Jeff Richardson

One of the most noticeable changes to my law practice since the COVID-19 pandemic began was the vast increase videoconferences that I have attended.  Instead of driving across the city for an appellate argument or across the state for a hearing on a motion for summary judgment, I attended court via Zoom.  Instead of attending a meeting with the members of the Appellate Team at my law firm, we talk to each other using Microsoft Teams.  And instead of flying across the country for a client development opportunity, I have introduced myself to people via a webcam.  A large number of the events on my calendar are videoconferences, and that’s a big change that you may be noticing as well.

Because a calendar is so important to lawyers and other professionals, many people like to go beyond the features of the built-in Calendar app on the iPhone and iPad by using a third-party calendar app.  One of the most popular choices is Fantastical, which has been my primary calendar app since I first reviewed it in 2012.  This week, Fantastical was updated to version 3.1, an update that is focused on making the app more useful for folks who have videoconferences on their calendars.  This is a great update that reminds me how much I appreciate this app.

Fantastical 3.1

The new version of Fantastical takes advantage of the fact that when you add a videoconference to your calendar, the calendar invite includes information for joining the videoconference.  Fantastical has learned how to interpret these invitations so that it knows what kind of videoconference you will be attending.  Specifically, the app now recognizes Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, RingCentral Meetings, BlueJeans, and Skype for Business.  When it sees one of these videoconferences, it adds a special icon to your calendar.

For example, there were times last week when literally every other entry on my calendar was some type of videoconference.  With the new version of Fantastical, things like Zoom and Teams meetings are easy to recognize thanks to the icons that Fantastical places right next to the meeting time.  Here is what it looks like on an iPad:

Here is what it looks like on an iPhone:

Just having the visual indications is nice enough because it helps you to prepare for what is coming next.  But when you are ready to join the meeting, if you will be doing so from your iPad or iPhone, Fantastical can help with that too.  When you tap the calendar entry, Fantastical places an obvious link at the top that you can tap something like “Join Zoom Meeting” to join the meeting:

And better yet, when it is close to the time to join a meeting, Fantastical places a blue “Join” button right in the calendar so that you can click a button without having to even open the calendar entry:

I like this feature because I sometimes find it annoying to have to search through the calendar invite to locate the specific link that I need to click to join the meeting.  Now, it is easy with Fantastical. 

And of course, you can use services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. for audio conferences as well as a videoconference.  Thus, these services can substitute for the conference call numbers that we have all been using for years.  With this update to Fantastical, it is easier to connect to an audio conference on your iPhone.

I prefer to have Fantastical mirror the same calendar used by the built-in Calendar app on my iPhone and iPad.  That way, I can easily switch between looking at my calendar in either app.  But if you want to use Fantastical as a stand-alone calendar client, you can manually subscribe to calendars such as Google, Exchange, Office 465, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, etc. — and with this update, you can use Fantastical to subscribe to a Zoom calendar.

Since we are talking about videoconferences, I have two more suggestions for you.

Lampat LED Desk Lamp

First, one of the most important things that you can do to improve the way that you look on a videoconference is to adjust the lighting.  I’m sure you know that you don’t want to have something bright right behind your head, such as a window without a shade.  But even with just the typical overhead light in your office, you won’t look your best. 

You can easily spend lots of money on fancy external lighting to make your face well-lit.  Television studios and folks who make their living on YouTube have been doing this for years.  But an inexpensive solution that I like is this $30 Lampat LED Desk Lamp that you can purchase on Amazon.  I’ve used one for many years just as a desk lamp in my home office, but I discovered over the past few months that it also works great to light up a face during a videoconference because (1) it has a long strip of LEDs so it provides even light across your face, (2) you can tilt the lamp up so that it shines light on your face, and (3) you can adjust the brightness and the light temperature to provide more natural light on your face.  When I use my iPad to join a videoconference, I turn on this lamp and adjust it so that my face looks much better.

I recently bought a second one of these lamps to keep on the desk at my office at my law firm.  Overhead fluorescent lights in an office are not great sources of lighting.  Now, whenever I’m at work and I have a videoconference, I can easily get much better lighting on my face.

And when you are not on a videoconference and you just want a nice lamp, this is a fine lamp.  Because it is an LED lamp, it doesn’t get hot.  I like that you can adjust the brightness and temperature so that it provides just the right amount of light to a document or whatever else you are reading.  It also has a handy USB port on the side, giving you an easily-accessible location to charge an iPhone or other device using a cord.  The other day, my Apple Watch didn’t charge overnight for some reason, so I used the lamp to bring my watch up to 100% while I was typing an appellate brief.  And if you don’t need to use the lamp, the arm folds down so that it takes up very little space.

Logitech HD Pro C922 webcam

Second, you will look better on your videoconferences if you use a nice camera.  The built-in front-facing camera on the iPhone is good, but the screen is too small for me to use in a videoconference unless I have no other option.  The built-in front-facing camera on most modern iPads is decent enough.  But what if you are using a computer?  As Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal recently reported, even if you are using a new laptop such as a MacBook Air or a Dell, all of the cameras are bad.  And if you use an external monitor with your laptop — that’s the setup I use in my office with my PC — there won’t even be a camera on the monitor.

I recently purchased a Logitech HD Pro C922 webcam, and I’ve been very happy with the video quality.  It is better than the built-in camera on the iMac that I use in my home office, and it is much better than the built-in camera on the Dell PC that I use for work. Sites that review webcams such as PC World, The Gadgeteer, and Wirecutter have raved about the quality of these Logitech webcams, and whenever I have been in a videoconference with someone else using this model, I’ve been very impressed.  Best of all, this thing is light and can sit anywhere on top of a monitor, so I can select the best place to put it on top of my external monitor so that I am looking right at the camera — and thus right at the court or my clients — when I’m using it. 

I will warn you that webcams have been incredibly hard to find ever since the COVID-19 pandemic started, and that is still true.  Even if you try to order directly from Logitech, this model has been sold out for months.  The link I’m providing is an Amazon link to a search result to give you more merchant options.  As I type this, for example, one of the options is the C922x (the same model that I have but without an included, tripod, which I don’t need anyway) for $150, which is about $50 more than you would normally pay for a camera like this if there were not a pandemic.  But if you don’t mind paying a little extra, you can get one now.  I was able to get mine because a partner at my law firm placed two orders with two vendors months ago, and when the second one finally came in, he sold it to me for the $100 he paid.  Hopefully, it won’t be long before it is much easier to purchase these webcams.

I think that a webcam is a good purchase because even after the pandemic is over — and PLEASE LET THAT DAY BE SOON — I suspect that attorneys and other professionals will be doing a lot more videoconferencing now that we have all gotten used to it.  By purchasing a light and a nice webcam, you will be prepared for the future.

To return to the main reason for this post, I love this new update to Fantastical.  If you already use the app, look out for these new features.  If you don’t, you can use many features in the app for free, and you can upgrade to a premium subscription if you want to take advantage of additional features for $5/month or $40/year.

Click here for Fantastical (free): 

Click here for the Lampat LED Desk Lamp from Amazon ($29.99)

Click here for the Logitech HD Pro C922 webcam from Amazon (price varies)

The iPad is a perfect tool for any attorney going paperless, and more and more of the documents that attorneys work with are already digital.  But sometimes you encounter a paper document that you need to scan.  In my law office, the copy machine does a great job of scanning documents, but I often find it far more convenient to just use my iPhone as a scanner.  For a long time now, my go-to scanner app has been Readdle’s Scanner Pro app, which I reviewed in 2016.  Oliver Haslam of iMore discusses the latest update to Scanner Pro, which can now remove shadows from a scan.  I look forward to seeing how this works because shadows are occasionally a problem when using an iPhone to scan a document.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• I know that some attorneys use Signal to communicate securely with certain clients.  Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac explains how you can now transfer all of your Signal messages to a new iPhone.
• The Peabody Awards were announced this week, recognizing “the most compelling and empowering stories released in broadcasting and digital media during 2019.”  One of the 10 award winners in the Entertainment category was the Apple TV+ show Dickinson.  I enjoyed the first season of that show, although I thought that For All Mankind, The Morning Show, and Trying were even better.
• Walt Handelsman, the political cartoonist for the newspaper here in New Orleans, notes the social importance of smartphones.
• Adam Engst of TidBITS warns that the iCloud backup of your iPhone and iPad is deleted after 180 days.
• Caitlin McGarry of Gizmodo reviews the Logitech Combo Touch keyboard for iPad, which includes a trackpad.
• If you want to get a camera for your smart home, should you get one that is compatible with Apple’s HomeKit technology?  Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac explains the advantages of doing so.
• Oliver Haslam of iMore shares the story of a man in Pheonix who fainted, but fortunately, his Apple Watch noticed and automatically called for help.
• Apple has new page on its website explaining ways that the Apple Watch and iPhone can work well together.
• And finally, yesterday, California attorney David Sparks linked to an interesting video in which Arun Maini demonstrates — at the same time — how Apple’s Siri compares to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung’s Bixby.  Here it is:

I have been publishing iPhone J.D. for almost a dozen years, and for that entire time, the focus has been on how lawyers can use mobile devices to do a better job of seeking justice for their clients.  For the past two weeks, as the entire world has focused on abuses of power, I’ve thought about how mobile devices have also played a critical role in implementing the famous reminder by Justice Brandeis that sunlight is the best disinfectant.  A picture may tell a thousand words, but a video taken at the very time when power is being abused makes it easier for everyone to understand what is actually happening.  We see how long the knee is on the neck and how unconscionable that is.  We sympathize with peaceful protestors as they are gassed and beaten.  We understand injustice in a way that words alone cannot really convey.  As Apple improves the camera in the iPhone every year, it becomes an even better device for preserving memories of family and friends, and I love that, but it also becomes a better tool for social justice.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• If you own an Apple Watch, you know that, from time to time, you can earn an activity award in various different days.  Ryan Christoffel of MacStories reports that today you can earn an award for World Environment Day by simply closing your stand ring — get up and move around at least once during 12 different hours.  With all of the difficulties in modern life as a result of COVID-19 etc., it is nice to have an activity award that is easy to achieve.
• On the Apple website, Apple CEO Tim Cook shares his thoughts on speaking up on racism.
• In an interesting article for Macworld, Glenn Fleishman discusses what happens to digital purchases that a loved one made from Apple after they pass away.
• Joe Maring of AndroidCentral interviews developers to discuss how much more difficult it is to develop apps during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The article reveals that it is even harder to develop Android apps than iPhone apps because there are so many more different types of Android devices, so when a developer is not working in an office with access to lots of different devices to test, app development slows down.
• Chance Miller of 9to5Mac provides his impressions of the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro after six weeks of use.
• Samuel Axon of Ars Technica also reviews the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro.
• If you don’t have an Apple Card credit card yet, and if you sign up for one this month and spend $50 at Walgreens, you will get $50 back.  Details are on the Apple website.
• For attorneys and others with a lot on our plates, a good task manager can be essential.  Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reviews a new app called Tasks that allows you to organize tasks by project.  I haven’t tried the app yet, but this review makes it sound pretty good.
• And finally, last night I saw a trailer for a new series starting on Apple TV+ today that looks like it could be uplifting during these troubled times.  It is called “Dear…” and it profiles game-changing individuals such as Spike Lee, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stevie Wonder, Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, and even Big Bird, who have inspired many people to do great things:

It hasn’t been that many days since Apple released iOS 13.5, which I called the COVID-19 update, but yesterday Apple released iOS 13.5.1 and iPadOS 13.5.1  When Apple releases an update that close to a prior update, you know that it must be to address some sort of bug.  In this case, it was a security update, which Apple says addresses a “memory consumption issue” that resulted in an app being able to “execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.”  It was well-known that there was some kind of security flaw in iOS 13.5 because many websites, such as Lifehacker, offered instructions for how to jailbreak an iPhone running iOS 13.5. 

In the very early days of the iPhone, I know that some folks had a legitimate reason to jailbreak an iPhone — i.e., bypass the normal iPhone security to do something that the iPhone is not designed to do.  For example, it used to be impossible to show off everything on an iPhone screen on an external monitor.  Folks who wanted to teach people how to use an iPhone would sometimes jailbreak an iPhone to connect it to a projector and mirror everything on the screen.  Of course, that particular feature has been part of iOS for a long time now.

Nowadays, some folks jailbreak just to tinker around with the iPhone, but the most popular reason to jailbreak is to run pirate software (often games) that a user has not paid for.  And the potential downside of jailbreaking is huge; you make your device vulnerable to malware that would not be a threat to a normal iPhone, and also risk making it not work correctly.  If you are using your iPhone or iPad to get work done, and especially if you are an attorney with confidential information on your device, I strongly discourage jailbreaking and I strongly encourage installing security updates whenever Apple releases them. 

If you bought a new Apple device in the past few months, then you have free access to the AppleTV+ service.  There are some great shows on there — I loved For All Mankind and The Morning Show, and so far I am really enjoying Trying — and there are  other shows that are good enough to enjoy even if they won’t win any awards.  But today, I want to mention Mythic Quest, a comedy about a videogame company.  The first season came out a while ago with nine episodes, some of which were better than others, but the standout episode is the one in the middle, Episode 5.  Apple recently released a tenth episode called Quarantine, which was filmed by all of the actors in their homes using iPhones.  There have been tons of things filmed using webcams over the last few months, from episodes of Saturday Night Live to concerts to late night TV shows.  But so far, this tenth episode may be my favorite of this new genre.  It is worth watching all of the other nine episodes of Mythic Quest just so that you get to know the characters and can fully appreciate Episode 10, which is fantastic.  So if you are looking for something to do while you shelter at home, I recommend that you watch Mythic Quest and prepare to enjoy the laughs during Episode 10.  You can learn more about how this episode was created in this article by Lacey Rose of The Hollywood Reporter, but you should watch the episode before you read that article because it has some spoilers.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Michigan attorney Jonathan Frank reached out to me this week to share a post on LinkedIn about his first Zoom arbitration, including how he used his iPhone connected to a monitor.  My experiences with trial and appellate court hearings using Zoom has been very positive.  You lose something by not being there in person, but you gain so much in convenience and efficiency that overall I think that it is a better experience.  I haven’t done a mediation or arbitration via Zoom yet, and as Jonathan notes in his post, that is a different type of experience because it can go on for so long.
• One week ago, a bug caused many iPhone and iPad apps to be unable to launch, giving the error “This app is no longer shared with you.”  A version of this bug has been around for a while, and I posted a fix for it a year ago.  Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reports that Apple has now fixed the bug.  That’s great news, and I’ll be curious to see if Apple’s fix only addressed the new version of the bug that surfaced last week or if Apple also fixed the bug that I have been seeing every few months for over a year.
• Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reviews the Yobi B3, a smart doorbell that works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
• Andrew O’Hara of AppleInsider reviews the Logitech Circle View, a smart security camera that works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
• Glenn Fleishman of Macworld offers advice for participating in a videoconference using your iPhone and a large TV (such as a TV connected to an Apple TV) so that you can see the other participants on a larger screen.
• Jason Snell of Six Colors charts all of the releases of iOS over time.
• And finally, almost a year ago, I mentioned a video from Apple called Bounce that shows, in an exaggerated fashion, how freeing it is to use AirPods.  As reported by Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac, that advertisement recently won the Best in Show award at the 99th ADC Awards.  It’s a great video, and worth watching again:

Back in 2014 and 2015, Apple revamped the way that photos are stored and managed on the iPhone/iPad and the Mac, and at the same time changed the name from “iPhoto” to “Photos.”  Around that time, California attorney David Sparks created a Video Field Guide to show and talk through the apps.  I reviewed that guide almost exactly five years ago.  In the past five years, Apple has made a huge number of changes to Photos, especially in iOS 13.  Accordingly, David has spent the last year creating an all-new Second Edition of his Photos Field Guide.  The first edition had over two hours of videos.  This second edition has over six hours of video, about 128 individual videos.  David provided me with a free review copy of this Field Guild as soon as it was released a few days ago, and I enjoyed spending lots of time with it over the long Memorial Day Weekend.  It sells for $29, but for a limited time you can purchase for only $24.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get the most out of the Photos app on their iPhone or iPad.  (And if you also use a Mac, the Guide also fully covers the Mac version of Photos.)

The Photos Field Guide is perfect for anyone who appreciates that there are lots of features in the Photos app but who hasn’t taken the significant time to figure all of them out yet.  David goes through virtually every feature in the app and for each feature shows how it works and explains why you would want to use the feature — or in some instances, why you are better off not using the feature.

David has created about a dozen video Field Guides, and they are all available at the website learn.macsparky.com.  A few of them are even free.  Once you purchase the Photos Field Guide, you will be able to click the guide from the main page of that website and start to use it.

The primary way to use the Field Guide is in a web browser.  I mostly used the Photos Field Guide in Safari on my iPad, and it worked great.  I also used it on a Mac, just a little, to see how it worked there, and that also worked well.  All of the chapters are listed on the left.  Simply tap on a chapter to have the video play on the right.  You can tap a button in the bottom right of the video to have it fill the screen, which is how I watched most of the videos.

The Photos Field Guide includes chapters devoted to every aspect of the app.  There are chapters with tips for taking better photos and using all of the features in the Camera app and chapters on recommended accessories such as small tripods that work well with the iPhone.  There are chapters for importing photos that you take with another camera, such as a DSLR camera.  There are chapters on managing the photos in your library, editing photos, organizing your photos, finding photos (and discovering the ones that you might have forgotten about), and sharing photos.  There are also three chapters on working with video.

And those are just the chapters devoted to the iPhone and iPad.  There also versions of most of these same chapters devoted to the Photos app on the Mac.  And David Sparks points out when there is a function that you currently can only do on the iPhone/iPad but not on the Mac (such as advanced video editing functions) and on the Mac but not on the iPhone/iPad (such as using the retouch tool to remove a blemish).  (In the iPhone/iPad chapters, he shows how you can work around that limitation by using third-party apps to remove a blemish from a photo.)

The chapters on finding and managing photos are particularly useful.  When I started practicing law in the mid-1990s, a single roll of film on a camera might take my wife and I months to finish.  Nowadays, I may take dozens or even hundreds of photos on my iPhone in a single day.  With so many more pictures, knowing how to use photo management tools is essential.  For example, I love that I can easily tell Photos on my iPad to show me pictures of my daughter, taken in 2012, on the beach, and then I’m instantly looking at those pictures.

The logical way to use the Field Guide is to read the chapters in order, but you don’t have to do it that way.  If a particular chapter doesn’t interest you, you can just skip it.  Or you can jump around to the chapters that interest you.  When you complete a chapter, a checkmark appears next to the chapter name to make it easy to keep track of what you have already watched.

A bar and number at the top left tells you how much of the Field Guide you have completed so far.

What I love about this Field Guide is that David shows you the actual screen of his iPad (or iPhone or Mac) so you can see exactly what he is doing while he explains to you what he is doing.  These are not videos in which you see his face talking about the app.  The only time I saw a video with David talking to the camera was in the very last chapter at the end of the book, a 29-second video called “Thanks.”

I also like that David shows how to work with the Photos app using his actual Photos app, not some limited mock-up.  That way, when he gives tips for managing a lot of photos, you see him doing so with his tens of thousands of photos.  Yes, that means that you see a ton of pictures of David’s family and friends, a lot of pictures of Disneyland because he is a fan and it is close to his home, and even some pictures of his very cute puppy. 

I will note that there were a very few instances in which I wish that he had used a photo designed to illustrate a particular function instead of just a convenient picture from his own library.  For example, when he showed off the powerful vertical and horizontal perspective features, he did so on a photo taken at Disneyland that didn’t even need the adjustment.  (For an example of how you might use that feature in real life, look at the two pictures of a PowerPoint slide showing a horse in this post.)  But for most of the time, it was helpful to see him using the features with his real photo library because it felt like how I would be using the Photos app with my own, real, library of photos.

There are some settings that you can adjust in the Photos Field Guide, such as changing from 1x play speed to a faster or slower play speed.  You can also download individual videos so that you can watch them later without an Internet connection.  And to make that easier, at the very end of the Field Guide, David combined all of the chapters in each section of the book into a single video for each section (21 sections total) so that you can easily download a series of chapters devoted to a topic without having to download a dozen individual chapters for each section.

I consider myself a fairly advanced user of the Photos app – I take a ton of pictures (over 50,000 in my Photos library) and frequently edit the pictures either in the Photos app on my iPhone/iPad/Mac or using Photoshop on my Mac or iPad — and I still learned quite a few things from the Photos Field Guide.  For example, I found his tips on sharing photos especially useful because David explained the limitations on certain sharing methods that you can avoid using other sharing methods, something I did not fully understand.  If you consider yourself an intermediate or beginning user of Photos, then you will find this resource even more valuable.

And I say that from experience.  After the first edition of David’s Photos Field Guide came out five years ago, I got a copy for my grandmother.  Even though she was in her late 80s, she loved working with her photos on her Mac, and she would tell me how she would watch parts of that Field Guide over and over again until she had figured out how to master each task.  Watching a video in which someone shows and explains how to do something is often far more useful than looking at a book, and my grandmother loved learning how to do more with all of the photos that she had accumulated (and scanned) from a lifetime of vacations and family events.  My grandmother has now passed away, but I know that if she were still around, the second edition of this Field Guide would have brought a big smile to her face.  And because of the work that she did with her digital photos while she was still alive, I love that I can still go through her photos that she organized so well.

Finally, while this guide would be useful at any time, now that we are all spending more time at home as a result of COVID-19, this is a perfect opportunity to find some time on a weekend to curl up with your iPad (or Mac) and learn from the Photos Field Guide.  You will quickly find yourself doing more with the pictures that you already have, and then in the future, you will do more with your photos than ever before.

Click here to get the Photos Field Guide (2nd Edition) ($24 for a limited time)

Just about every lawyer stores lots of confidential information on an iPhone or iPad, protected by the device’s passcode.  But both good guys and bad guys are always looking for ways to hack that passcoce.  Olivia Solon of NBC News reported this week that Grayshift, a company that makes iPhone-cracking devices for law enforcement, has a new trick up its sleeve.  In the past, the Grayshift device would try to guess the iPhone passcode.  As John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains, an iPhone is made so that it cannot accept more than 12.5 guesses per second.  That means that a four-digit passcode would take on average seven minutes to crack (14 minutes maximum, if the last possible guess was the right one), and a six-digit passcode (the current default) takes on average 11 hours to guess, 22 hours at most.  Go up to ten digits, and the average goes up to 12.5 years.  Go over ten digits and/or use letters in addition to numbers (which is what I do), and the time to crack a passcode goes up exponentially.  But with the new software from Grayshift, called Hide UI, a law enforcement official takes your iPhone, connects it to the Grayshift hardware, and then returns the iPhone to you.  When you next enter your passcode, Hide UI secretly runs in the background and watches the passcode that you enter.  Then the official takes your iPhone back, and they can get in.  When this type of tool is used by good guys, like law enforcement trying to protect lives, that’s great news.  When bad guys steal your phone and do the same thing to access your confidential attorney-client information, that’s horrible news.  Be careful out there, and advise your clients to do the same.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• If you use Microsoft Teams for videochat, you saw this week that Microsoft finally added 3×3 video so that you can see nine people at once (plus yourself) instead of four.  It’s a nice improvement, and long overdue.  But unfortunately, the iPad app still only shows four people, one of whom is you.  According to a post on Microsoft User Feedback Forum, Microsoft is “continuing to work to include more videos during a meeting, as well as enabling support for mobile devices.”
• Many attorneys are now attending trial and appellate court hearings via videochat.  (I had my first such hearing earlier this week, and the process worked well.)  Ideally, you will be in a well-lit environment with a nice background, but if not, you can use a virtual background with Zoom, Teams, and many other services.  As Ray Ward of the Louisiana Civil Appeals blog wrote this week, the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal has offered some background images that oral advocates can use to make it look like they are standing in the courtroom in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Cute idea.
• Apple added many more Pride Apple Watch faces this week — the ones with rainbows.  Killian Bell of Cult of Mac explains how to access them.
• Harry McCracken of Fast Company reviews the Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro.
• Dave McNary of Variety reports that the new Tom Hanks submarine drama called Greyhound was supposed to be the big movie in theaters right now, but in light of COVID-19, Sony decided to sell the release rights to Apple for its Apple TV+ video service.  No word yet on when the movie will be available to watch.
• Don’t force quite apps on your iPhone unless they are not working correctly and need to be restarted.  Adam Engst of TidBITS explains why.
• Leif Johnson of PCWorld notes that if you pair AirPods with Windows 10, the microphone doesn’t work as well as it does on an iPhone or Mac.  I didn’t know that.
• And finally, here is a beautiful video released by Apple a few months ago called Otherworldly:  Valley of Fire.  The whole thing was filmed on an iPhone 11 Pro using the Ultra Wide camera.:

Yesterday, Apple released the latest update to the iPhone operating system.  Apple just calls it iOS 13.5, but to me, this is the COVID-19 update.  It includes a number of changes to make the iPhone work better in a world in which we are dealing with the coronavirus.  Here are the major new features.

Mask detection

We all need to wear masks in public, but if you have a newer iPhone with Face ID, that means that you cannot simply look at your iPhone to unlock it.  Face ID examines your eyes, nose, and mouth to confirm that you are really you, and it won’t unlock your iPhone if your nose and mouth are covered up.  Before iOS 13.5, it took the iPhone a short period of time to scan your face looking for a nose and mouth that it would never find because of a mask before it would finally give up to switch to a mode where you enter your passcode.

With iOS 13.5, your iPhone notices in a fraction of a second that you are wearing a mask and jumps directly to the screen where you enter your passcode.  Even though this only saves seconds, it actually removes quite a bit of aggravation.  This was a great idea — and one that most of us never would have thought of before a few months ago.

Exposure notification

Experts such as the CDC say that contact tracing is a “key strategy for preventing further spread of COVID-19.”  When someone gets COVID-19, it is helpful to quickly notify others who may have caught the disease from that person so that they can be quarantined before they unknowingly spread it to others.  Contact tracing is often done by a public health official asking a sick person where they have been.  But nobody has perfect memories, and even if you know the exact time that you were in an exact place, how do you know who else was close to you?

iOS 13.5 includes the first version of the exposure notification software developed jointly by Apple and Google.  And it is done in a way that protects your privacy.  If you choose to participate, once a public health official confirms that you have COVID-19, then other smartphones that were sufficiently close to your smartphone (as measured by Bluetooth) for a sufficient amount of time give their owner a notification that they may have been exposed to COVID-19.  All of this is done with privacy in mind.  You have no way of knowing who they are and they have no way of knowing how you are.  And unlike some contact tracing software in which the government keeps a central database of everywhere that your phone has been, the Apple/Google approach doesn’t make this information available.

The privacy emphasis is good not only because it is inherently good to protect your privacy but also because that encourages more folks to turn on this feature.  The more people that use the system, the more that the system can do to protect us all.

Note that iOS 13.5 is only the first step, just the back-end software that exists on your iPhone.  To actually take advantage the exposure notification feature, you need to do two things.  First, you need to download a free app provided by your country or state or other locality that is designed to work with the Apple/Google data.  Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal reports that, here in the United States, the states of North Dakota, Alabama, and South Carolina will soon have their apps available.  Parish Dave of Reuters reports that 22 countries are considering releasing compatible apps.

Second, you need to turn on the feature in the Settings app.  Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Bluetooth -> COVID-19 Exposure Logging to turn it on.  You can see this setting once you download iOS 13.5, but you cannot do anything with it until you have installed an authorized app.

 

I hope that we don’t have to wait long to see apps in all 50 states and many other countries.  Also, I hope that lots of folks take advantage of this feature.  Much like wearing a mask, the more that people participate, the more that we are all protected.

Eliminate FaceTime nausea

Before COVID-19, I only used FaceTime to talk to one person at a time.  But now that we need to stay apart from our friends and family, I’ve had more group FaceTime calls to talk to several family members at once.  Unlike some other services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams that have fixed rectangles to indicate different people, a group FaceTime calls uses an interesting feature in which the rectangles float around the screen and the rectangle for the person who is speaking grows largers while others get smaller.  In theory, it is a neat trick.

In practice, it sometimes makes me feel seasick to see shapes moving around the screen getting bigger and smaller.  Fortunately, iOS 13.5 gives you the option to turn this off.  Go to Settings -> FaceTime -> Speaking to turn off the automatic prominence feature that changes the size of the tiles based upon who is speaking.

I’m glad to see this option, because other than this annoyance, I find the quality of group FaceTime calls to be very high.  Now that I have this option, I’m much more likely to use group FaceTime to talk to a group of people who are all using Apple devices.

Tell emergency services who you are

Hopefully, none of us will ever need to call 9-1-1 or whatever the emergency services number is in your part of the world, but it is nice to know that the service is there if you need it.  In iOS 13.5, if you call emergency services — whether for a COVID-19 reason or something else — you can choose to have your iPhone share a limited amount of your health data automatically, information that can make it faster and easier to get the medical attention that is best for you.

Before discussing this new feature, let’s talk about the iPhone Medical ID, a feature that has been available since the release of iOS 8 on September 17, 2014.  In the iPhone’s Health app, you can add information selected by you such as your name, age, medications, blood type, and emergency contacts to a Medical ID card.  If someone finds you in a state in which you cannot communicate, they can pick up your iPhone and (if you have it enabled) see the information on your Medical ID without having to unlock your iPhone.  (When on the lock screen on which the keypad is displayed, tap Emergency, then tap Medical ID, both of which are at the bottom left.)  That way, even if you cannot tell a medical professional or police officer this critical information, your iPhone will do it for you.  If you have a contact listed on your Medical ID with an associated phone number, that person can even use your iPhone to call that number without unlocking your device.  For example, the person could call your spouse to advise that you have been injured. 

The new feature in iOS 13.5 is that your iPhone can share this information with emergency services when you call them.  That way, they not only know where you are located but they also know who you are and other information that could be critical in a time-sensitive situation to help you as soon as possible.

Etc.

There are a few other minor new features.  For example, Ryan Christoffel of MacStories describes a new feature that lets you share a song, album, or playlist in Apple Music to Instagram and other services.

Also, like every update to the operating system of the iPhone and iPad, this update fixes some bugs and improves security.  Thus, I always recommend that folks update their iPhone and iPad when an update is available, except that you might want to wait a day or two just in case there are any problems with the rollout that Apple needs to fix.  I had no trouble yesterday when I updated my iPhone to iOS 13.5 and my iPad to iPad OS 13.5, nor have I seen reports of others encountering problems, so I think that this update is safe to install.

My entire family has been working and attending school from home for the past eight weeks.  Although New Orleans is slowing starting to open up tomorrow, I have no doubt that we will be spending a lot more time at home in 2020 than in prior years.  That means that the Wi-Fi at my house has been getting much more use than normal, and I suspect that the same is true for many of you.  At my house, I’m still using the Apple AirPort Extreme system that I described in this 2015 post, but Apple stopped selling and upgrading that equipment long ago, and I’ve been considering an upgrade to improve performance throughout my house.  If you are also considering an upgrade to your Wi-Fi hardware, the best systems today seem to be the mesh Wi-Fi systems such as the Eero Pro.  California attorney David Sparks points out on his MacSparky website that Apple is now selling Eero products in its online store, an indication that Apple approves of the product, and he notes that the system has been working well for him.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Samuel Axon of Ars Technica reports that Apple has acquired NextVR for an estimated $100 million.  We don’t know exactly what Apple has planned for AR and VR in the future, but the company is clearly working on something big.
• One way to see why a lot of people are very happy with Apple’s new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro is to take a look inside of the product.  iFixIt used X-Ray photography and took a Magic Keyboard apart to show how it all works.
• If you are interested in using a stylus with your iPad but don’t want to pay $99 or $129 for an Apple Pencil, Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the Meco Stylus Pen, which costs $33 on Amazon.
• If you are interested in using a stylus with your iPad and want your stylus to also sterilize your iPad screen, the Apple Pencil won’t do that — and I think that it is safe to predict that the Apple Pencil will never do that — but the new Adonit Note-UVC will, according to Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac.
• Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac reports that a new smart lock from August is smaller than previous models and works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that Apple’s A13 chip used in its newest iPhones, including the $400 iPhone SE, is faster than any chip used on even the most expensive Android phone that you can buy.
• Ben Lovejoy of 9to5 reports that a Stanford University study is trying to determine if the Apple Watch can detect COVID-19. 
• And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal prepared an interesting video showing how the exposure notification app that should soon be available on the iPhone (and Android) works:

I am presenting a 90-minute webinar CLE this Friday, May 15, at 9:30 Central to provide tips for using an iPad and iPhone in your law practice.  I’ll be talking about viewing and editing documents, taking handwritten notes, security issues, recommended apps, tips for being more efficient, the latest software and hardware, and much more.  I have some slides prepared, but in addition, this will be the first time that I have conducted an online CLE in which I will be doing a live demonstration from my iPad to show you exactly how I use my device.  Hopefully, that will make this more interesting than a typical webinar in which you only see slide after slide.  Participants will also have the opportunity to ask questions for me to answer.

The online CLE is sponsored by the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, and you can click here to register.  Loyola is charging $30 for the seminar, and it is approved for 1.5 hours of Louisiana CLE credit.  Depending upon the CLE rules in your state, you may be able to get credit for it in other states too.  With so many states approving online CLE during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is nice to be able to get CLE hours without having to leave home.

I hope to see some of you there!