Jeff Richardson

DataViz reported on its Twitter stream and on its Facebook page that Documents to Go was submitted to Apple’s iTunes App Store for approval and should be available in a few days.  As I’ve posted here and here and here, we don’t know much yet about the features, but presumably the app will allow you to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on an iPhone and edit Word documents and perhaps also Excel and PowerPoint documents.

The price has not been revealed yet, although the company says on its Facebook page:

And in response to a qustion on Facebook of whether there will be a discount for people who used Documents to Go on another platform such as Palm, the company says:  “Its priced so well you won’t need a discount!”

I’ve been very happy with QuickOffice on the iPhone, although that app still needs some work, such as the addition of autocorrect, underline and footnotes.  I’m very curious to see how Documents to Go stacks up to QuickOffice on the iPhone.

Having said that, I actually feel bad for both companies because these are both products that cry out for a copy and paste function that works across the iPhone so that you can copy from a webpage into a Word document, from a Word document into an e-mail, etc.  This feature won’t be available until iPhone Software 3.0 comes out this summer, but I understand that both companies felt the pressure to release their apps now.  It would also be great to be able to take a Word or Excel document that is attached to an e-mail and open it up in QuickOffice or Documents to Go.  Again, that just isn’t possible with the current iPhone operating system.

Since 1988, Wolfram Research has been selling Mathematica, a high-end computational software product that is used by scientists and mathematicians and sells for about $2,500.  For the last five years, Stephen Wolfram and his team have been looking at using the complicated math that can be done with Mathematica to answer questions by computing connections based on existing data.  A few days ago, this research culminated with the unveiling of the Wolfram|Alpha website.

Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine.  When you run a search on a site like Google, Google tries to find your search terms on other web pages.  Thus, a search engine works best when you are trying to find information that someone else has already addressed on a web page.  For example, do a search for “iPhone lawyer” on Google and you will find this website and others that address the use of iPhones by lawyers.  If you have a question that someone else has already answered on a page of a website, then you should use a search engine to try to find that website page.

When you run a search on Wolfram|Alpha, the site does not link you to other websites.  Instead, it tries to compute an objective answer for you by accessing a vast database of data and then it displays that answer using organized tables, graphs, charts and/or pictures.  Type in “What is the weather in New Orleans” and Wolfram|Alpha will report the current New Orleans weather and the historical weather in New Orleans.  Type “number of lawyers” and the website will tell you that just over 500,000 people in the U.S. are lawyers, 1 in 242 people, with a median wage of $106,100.  Type “father’s mother’s sister’s son” and the website will inform you that you are talking about your first cousin once removed, give you a helpful family tree graph, and tell you that your blood relationship fraction is 3.125%.

Wolfram|Alpha is interesting when it makes connections between sets of data that you might not otherwise think of.  A good example is the website’s ability to analyze a name.  If I type as a search term “Jeffrey,” I will see a graph showing me that the number of people born that were named Jeffrey started to rise around 1940, peaked around 1969 (which just happens to be the year in which I was born) and then has declined since then.  Then, the site takes a look at mortality rates for people born in the years that people named Jeffrey were born and computes that there are almost a million Jeffreys currently alive, 1 in 256 people, with a large number of us in our late 30s to early 50s.  Enter your own name in Wolfram|Alpha to see your own statistics.

I’m just scratching the surface of what Wolfram|Alpha can do, and I encourage you to check out this page to get more examples of interesting searches that you can run.  You can also click here for an excellent video description of the website.  I also enjoyed listening to the last 30 minutes of the latest This Week In Tech podcast which includes an interview of Stephen Wolfram by Leo Laporte.  And Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has a nice post with good examples of Wolfram|Alpha search terms.

So what does all of this have to do with the iPhone?  Like many of you, I often find myself using my iPhone to quickly get answers, whether I am looking up a name in my Contacts, finding a place on a map, or running search terms on Google.  Wolfram|Alpha provides another way to use an iPhone to quickly find answers.  Just go to the Wolfram|Alpha website on your iPhone and you will see an iPhone-formatted screen  UPDATE 12/3/09:  According to App Advice, Wolfram|Alpha no longer has a specially formatted iPhone screen.  Instead, when you access the website from an iPhone, you are encouraged to buy the $50 app to get an iPhone interface.  You can still use the website on an iPhone, but you lose the nice screen.  On the left is what is used to look like, and on the right is what it looks like now when you access the screen from an iPhone:

Type in some search terms and let Wolfram|Alpha quickly do its thing.  The search result screens are not specifically formatted for the iPhone screen, but they are easy enough to view in landscape mode and easy to read by scrolling back and forth in portrait mode. 

I can imagine being in a deposition and learning that the witness had five drinks in two hours.  Was he too drunk to drive?  Run the search “BAC 5 drinks, 2 hours, male, 180lb” and you will learn that his blood alcohol content was 0.11%, and assuming a legal driving limit of 0.08%, the witness should have waited at least three and a half hours before driving.

Wolfram|Alpha is new, so many search terms don’t give you useful answers, but
you’ll only waste a few seconds giving it a try.  When this website works, it works well, and I’m sure it will only get better over time.  Thus, I recommend that you keep this website in mind when you are searching for information, whether at your desk or using your iPhone.

Above the Law (ATL) is a website that accurately describes itself as a “legal tabloid.”  A large number of the posts relate to law firm gossip, but the site tackles just about anything of interest to lawyers at large law firms.  It was voted the top news website on the 2008 ABA Journal Blawg 100.

Yesterday, ATL Associate Editor Kashmir Hill asked me to name the top ten iPhone apps for lawyers, a topic that has been covered before on this website.  My response led to this post on the ATL website.  The ABA Journal picked up on the story here, adding a note that the number of iPhone-using attorneys has soared in the latest ABA Technology Survey.

Here are some additional thoughts on the ten great third party apps that I mentioned in the ATL post:

1. QuickOffice.  My full thoughts on QuickOffice are in these posts:  1, 2 and 3.  I don’t have much more to add except to note that the app works very well, and I especially like the new ability to have the app show up as a virtual hard drive on my Mac or PC so I can drag and drop documents.  Of course, I am still very curious to see what DataViz’s Documents To Go will look like, which DataViz says is due “early to mid May” and which I presume means very soon.
2. Cliff Maier
   
   reference apps. I’ve posted about these apps here:  1, 2, 3 and 4.  I continue to use these great apps all of the time.
3. DaysFrom. I also like DateCalcPro, but most of the time I find myself using DaysFrom to calculate days, for the reasons I previously posted here.
4. Wikipanion. My review is here.
5. Google Mobile App. My review is here.
6. Various weather apps. I like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather apps, but I really love the version of the Weather Underground website that is formatted for
   
   the iPhone web browser.  Just go to i.wund.com using Safari on your iPhone.  Even better, once you are there, enter your zip code to see your local weather and then hit the + sign in Safari to “Add to Home Screen.”  That will give you an icon that you can easily tap to get your latest local weather.  One nice new feature is an iPhone version of the “Interactive Wundermap” which I can only describe as sort of a cross between a weather radar and the Google Maps app.  (Click here to see the Interactive Wundermap on a computer.)  You can double-tap to zoom in and easily pan and scan on an iPhone to see the weather conditions.  Very impressive stuff.
7. Twitterific. My first Twitter client on the iPhone was the 1.0 version of Twitterific.  But that app had limitations, and the free TwitterFon app (which I mentioned here) soon became my favorite Twitter client.  Earlier this month,  The Iconfactory released Twitterific 2.0, and wow, what a difference a 2.0 makes.  This app includes tons of advanced features, has a great interface, and is really a joy to use.  I’m currently using the free version, and it is now my favorite iPhone Twitter app.  It has ads, but the ads are unobtrusive, and for only $3.99 you can get a version without ads.  If you use Twitter, I strongly encourage you to check it out.  Click here to get Twitterific (free): 

   

8. Facebook. I haven’t posted a review of this app (although I mentioned it here) but this is a really useful app.  If you use Facebook, you have no excuse not to get this free app.
9. Black’s Law Dictionary.  My review is here.  There have been some minor tweaks and bug fixes since I posted my review. One large change (that I noted in my review was going to happen soon) is that if you now try to go to Westlaw on your iPhone by going to www.westlaw.com, you are redirected to wireless.westlaw.com.  I understand the thinking here; wireless.westlaw.com is certainly much faster.  Even so, I prefer the full Westlaw on my iPhone, and if you do too, you now need to go to web2.westlaw.com to get the “real” Westlaw on your iPhone.
10. NetNewsWire. I don’t believe that I’ve mentioned this app before, but it is a great, free RSS reader on the iPhone.  Click here to get NetNewsWire (free):

    

Thanks to ATL and the ABA Journal for these two posts and for recognizing the growing number of attorneys using iPhones.

If you use a Mac to give presentations using either Keynote or PowerPoint, you’ll want to check out two articles by Rob Griffiths of Macworld about iPhone apps that allow you to use your iPhone as a remote control for your presentation.  A few months ago, he reviewed three apps that you can use to control Keynote:  Keynote Remote, Stage Hand and TapNext Lite.  And then a few days ago, he reviewed Point Remote, which works with either PowerPoint or Keynote.  I haven’t had a reason to use these apps myself so I can’t offer my own reviews yet, but if you use a Mac when you give presentations, you’ll want to read these two reviews.

On a personal note, it has now been six months since I started this blog (November 17, 2008), and my favorite part has been hearing from readers.  Most of you who e-mail me or post comments are lawyers (although certainly not all), and I really enjoy hearing about how different people use their iPhones.  Please keep your e-mails and comments coming!  I’m positive that the next six months will be incredibly exciting for iPhone users, with the upcoming iPhone Software 3.0, the next hardware version of the iPhone, new third party hardware that will work with the iPhone, and the millions of new iPhone apps that will be released. 

Here are some news stories and other items of interest that have caught my attention this week. 

• Here is what happens if your iPhone gets too hot.
• Lifehacker points out that the NBC website does a great job of streaming TV shows to your iPhone.  It’s nice to be able to watch shows like The Office and 30 Rock for free.
• Adam Alexander is the author of the powerful DateCalcPro, which I reviewed here.  He has a new $1.99 app called TextMinder which you can use to send yourself text reminders.  Just enter some text and let the app know what time and date you want the reminder, and the app sends you a text message at the right time.  I do something similar just using the Calendar app and alarms, but if you find it more useful to get text messages as reminders, you’ll want to check out this app.  Click here to get TextMinder ($1.99): 

  

• The online Kindle Store is now formatted for the iPhone.  Thus, you can access the store using Safari on your iPhone, buy a book (or get one of the many free selections), and then read it on your iPhone using the free Kindle app.  iLounge makes the interesting observation that once the iPhone 3.0 software comes out, an app such as Amazon’s Kindle app could allow in-app purchases, but then Apple would get 30% of the cut.  By using an iPhone-formatted website, Amazon doesn’t have to share with Apple.
• AppleInsider reports
  
  that Apple now allows you to buy an iPhone 3G directly through the
  
  online Apple Store.  It would appear that they are clearing out
  
  inventory in anticipation of the next version of the iPhone, which I
  
  expect will be announced in June.]
• Ralph Koster has a cute post (that I saw mentioned on Boing Boing) on why being born in 1971 was the perfect time to be born a geek.  I was born just slightly before that, in 1969, and I have to agree with a lot of what Ralph says.  We saw Star Wars in the theater (and at a great age to see it), we “got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about
  
  details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings
  
  from magazines and learning how computers actually worked,” we learned how to use libraries for research, we saw the dawn of the Internet, etc.  It’s a fun read.  I remember that when I started law school in 1991, Georgetown made the Internet available for students, but I decided not to sign up because I thought that this “Internet” thing might be too much of a distraction from studying.  Today, I can’t imagine a law student *NOT* using the Internet as an essential part of his or her studies, although of course the Internet back then was nothing like what it is now.

And finally, on a personal note, last night I had a great dinner at the fabulous New Orleans restaurant Dick and Jenny’s with two of my favorite legal technology bloggers, Ben Stevens of The Mac Lawyer and Ernest Svenson of Ernie the Attorney.  If you don’t already have their blogs in your bookmarks or your RSS news reader, I recommend that you do so.  Along with many other great topics, they both occasionally discuss using iPhones in their law practices.

If you are a tax attorney who would like to have the Internal Revenue Code on your iPhone, you now have two choices.  I’ve frequently discussed Cliff Maier’s apps, and Cliff recently added IRC (Tax Code) ($14.99) to his growing reference app library.  But a great alternative is an app from LawToGo.net called Internal Revenue Code (Tax Code) 2009 that sells for $13.99.

I’m not a tax attorney so I haven’t given this a real world trial nor can I comment on the content.  The app’s website says that this app is up to date as of December 31, 2008, and says that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will be included in the next (free) update.  Nevertheless, from what I can tell, the app seems quite solid.  You can use the app many different ways.  First, you can just browse through sections, tapping to drill down to a specific section.

Additionally, you can search for a particular section.  You can search for words, including AND search, OR search, and /n (within a certain number of words) search.  Search terms are clearly highlighted in yellow in the search results.

If you know the particular section that you are looking for, you can also use the Search by Section No. feature.  For example, like many Americans, I’ve recently been thinking quite a bit about my dwindling 401K.  If I want to read Section 401(k) itself while I drown my sorrows, I can jump right to Section 401 and then scroll down to (k).

The app includes lots of additional features.  You can use the arrows to browse back and forth through sections.  You can e-mail a section of the tax code, you can add a section that you use frequently to your Bookmarks, and you can turn your iPhone screen on its side to view everything a little bit larger in landscape mode.

If you want to see this app in action before you buy it, there is a video overview on the LawToGo website.  The developer has done a nice job with this app.  I am sure that any tax attorney would find it very useful, and for the rest of us, it may serve as a useful sleep aid.

Click here to get LawToGo.net’s Internal Revenue Code ($13.99): 

Back in January, I discussed an upcoming Sling app for the iPhone.  Sling Media makes products
that allow you to watch your home TV or DVR in another location by
streaming the audio and video over the Internet.  Connect a Slingbox
(different models range from $180 to $300) to your home entertainment
system (Cable, Tivo, DVR, etc.) and then you can watch live or recorded
TV using a laptop anyplace else in the world as long as you have an
Internet connection.  You can sit in your hotel room in the West Coast
and watch your local news or sports being shown on your TV on the East
Coast.  At the beginning of this year, Sling was previewing an iPhone app that allows you to use a Sling device to take anything on your TV and watch it anyplace else in the world on your iPhone screen.  It is a neat idea, and I wondered why it took so long for the app to appear in iTunes.

Apparently part of the answer has to do with negotiations with AT&T.  The app was finally released today for $30, but there is an important restriction imposed by AT&T:  you can only use it to stream your TV signal over Wi-Fi.  No use over 3G.  I suppose I can understand AT&T’s concern about the Sling app using a lot of bandwidth, but is this really a unique concern?  After all, only a small number of people own a Sling device whereas tons of people stream video to an iPhone from YouTube and hundreds of other websites throughout the day.  Why single out Sling?  AT&T’s answer is that the Sling app violates its data plan Terms and Conditions.

Well let’s read the contract.  The Terms and Conditions, available here, include this language (emphasis added):

While most common
uses for Intranet browsing, email and intranet access are permitted by your data plan, there
are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and interference with the network
and are therefore prohibited.  Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation,
the following … (vii) software or other devices that maintain continuous active Internet connections when a
computer’s connection would otherwise be idle or any “keep alive” functions, unless
they adhere to AT&T’s data retry requirements, which may be changed from time to time. This
means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally
acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using
P2P file sharing services, redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers,
web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition devices is prohibited.

So AT&T says that you can’t use the 3G service to redirect a TV signal to a PC.  Okay, but that has nothing to do with the iPhone, right?

Wrong, says AT&T.  In a statement reprinted at Engadget, AT&T says:  “Applications like [the Sling app], which redirect a TV signal to a personal
computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service. We
consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that
they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.”  Note that you can use other smartphones from AT&T to watch Sling TV such as the Blackberry Bold, the Pantech Duo, the HTC Fuse and the Palm Treo 700p.  It’s just the iPhone — unlike all of those other devices — that AT&T considers to be a PC because of its hardware and software. [UPDATE:  There is an excellent CNET article with more information on this story, and AppleInsider has an in depth review of the app.]

I’ll be the first to agree with AT&T that the iPhone is in a class by itself and is far more powerful than those other smartphones.  But I find it curious that AT&T sees the need to equate an iPhone with a PC to justify restrictions.  It should be said, however, that AT&T’s decision to limit the Sling app to Wi-Fi might make sense on a practical level.  Jason Snell at Macworld has used a prerelease version of the Sling app on an iPhone which had no restrictions, and he says that when using 3G the “quality was severely degraded and there were numerous hiccups in the connection, requiring long pauses for rebuffering.”  

To avoid any speculation, let me say this loud and clear:  this site will never, ever, be renamed PC J.D.

Click here to get SlingPlayer Mobile ($29.99): 

There are already several great news apps on the iPhone — the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, to name a few.  But there is always room for another good app, and Thomson Reuters has just released a great one, News Pro.

Reuters has always provided top notch news content, especially for business and international news, and of course that great content is available in this app.  There are a large number of news categories from which you can choose:  Top News, U.S. News, Politics, World News, Business, Markets, Deals, Science, Technology, Internet News, Health, Sports, Entertainment, Film, Television, Music, People and the always amusing Oddly Enough.

The content alone would make this a nice app.  But what makes the app really stand out are the extras.  Many news stories come with small pictures which you can tap to enlarge and there are a number of short video stories.  You can also browse the news by looking at picture thumbnails.  You can also get up to date information on the market equity indexes and 18 different currency exchange rates.  And you can look up information on individual stocks, including not just the share price information but also the latest news about the company, background on the company including address, officers and directors (including salaries), phone numbers (which you can tap to call), etc.  And the interactive stock chart works well and is interesting to use.  The stocks portion of this app is a compelling alternative to the Stocks app that comes with the iPhone.

There is room for improvement in this 1.0 app.  For example, there is no way to search the current news, change the font size, or e-mail a news story.  Nevertheless, Thomson Reuters has done a great job with this app, and if you ever use your iPhone to keep up with the news — especially international or business news — you will want to download this free app.

Click here to get Thomson Reuters News Pro (free): 

Attogear has created a series of apps that it calls the QuickQuotes series.  Each app costs $0.99 (although there are some free ones) and features quotes either relating to a topic (love, motivational, wisdom, computer geek), from a famous person (Lincoln, Einstein, Leno, Obama) or by people in a profession (cartoonist, dancer, coach, comedian, photographer).  The Attogear website lists almost 70 QuckQuotes apps, although a good number of those are not yet in iTunes and are said to be coming soon.  One of the profession versions of the QuickQuotes apps is Lawyer QuickQuotes.

The QuickQuotes app design is very nice.  Each quote appears on a single screen.  (The font size adjusts to accommodate the length of the quote.)  You can browse through quotes, bookmark your favorites, search, shake for a random quote, e-mail a quote, change the background wallpaper, and change the font.  The app does a great job of handling the content.

My problem with this app is the content.  I’m sure that in the history of lawyers, there are many who have said something interesting.  At least, I hope so.  And many of the lawyers quoted in this app are fascinating people.  Examples include Lloyd Cutler, Edward Hall, Samuel Dash, Ralph Nader, Kenneth Starr, Peter Benenson, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Stephen Carter and Elliot Richardson.  Unfortunately, as I went through many (but not all) of the almost 700 lawyer quotes in this app, I didn’t find myself all that inspired or, in most cases, even all that interested.  There were also quite a few that sounded like they could be interesting, but only if one understands the context — which this app doesn’t provide.  For example, here are two (of a huge number) that left me baffled:

What research is Newdow talking about?  A quick Wikipedia search reminded me that Newdow is the attorney and minister who filed lawsuits to seek to have “under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” removed from coins and currency.  The quote relates to his motivation to file the “In God We Trust” lawsuit.  As for the quote from the famous First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, it appears to come from this interview in which Abrams revealed his motivation for including a discussion of Supreme Court practitioner strategy in his book Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment.  I’ve worked with Floyd Abrams in the past and he has a lot of fascinating things to say, but this particular quote, even after I knew the context, didn’t strike me as one of them.

I don’t mean to imply that there was nothing interesting.  These two were intriguing enough:

But it actually took me a while to find those two when I was looking for interesting quotes to note in this review.

So should you get this app?  Perhaps some of you will find these 700 quotes a lot more interesting that I did, but I won’t be keeping this app on my iPhone.  Having said that, the app design is very nice and I am interested to try others with different content.  For example, from the preview on the website, I might enjoy this one with Steve Jobs quotes once it becomes available in iTunes.

Click here to get Attogear’s Lawyer QuickQuotes ($0.99): 

Here are some of the iPhone news stories that I have been reading this week.

• Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviews Quickoffice for iPhone.  His impression is similar to mine; he likes it, but thinks it needs a little more polish.
• Ars Technica reports (as do many others) that the FTC is investigating whether Apple and Google are breaking antitrust laws because two people serve on the boards of both companies (Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Genentech’s CEO Arthur Levinson).  As an attorney, I understand why FTC is doing this.  But as an iPhone user, I’m happy for Apple and Google to be very buddy-buddy.  Frankly, in today’s tech world, so many companies are competitors in some areas and partners in other areas that it is difficult to draw the antitrust lines.
• Apple says that you can get 5 hours of talk time or Internet use with an iPhone.  Want to really increase that battery life?  Then check out the new HyperMac external batteries.  They were designed for the Apple MacBook family of laptop computers, but they also can provide power for an iPhone via a USB port.  The MBP-060 model can provide you with over 70 hours of non-stop talk or Internet use on your iPhone, for only $200.  Or you can splurge and get the MBP-222 with over 260 iPhone hours for only $500.  Just think, never again will you have to worry about running out of battery power while you watch a movie or play a game on your iPhone during a transatlantic flight — even if you have 25 of them in a row.
• iPhone Central reveals the ultimate doormat for an iPhone fan.  Good luck getting your spouse to agree to this one.
• And finally, Planet-iPhones reports that Apple is telling developers of apps previously rejected for having inappropriate content that they should resubmit the apps once iPhone Software 3.0 is released, which will reportedly include parental control settings for app downloads so that mature content can be downloaded.  The iPhone Blog has a screen shot of what the parental controls will look like in the 3.0 software.  So if all of the current iPhone fart apps aren’t enough to satisfy you, just wait until you see what you can download this summer.