think of any reason that anyone would want their edits to show up this way. The only workaround that I have discovered is to go to your original edit, select it and tap the icon on the ribbon to reject your first edit (so that you go back to the original text), an then edit again as you now want it to read. Although this workaround works, it seems silly that you have to do it in the first place.
Other Advanced Functions
It comes as no surprise that there are many other advanced functions supported by Word on the PC or Mac that are not supported on the iPad. Other than the ones listed above, I really don’t miss them.
For example, while you can check spelling in Word for iPad, you cannot check grammar. But grammar checking is a function that annoys me in Word on my Mac and PC, so I always keep it turned off on my computers. I don’t miss it on the iPad.
Word for iPad supports footnotes but has only limited support for endnotes, captions (numbered labels for objects), citations (the bibliography function), and Table of Contents — namely, you can view them if they are already in a document, but you cannot add or update them. Again, I don’t miss these features in Word for iPad, and I suspect that most attorneys who use Word for iPad will feel the same.
Word for iPad doesn’t support macros. I stopped using macros in Word documents a very long time ago because they were sometimes used to spread Word viruses. If you like to use macros in your Word documents, you can do so on your computer but not in Word for iPad.
Word for iPad also doesn’t support split windows. I sometimes find split windows useful on my PC and Mac, but in light of the smaller size of the iPad screen, I can understand why this feature was omitted. Having said that, if Microsoft were to add this feature in the future, I might find it useful, especially when in portrait orientation.
Exporting Documents
So now you have edited your document and you are ready to move it off of your iPad. What are the choices? Word for iPad sometimes feels like it has the Hotel California problem; you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Word for iPad has many limitations that make it more difficult than I would have expected to get a document out of the iPad.
First, you cannot print … yet. Although this has resulted in some bad press, I don’t see this as a major limitation. Although I do sometimes print from my iPad to an AirPrint printer, I don’t do this very often, and I don’t really miss it in Word for iPad. Moreover, PC World is reporting that Microsoft will add this feature in a future update, and Microsoft Principal Group Manager Sangeeta Mudnalsaid in the Reddit this week: “Print is a high demand feature that we intend to introduce in due course.” [UPDATE 4/28/14: Version 1.0.1 came out today, and it adds the ability to print.]
Second, Word for iPad doesn’t support the standard iOS export functions to Open in… another app or to share with another user using AirDrop. The Open in… omission is a huge limitation, and is so obvious of an omission that I can only conclude that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support the feature, perhaps as a way to encourage users to use OneDrive. My #1 feature request for Word for iPad is that Microsoft reconsider this decision and add the ability to open a document in another app. This would let folks save to Dropbox (by opening in the Dropbox app), convert to PDF (by opening in any of the apps that convert Word files to PDF), add the document to an iPad-based folder (such as folder in GoodReader), etc.
So what can you do right now with a document? First, you can save the document to the iPad itself. This works fine if you don’t have a lot of documents, but there is no support for folders so you just have to work with a big long list of documents. There is a Recent button that lists in order of use, so at least it isn’t too hard to find a document that you worked with recently.
Second, you can email the document itself, or a link to the document. More on this in a moment.
Third, you can save the document to OneDrive. Indeed, everyone who uses Office 365 has a OneDrive account, so by definition if you have the full version of Word for iPad, you have a OneDrive account. But for me, saving confidential attorney-client documents and/or work product — such as the drafts of virtually every document that I work on — to OneDrive is not acceptable. I’m sure that Microsoft has good intentions, as does Dropbox and other cloud storage services, but I would rather keep my confidential documents under my control, which means only storing the documents on devices that I or my law firm own unless there is sophisticated encryption.
Note that if you do save to OneDrive, you can then use the free OneDrive app to access the document, but the OneDrive app also doesn’t support the standard iOS functions so you cannot use the OneDrive app to open the document in another app. [UPDATE: I missed it at first, but now I see that you can do this in OneDrive; when the document is being shown on your screen, tap … in the bottom right corner and select Open in Another App.] You can, also work with documents in your OneDrive with other apps, such as Documents to Go or GoodReader.
Note also that if you choose to email a link to someone instead of emailing them the actual document, it appears that Microsoft first uploads the document to OneDrive and then sends a link. So if you want to avoid putting a confidential document on OneDrive, I recommend that you email the file itself and not a link.
Finally, I see that the Word for iPad app supports Microsoft SharePoint. I know that you can open documents from a SharePoint location, and according to Priyanka Sinha, part of the PowerPoint for iPad team, “Office for iPad supports opening, editing, saving from [on-premise] SharePoint 2010+.” I don’t use SharePoint, but if your law firm does, this is good news.
Of all of these options, email is the only one that will be useful for most attorneys, unless your office has on-premise SharePoint. Indeed, if you want to edit a document and then send the revised draft to another attorney or your secretary, email is a great option. So thank goodness Word for iPad includes the option to email the document because for many attorneys, this may be the only option that they really need.
If you instead want to open a document in another app, you can use the email function as a workaround. Email the document to yourself, then open up that email, then hold your finger down on the attachment and you can then open up the document in another app — for example, open in Dropbox to save it there, open in another app that will convert to PDF, open in the Transporter app to save it to a folder on your Transporter, etc.
Stability
I rarely have problems with iPad apps crashing, but sometimes it happens, and it can be very annoying. One of the things that I have always liked about Pages, the word processor for the iPad made by Apple, is that it is rock solid. I have used it to take notes in day-long meetings and depositions many, many times and it has always worked perfectly and I have never lost even a line of text.
I’ve only been using Word for iPad for two weeks, and while the app has not crashed on me yet, UPDATE: SEE BELOW I’ll have to use it much longer to conclude that it is as stable as Pages. However, I have had one occasion when I was using Word for iPad (and one occasion when I was using Excel for iPad) when I got a “Not enough memory” error. I tapped OK and continued to use the apps without incident, but the error did make me nervous.
[UPDATE: So just a few hours after this post went live, I had my first crash. Thursday morning I was taking a deposition of a plaintiff. An attorney for a co-defendant went first and asked questions and I was taking notes of the questions and answers on my iPad. I usually use Pages for this, but today I decided to use Word for iPad with an external keyboard. I was also frequently switching between Word and other apps on my iPad such as GoodReader, Mail, Safari and Maps to look up various items that related to what the plaintiff was saying. Every time I switched back to Word I had to wait a short moment to load the document back into memory … until one time, about 45 minutes into the deposition, when instead of loading my document I just saw the main screen of Word. Where was my document? I looked at the list of recent documents and it wasn’t there. Ugh. After trying everything I could think of to locate my document, I gave up and I started a new Word document and used it for the rest of the deposition and all was fine. It did occur to me that with my first document I never saved it under a specific name. (Tap the second icon on the left of the screen and then select name.) I didn’t think that I needed to do so since Word for iPad kept telling me that it was auto-saving the document even without a name, but maybe if I had given the first document a specific name it would have showed up in my recents list after the crash? I’ll have to explore this more, and it turned out that the first 45 minutes of my depo were just background information anyway so I didn’t lose anything of value, but it could have been a big disaster. In the future, perhaps I will stick to Pages for taking notes until I feel that this has been fixed.]
In the Reddit earlier this week, Rick Schaut said: “The biggest challenge [porting Word from the Mac to the iPad] was working within the resource constraints of an iPad vs a desktop Mac, and the issues span a wide gamut from memory to processor speed to battery usage. Getting Word’s scrolling to be so smooth as it is, for example, took a fairly impressive engineering effort.” I know that Microsoft has to use some major tricks to get so much of the full version of Word to work within the memory constraints of an iPad. Hopefully, Word for iPad will remain stable; nobody likes to lose work.
By the way, here is a picture that the MacBU/Apex team shared of the equipment that they use to test Microsoft Office for iPad on multiple different iPads with different configurations:
Pricing
Word for iPad is free*. The * indicates that you can download the app from the App Store for free, and you can use the app to view Word documents, but if you want to edit Word documents you need to have an Office 365 account. And here is where things get confusing. I think the following description is correct, but I might be missing something about all of the different plans.
One option is to get an Office 365 Home Premium account, which is what I have been using for the past year. That lets me install Office on up to five computers (Mac or PC) at my house and also lets me use Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad on up to five tablets. It costs $9.99 month or $99.99 a year.
If you want your law firm to pay for Office 365, then you need an Office 365 for Business plan that supports desktop and mobile apps. Options include Office 365 Small Business Premium for $150 per user per year, for up to 25 users. If you are in a larger law firm, you may need Office 365 Midsize Business, which is $180 per user per year, for up to 300 users. For larger companies there are different rates. [UPDATE 9/8/14: For more information on the Office 365 licenses that can be used by lawyers, read this post.]
Of course, your law firm probably already has some sort of license agreement with Microsoft, and if you don’t currently use Office 365, then you need to investigate what it will cost to add mobile support for your users. Talk to your Microsoft rep.
I hear some people complain about the price, but for lawyers I have no doubt that this cost is worth it. Whether you are paying $100 a year for several of your home computers and tablets or $180 or more a year for a single user license in a large organization, you are paying for both the computer software and the iPad software. Considering how important Microsoft Word is to attorneys, this is a small but essential cost of doing business.
Conclusion
I have been using Word for iPad for two weeks, but I have been using Microsoft Word, in one form or another, for over 25 years. I think that almost every attorney should have Word on the computer in their office, and similarly, Word for iPad is so good, and such an important app, that I think that every attorney who uses an iPad should get Word for iPad. If nothing else, just use the free version of the app as a great document viewer. But to do real work with the app, you’ll want to have an Office 365 account.
As noted above, this 1.0 version of the app has some limitations. For an app that I really like, I’m surprised how many times I had to use the word “workaround” in writing this review. Hopefully many of these limitations will be addressed in future updates. On Reddit this week, a member of the Excel for iPad team stated: “One of the great things about Office 365 being a subscription is that you can expect to get frequent updates, so stay tuned! We think you’ll like them.” And Rick Schaut from the Word for iPad team stated: “I can’t say what will or will not be in the next version of Word, because those decisions are always in flux. I can say that we’re always thinking about what we should include, and we’re always working to find the best mix of features across our broad base of users.”
Word for iPad is already a fantastic app today, and I look forward to seeing how it is improved in the future.
Click here to get Microsoft Word for iPad (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.
One of my favorite parts of ABA TECHSHOW a few weeks ago was a presentation that Ben Stevens and I gave on March 27, 2014 called iGadgets and iGear for the iLawyer. In that session, Ben and I talked about and showed off some of our favorite iPhone and iPad accessories. Most of them were items that we use in connection with our law practice, but some of them were just fun accessories that most anyone would like. With more time we could have discussed so many more — there are just so many useful and/or fun things that you can buy to enhance your iPhone or iPad.
Here is a list of the items that we discussed. I’ve added links for the ones that I have reviewed here on iPhone J.D., and for the others I added an Amazon link (when available) so you can see the item and get more information there. A few of these will be the subject of upcoming reviews on iPhone J.D. Some of my reviews were written a while ago and in some cases my views have changed, but suffice it to say that the fact that an accessory is on this list tells you that either Ben or I thought that it is still worth your consideration.
As I mentioned last week, MyCase hired Stephanie Crowley to produce live murals based on what Ben and I were talking about during our presentation. Here is what Crowley created:
I have been on the road a lot for the last 10 days, which means that I have had to work with quite a few Word documents, and even a few Excel documents, on my iPad. The new Office apps from Microsoft have worked really well for me and I continue to be impressed. Microsoft announced yesterday that 12 million people have downloaded the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps (most people would download all three, so I guess that means about 4 million users so far). Macworld has good reviews of the new apps (Jeffery Battersby: Word; Rob Griffiths: Excel; Joe Kissell: PowerPoint) and Julio Ojeda-Zapata offers a good overview of all three apps for TidBITS. I don’t care that much about PowerPoint, but Excel is useful, and the Word app is the best new app on my iPad in a very long time. And now, the recent iOS news of note:
I saw South Carolina attorney Jenny Stevens working hard at TECHSHOW to find every cool swag item being given away by a vendor in the Exhibit Hall. The result was a post on The Mac Lawyer called The Best Swag from ABA TECHSHOW.
California attorney David Sparks reviews a USB cable from Skiva that has both a Lightning connector and a Micro USB connector.
South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn of iPad Notebook lists the new improvements to Apple’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps.
Jesse Landin of Law Technology News discusses apps with information on construction contracts, maritime emergencies and craft beer.
Jeffery Battersby of Macworld reviews PDFpen for iOS.
And finally, here is a fun video created by EasyExplainVideo that takes the audio from the 2007 introduction of the iPhone by Steve Jobs and adds new graphics to it. (via The Mac Observer)
I like to take pictures with my iPhone. When the lighting is good, the pictures can be really great. When the lighting is poor, and when I don’t try to go out of my way to take the best possible picture, the quality is less than optimal but the pictures are still nice to have just for the sake of the memories. I say that because while I took a lot of pictures at ABA TECHSHOW last week, I didn’t take any special efforts to make them great pictures … and yet I’ve decided to post a few of them today anyway, because if you were at TECHSHOW with me, it might be fun to see yourself, and if you were not at TECHSHOW, maybe the pictures will give you somewhat of a sense of why so many people go back to TECHSHOW year after year. Click on any picture for a larger size.
The Sessions
I sometimes take pictures of the audience when I give a presentation, and I did so at TECHSHOW for my three presentations. On Thursday morning, I teamed up with Judge Hebert Dixon of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for iPad in Trial / iPad for Litigators. Here is a picture I took of Judge Dixon and the audience when the judge was showing off using an iPad to give a wireless presentation.
You might notice that in the back of the room there is a large whiteboard. For some of the TECHSHOW presentations, MyCase hired Stephanie Crowley to produce live murals based on what we were talking about during the presentations. This is a fun idea that I had never seen before. Here is Crowley’s drawing of my session with Judge Dixon:
My second session on Tuesday was with Ben Stevens of The Mac Lawyer. The session was called iGadgets and iGear for the iLawyer, and it consisted of Ben and I showing off our favorite iPhone and iPad accessories. I forgot to take a picture until just after the session ended, and I only took two pictures of the audience — which results in a horrible panorama — but I suppose it is good enough to get the idea, and to find yourself if you were in the room.
Once again, Crowley created a drawing of our presentation.
On Friday, I attended the Keynote address by Rick Klau of Google. Before he became an Internet celebrity, Klau was a regular presenter at TECHSHOW, so it was nice to have him return.
On Saturday morning, I teamed up with Reid Trautz, Brett Burney and Chad Burton for the 2014 edition of 60 Apps in 60 Minutes. (Here is a list of the apps we discussed.) Unfortunately, Crowley wasn’t around on Saturday morning, but here is the audience.
As you can see, our room was pretty much at capacity with almost every chair taken, folks sitting on the side (you can just barely see one of them in the side of the picture) and folks standing in the back — more and more of them as our presentation progressed. I was interested to see what kind of attendance we had for our presentation because at the same time that we talked about iOS apps, there was another session talking about Android apps, another session talking about Windows 8.1 apps and another session talking about BlackBerry apps. To the extent that TECHSHOW is at all a cross-section of the legal technology community, what do the sessions tell us about what devices lawyers are using?
It turns out that legal technology consultant Adriana Linares had the same thought, so she took pictures of each of the four rooms. Here is the picture that she tweeted from our packed iOS session:
Unfortunately for BlackBerry, it gets worse. One of the three people in the BlackBerry session was Sam Glover of Lawyerist.com who explained to Adriana that he was in the room simply because he “needed a quiet place to work,” and Sam tweeted that one of the other two people in the BlackBerry session was using an iPad to take notes. We’ve come a very long way from past TECHSHOWs where it seemed like almost everyone was using a BlackBerry.
Here is a picture of the audience in the very last session of TECHSHOW called 60 Sites in 60 Minutes:
And finally, here is a picture from the night before TECHSHOW started when Dallas attorney Tom Mighell gave a presentation at the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue on how lawyers can get the most out of an iPad. That is a huge Apple Store and it has a nice private meeting room at the top, which is where we were, in addition to the big theater on the second floor.
The Exhibit Hall
I didn’t think to take very many pictures of the Exhibit Hall, but it was very active this year, and it seemed like almost every booth was showing off some sort of mobile solution for the iPhone or iPad — a far cry from just a few years ago. Here is Clio CEO Jack Newton showing how you can scan a document and then wirelessly send it to your iPhone to file away in the Clio document management system.
Here is the WordPerfect booth where they were showing off a new version of WordPerfect that works on the iPad, although you have to have Internet access for it to work.
One of the biggest topics at TECHSHOW was Microsoft’s announcement mid-Thursday that it was releasing Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the iPad. There was a very small Microsoft booth at the back of the Exhibit Hall, but it was really just there to show off Windows Surface tablets. I tried to get them to show me how the Word app on Surface is different from the new Word app on the iPad, but they really had no idea. I found a few minor differences — for example, the Surface app checks both spelling and grammar while the iPad app just checks spelling — but the apps looked virtually identical.
People
It is often said that one of the best parts of TECHSHOW is talking to the other people who attend, and I certainly agree with that. Folks who I met at TECHSHOW gave me lots of idea of apps and accessories that I need to check out, and it was fun and educational to learn how other lawyers are using their iPhones and iPads.
Wednesday night, I had a really fun dinner with Ernie Svenson, Tom Mighell, Dennis Kennedy, Allison Shields, Philippe Doyle Gray, Antigone Peyton, Adriana Linares and Jason Marsh. Most of those folks are current or former TECHSHOW presenters from across the country (and in Philippe’s case — from Australia), and it was a great group of folks to be with for the start of TECHSHOW, especially considering the dinner wasn’t planned and just sort of happened as a bunch of us ran into each other.
Friday night I attended the dinner hosted by Randy Juip and Ben Stevens. I didn’t take a picture of the group, but Ben’s wife Jenny Stevens posted this one on Twitter.
The one person not shown in that picture is the person who took the picture, and he did something that I’ve never seen done before at a steak restaurant. He ordered an uncooked steak. I’m not talking about a steak cooked rare, or even Steak Tartare, I’m talking about straight from the refrigerator directly to the plate. And he ate the whole thing. Yikes. I won’t post his name because I don’t want to be responsible for his health insurer dropping his coverage.
I’ll finish the people pictures with four pictures from a very swanky party thrown by Clio. Here I am with Ian O’Flaherty and Tara Cheever of Lit Software (makers of TrialPad and TranscriptPad). I see that Tara is holding a MOBiLE CLOTH with an iPhone J.D. logo on it, perhaps to provide some extra warmth along with that blanket on that cold Chicago night. Thanks again to MOBiLE CLOTH for giving me so many of them to hand out to iPhone J.D. readers throughout the show.
This past Saturday morning at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago, Brett Burney, Chad Burton, Reid Trautz and I presented the 2014 installment of 60 Apps in 60 Minutes. We highlighted a variety of apps including some great new apps, some perennial favorites, and some that were thrown in mostly for the entertainment value. Here is a the full list. Many apps are free, but note that some of those require subscriptions or can have extra fees associated with them (e.g. the WestlawNext and Lexis Advance apps). All of them are worth taking a look at.
Except for the Hangtime! app. I don’t care what Reid said, I beg you to avoid that one. Seriously, just don’t do it.
For the apps that I previously reviewed here on iPhone J.D., I added a link to the app name.
I’m at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago right now, and the big news on Thursday was that Microsoft released a version of Word (and Excel, and PowerPoint) for the iPad. I have been kicking the tires on this app since it was released Thursday afternoon, and I am incredibly impressed. Unlike Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone released last year, the new Word app for the iPad has virtually every feature that lawyers want to use. Every attorney who uses an iPad will want to get this app. [UPDATE: Click here for my full review of Microsoft Word for iPad.]
Unlike the iPhone app released last year, this app works great with track changes (redline edits). You can view redline edits, you can create your own redline edits, and you can control how they display (inline with text or off to the side). The app also displays footnotes. And unlike some of the other apps that can revise Word documents, this app seems to preserve formatting. Thus, someone can email you a document, you can read and edit the document, and then you can send it back to them, all using your iPad and not a computer.
So far, my only complaint with Word for iPad is that while it it easy to get a file into the app, it is difficult to get files out. You can open a Word document attached to an email by simply holding down your finger on it to see the “Open in” menu and then selecting the Word app. But once a file is in Word for iPad, you can only save it (to your iPad or to your Microsoft OneDrive) and the only way to get the document out of the app is to email it. You cannot choose to “Open in” another app, nor can you print, nor can you save to DropBox, Box, or any of the other cloud storage services. As a workaround, you can email to yourself, and from there you can work with the attachment to your self-directed email.
Anyone can download the app for free and use it to view Word files, and if you have an Office 365 subscription ($100 a year) you can edit and save files. The release of this app is going to cause a huge number of attorneys to purchase Office 365 accounts. And all of the third party apps that we have been using for years to view Word documents are going to have to find ways to distinguish themselves. For example, Reader 7 does a great job of displaying your document full screen, an option not in the current version of Word for iPad.
I haven’t started looking at the new Excel and PowerPoint apps for iPad, but my hope is that they are as good as Word for iPad.
Kudos to Microsoft for releasing such an amazing iPad app that every attorney is going to want to have.
