Two years ago, at the same time that Apple introduced the Apple Watch Series 3, Apple introduced its first Sport Loop band for the Apple Watch. Until last month, I had never tried one. This year, with the Apple Watch Series 5, Apple has introduced a new mix-and-match approach where you can purchase almost any Apple Watch band to pair with any style of Apple Watch. (You do, however, have to purchase some type of band; you cannot just purchase the body of the watch without any band.). So when I purchased an Apple Watch Series 5, I used that as an opportunity to try out something new and I opted for one of Apple’s Sport Loop bands — which cost $49, just like Apple’s Sport Band. If I had any idea how fantastic this band is, I would have purchased one two years ago. This is by far the most comfortable band that I’ve ever used with the Apple Watch.
Hook-and-loop
The Sport Loop band opens and closes with a hook-and-loop … don’t call it Velcro™ … system. But more than just a fastener, the hook-and-loop is what defines this entire band. Almost all of the band is composed of a double-layer nylon weave with tiny loops.
You cannot really see the loops with your eyes, but they make the entire band very soft, light, and breathable.
Underneath one of the ends of this band are five small pads with hooks on them. The hooks are smaller than any other hook-and-loop or Velcro system that I’ve tried before, so much so that when I touch the hooks they almost don’t even feel like hooks. But when you place the end of the band down, the hooks easily attach to the loops.
You can sweat while working out with this band and it dries very quickly thanks to the tiny loops. One of the biggest complaints about the Apple’s Sport Band is that sweat can get trapped under the band. The Nike version of the Sport Band tries to solve that by having lots of holes in the band, but that still isn’t a perfect solution. With the Sport Loop, unlike the Sport Band, I never really notice sweat. I do notice that the Sport Loop will get a little damp as it absorbs sweat but then it dries out pretty quickly.
I haven’t tried swimming with the Sport Loop, but I have gotten it completely drenched in a sink. The nylon band absorbed a small amount of water but not enough to feel like it was getting heavy — nothing like a wet cotton cloth rag — and it dries pretty quickly once your arm is out of the water.
Perhaps my favorite feature is that the nylon loops give this band a very soft and comfortable feel. I also own Apple’s Woven Nylon band, and it feels nothing at all like the Sport Loop band even though both bands use woven nylon. The Woven Nylon band feels good but feels flat. This one feels soft.
The hook-and-loop system adds a feature to this band that I also love with Apple’s Milanese Loop band: the band adjusts to any size. With other bands like the Sport Band, Classic Buckle, and Woven Nylon band, sometimes one hole can be a little too tight and one hole can be a little too lose. By using hook-and-loop or magnets, the Sport Loop and the Milanese Loop can be adjusted to the perfect size.
But the Sport Loop is even better than the Milanese Loop because the band itself is slightly strechy. So if your wrist gets just slightly bigger or smaller during the day, you don’t need to adjust the Sport Loop band. It is always snug without being too tight around your writ. And unlike the Milanese Loop, the Sport Loop won’t slide up and down your wrist unless your purposefully make the band too lose.
Size
I have a larger wrist, around 215mm. While I can use a large Sport band (which Apple says is designed for up to 210mm wrists), I prefer the XL version (designed for up to 245mm wrists), which currently comes in only black. Apple says that the Sport Loop for the 44mm Apple Watch is designed for 145-220mm wrists. Even though I’m at the top of that range, the Sport Loop fits great on my wrist. And it looks to me like you could probably go up to 225-230mm before your wrist would be too large to use the Sport Loop (because then the part of the band with the five pads of hooks would not be able to fold over). On the other extreme, if you have a small wrist and use a 40mm Apple Watch, the Sport Loop is designed for a 130-200mm wrist. If your wrist size is around 130mm or smaller, I imagine that you might run out of room to fasten the band, so you might want to try a Sport Loop in an Apple retail store before buying it.
Style
Rene Ritchie of iMore calls the Sport Loop the yoga pants of Apple Watch bands, and that’s not a bad comparison. It’s very comfortable. I love this band so much that I would be tempted to wear it all day long with my Apple Watch. But just like those yoga pants wouldn’t be appropriate for work, I find the style of the watch to be a little casual for work. Thus, I’ve been using the Milanese Loop at work and when I want to look more dressy at night, and I’ve been switching to the Sport Loop after work, on the weekends, and when working out.
If you are thinking about buying this band, keep in mind that it has a loop style. Like the Milanese Loop, this band always forms a circle with the watch. You slide your hand in and out of the circle to put it on or take it off. If you use some sort of a stand for your Apple Watch charger, make sure that it works for the band to loop around the stand; you cannot just have two wings coming off of each side of the watch like you can with many other bands.
The Sport Loop comes in lots of different colors. When the watch was first released in 2017, the colors were uniform on both sides of the watch band. Although Apple no longer sells that style of Sport Loop band in its online store, you can still find it on Amazon. Indeed, as of the time that I am typing this, some of the colors such as Indigo and Hibiscus are on sale on Amazon for under $25, which is a fantastic price.
If you buy from Apple, the current generation of the Sport Loop (other than Pride Edition) has one color on one side and a different color or shade on the other side. Because the Sport Loop wraps around itself, the end result is that it looks like the band coming from the top of the Apple Watch is a different color/shade than the band coming from the bottom of the Apple Watch.
The current color combinations being sold by Apple this season are Anchor Gray with two shades of gray, Midnight Blue with black one one side and blue on the other and a blue trim, Alaskan Blue, with a darker blue on one side and a lighter blue on the other side and a yellow trim (the one that I bought), Khaki with one side blue and one side tan, Camel with one side yellow and one side lighter tan with a light blue trim, Pomegranate with two colors that are almost pink, and Pride Edition. To my eye, they all look like nice combinations. Having said that, if Apple were still selling versions that used the same single color on both sides, I’d probably opt for that style.
Conclusion
If you plan to get your Apple Watch wet a lot, such as when swimming, or if you will be using your Apple Watch in an environment in which food or other substances are likely to come in contact with your band, then the Sport Band with its easy-to-wipe-off fluoroelastomer might be the best band for you. But otherwise, the Sport Loop band is so incredibly comfortable that it gets my highest recommendation. I’m very happy that I opted for this style when I purchased my Apple Watch Series 5. If you are not buying a new Apple Watch, consider buying one from Apple for $49 or getting one of the older color styles on Amazon for only $25.
Having said that, the Sport Loop is such a casual watch band that I recommend that you also get a nicer watch band to wear whenever you are dressed up. For me, that is the Milanese Loop.
Almost every week for over ten years, I’ve been collecting the news of note related to the iPhone from the prior week and posting a Friday column called In the news. Add them all up and you’ll see that today is the 500th edition, a number that I certainly did not have in mind when I wrote this post in 2009. If you are interested, I explained the origin of In the newsback in 2011 when I published the 100th edition. Having said that, if you are around my age and used to watch Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s and/or early 1980s, then you already know what my inspiration was for the title. Before I head out to the fancy 500th celebration gala, here is the news of note from the past week:
Lit Software makes some of the very best apps for attorneys who use an iPad, such as TrialPad and TranscriptPad, and has more lawyer-specific apps coming in the future. In a post on the Lit Software blog, the company explains what is on the future roadmap for Lit Software, including a new subscription model and better support for iPadOS 13.
In an article for Law Technology Today, attorney Dennis Kennedy discusses attorney use of cloud computing, including use on mobile devices.
Illinois attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses the new features in GoodNotes, my favorite app for taking handwritten notes on the iPad (and a current sponsor of iPhone J.D.)
This week, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who developed lithium-ion batteries: Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough, and Akira Yoshino. As John Timmer of Ars Technica explains, that discovery spawned the mobile-electronic revolution, including the iPhone. And in an article in the New York Times, Prof. Whittingham is quoted as saying that “he always hoped lithium-ion technology would grow, ‘but we never envisaged it growing this far. We never imagined it being ubiquitous in things like iPhones.'” Congrats! All three of you are invited to New Orleans for the 500th celebration gala.
When iOS 13.0 debuted on September 19, 2019, it had an unfortunate number of bugs, resulting in the need for numerous software updates over the past few weeks. Chaim Gartenberg of The Verge says that there is still a long way to go, but fortunately, both iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 are fairly stable for me now.
iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 are very similar, but there are some important differences, as noted by David Nield of Gizmodo.
If you liked the idea of using a Logitech Crayon with your iPad instead of an Apple Pencil but the bright colors deterred you from doing so, Malcolm Ower of AppleInsider reports that you can now buy an all-gray version of the Crayon for the same price of $70.
In just a few weeks, Apple will debut its Apple TV+ streaming video service. Ramin Setoodeh of Variety interviews Jennifer Aniston, who talks about her new show and why she brought it to Apple TV+. Aniston explained that Apple is “all about quality, not quantity, so that was really appealing. And in spite of their comical secrecy, it’s been worth it. Who doesn’t want to be part of the Wild Wild West?”
And finally, here is a one-minute video from Apple that shows off some of the new features of iPadOS 13. In showing off the new swipe-to-type feature that Apple calls Quick Path, the video shows that you can pinch on the full-size iPad keyboard to turn it into a small, iPhone-size keyboard. Even when I’m not using Quick Path, I use that feature quite a bit when I want to type something but I also want to be able to see more items on my screen. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should check it out.
I recently tried to sync my iPhone 11 Pro to my Mac (using iTunes on macOS Mojave) and I was told that there was not enough space on my iPhone to fit everything that iTunes wanted to sync. That seemed wrong to me; there should have been plenty of space on my iPhone. The specific error message that iTunes gave me was: The iPhone ‘Jeff iPhone Pro’ cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all of the items in the iTunes library (additional 85.03 required).
The strange thing was that iTunes was also telling me that my iPhone had about 70 GB in free space more than my iPhone itself was telling me that it had. Why would iTunes think that my iPhone had more free space than my iPhone itself did? And which one was correct?
It turns out that my Mac was correct and my iPhone was wrong. To try to see what was taking up all of the space, and to try to account for the huge discrepancy between what iTunes and my iPhone thought was available for free space, on my iPhone I opened the Settings app, went to General, and then tapped on iPhone Storage. From there, I could see that my TV app was taking up over 140 GB in space, but when I reviewed the files in my TV app there were only about 70 GB in files. In other words, my iPhone somehow thought that my videos downloaded to my TV app were about twice as large as they really were.
The solution was to do a hard reset on my iPhone. How you do this depends upon the model of iPhone that you are using, and Apple has a webpage with all of the instructions. For modern iPhones (from the iPhone X and iPhone 8 and forward), you quickly press and release the volume up button, quickly press and release the volume down button, and then hold down the side button for about 10 seconds or so until you see the screen turn black and then the Apple logo appears, showing that your phone is restarting.
After I did this, my iPhone reported that there was only about 70 GB of videos in the TV app on my iPhone. Also, iTunes on my Mac was happy to sync with my iPhone, now that both my Mac and my iPhone were in agreement on how much space was available.
Whether you encounter this particular bug or something else that you cannot figure out how to fix, the moral of this story is: if all else fails, restart … and if even that fails, then do a hard restart.
iPadOS 13 and iOS 13 included many changes that gave developers the opportunity to make their apps much better. Some developers have done a great job taking advantage of the new operating system, which has been great to see. GoodNotes is a sponsor of iPhone J.D. this month, which gives me a good excuse to discuss the extensive improvement that were made to this app to take advantage of iPadOS 13.
But before I do so, let me note that GoodNotes has been my favorite app for taking handwritten notes on the iPad for many years, long before it first became a sponsor last month. I use this app almost every day in my law practice, whether I am taking notes while on the phone or in a meeting, talking to a client, in a CLE, or in court. GoodNotes comes with lots of different paper styles, or you can take any PDF document and turn it into a template for the virtual paper in a notebook. GoodNotes comes with a legal pad template, but I prefer to use one that I created myself because I like having the dotted red lines on the left and right side. If you want to download my legal paper template and use it yourself with your own notebooks in GoodNotes, click here to download my legal paper template file. Also, while GoodNotes is primarily an app to use on an iPad, there is also an iPhone app which syncs all of your notebooks. Thus, if you need to look at something from your notes and you only have your iPhone with you, you still have access to your notes.
Here are the features that are new to GoodNotes on an iPad running iPadOS 13:
Multiple windows of GoodNotes at the same time
You can now have two instances of GoodNotes running side-by-side. This opens up lots of possibilities. Sometimes I use this because I want to review one set of notes while I am writing another set of notes.
Sometimes I use this to open two instances of the same set of notes so that I can use different pages. For example, I often attend a meeting where there is an agenda sent around by email before the meeting. I will often make the first page of notes the agenda. If it is a PDF file, I just insert that file before the first page of notes. Then I take my notes. A few pages in, I may find that it is helpful to see the agenda at the same time that I am taking notes, and with GoodNotes 5.3, this is now easy. I can put my agenda on the left (page 1 of the notes) while I continue to handwrite on the right side on a different page of the notes.
There are lots of ways that you can start the dual-screen mode. First, when you are looking at one document in GoodNotes, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal the dock and then drag GoodNotes app from your dock to the right side of the screen, where it will open up a new instance of GoodNotes. Second, if you already have multiple tabs in use in GoodNotes, you can hold down on one of the tabs and drag it over to the right side. Third, when you are looking at all of your folders or documents in the library view, just select a folder or document and drag it over to the right side of the screen. Or you can use the action menu on any one document to select Open in New Window. Fourth, when you are looking at all of the pages of a single document in the thumbnail view, just drag any page to the right to create a new window. Fifth, if you have at least two tabs open, you will an icon at the top right of each notebook; tap that icon to see an option to open that notebook in a new window.
It is great to have all of these options to start the two-window mode. Suffice it to say however it feels natural to you to open a second window in GoodNotes, that approach is likely to be supported.
Although I mostly use the two-window approach so that I can look at something on the left while I write on the right, you can also copy something from one notebook to the other one. Use the lasso tool to draw a circle around something in one notebook. Then tap down on your selection and hold for just a second, until the object seems to lift off of the screen a little bit. Now you can drag to the other window, and when you do so whatever you copied will be pasted.
If you have the thumbnail view open on one of the sides, you can drag a page of that document into the other document. This approach creates an image of the document and inserts that image in the second document. Because you can scale this image larger or stronger, you can use this feature if you want to annotate a document but there isn’t enough room in the margins. With this method, you can move an image of a document into a page, then scale the image to whatever size you want, and then the margins around the image give you lots of space to write in the margins about the document.
Presentation Mode
When you use GoodNotes and your iPad is connected to an external monitor, you can decide what kind of Presenter Mode works best for you. One option is to just mirror the entire screen; the audience sees everything that you see. Another option is to mirror the presenter page. That way, the audience sees everything on the screen except that the audience doesn’t see the tools and other interface elements. Thus, the audience won’t see as you select a new pencil or pen or highlighter; they will just see what you write as you are writing it. Third, there is a similar view called mirror full page. This is similar to the second mode except that when you zoom in on your iPad, the audience will continue to see the full page. Thus, you can zoom in to write or draw something in a more precise fashion but the audience will just see the end result.
Note that there is also a laser pointer function in GoodNotes, so you can show your audience notes and then use the laser pointer to emphasize certain things while you are speaking.
If you are using the new side-by-side window function, the audience will only see one of the windows. Thus, you can have your presentation notes open in a window that only you can see as you write something in the window that your audience can see.
Dark Mode
If you enjoy using Dark Mode on your iPad, GoodNotes works with that too. Of course, your paper will probably be white or yellow or some other color, so to fully take advantage of Dark Mode, choose one of the new dark paper templates so that you are writing on dark paper. So far I’ve only played around with this mode, but if you are taking handwritten notes in a very dark environment, I can see it being much less obnoxious to use Dark Mode with a dark paper background.
OCR scanning
I mentioned above that I often take the meeting agenda and make that the first page of my notes. This is easy to do if someone previously sent you the agenda in a PDF file. What if they just hand you a piece of paper with the agenda? That isn’t a problem thanks to the new OCR scanning feature.
Tap the + button at the top right to add a new page, and then select Scan Documents. You can then use your iPad to take a picture of the document. Edge detection is automatic, but you can adjust the corners yourself or switch to manual mode. GoodNotes will take a picture of the document and will also use OCR to look for all of the words in the document, and then the picture of the document becomes the next page of your notes in your notebook. Because of the OCR function, you can` search for all pages in a notebook that contain in a specific word — even if the word was on the document that you scanned. And of course, once the document is in GoodNotes, you can write on top of it to annotate it.
For any attorney who, like me, works with paper documents but wants to make them digital, GoodNotes is now even more useful.
New iPadOS gestures
iPadOS 13 and iOS 13 brought new editing gestures that can be triggered when you put three fingers on the screen. Three-finger swipe left is undo, three-finger swipe right is redo, and hold down three fingers on the screen for a second to bring up the menu. (The new three-finger pinch gestures to cut, copy, and paste do not appear to be supported in GoodNotes.)
GoodNotes also supports the new multiple item gesture of iPadOS 13. When you are in the thumbnail view, touch the screen with two fingers on top of one page of a document and then start to swipe to the left or right to select other pages. This switches you into the selection mode (without having to even tap “Select” first) and allows you to select multiple page as you slide your two fingers over to them. This is a much more efficient way to select multiple contiguous pages in a document.
Conclusion
If you own an iPad and a stylus and you are not yet taking digital notes on your iPad, I strongly encourage you to try doing so with the GoodNotes app. This is a fantastic app — one of the most useful apps on my iPad, and a key part of my paperless law practice. Thanks again to GoodNotes for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month.
Since I posted my review of the Apple Watch Series 5 and the iPhone 11 Pro, I’ve seen lots of articles on the Internet talking about the battery life of both devices. Folks have been happy with battery life on the iPhone 11 Pro, and I have been too. I’ve had some long days out of the office this week with no good opportunity to recharge my iPhone 11 Pro during the day, but the better battery life on the iPhone 11 Pro has made this a non-issue. There was even a time this week when I could have plugged in my iPhone for a short while during the late afternoon but I didn’t bother doing so because it just wasn’t anywhere close to being necessary. On the other hand, I’ve seen some folks, such as Zac Hall of 9to5Mac, reporting that some folks are finding that it is difficult for their Apple Watch Series 5 devices to last all day. I’m certainly noticing less battery life than with my Series 4, but my Series 5 with cellular still lasts all day. I have seen it tell me that I was down to 10% battery life, but that was after midnight while I was about to go to bed anyway. I’ve also seen some speculation on the Internet that folks seeing limited battery life on a Series 5 are suffering from a software bug not a hardware problem, so maybe Apple will release a patch. And now, the news of note from the past week:
To take full advantage of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, Apple improved its three iWork apps: Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Illinois attorney John Voorhees of Mactories explains what is new in the iWork apps. Because I use Microsoft Office in my law practice, the Pages and Numbers apps are not very important to me, but Keynote is a fantastic app that I use frequently to give presentations from my iPad. In fact, I’m giving one such presentation today.
One of the new features of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 is the addition of a Download Manager in Safari, similar to a web browser on a computer. Sandy Writtenhouse of the iDownloadBlog explains the new Download Manager.
Another new feature of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 is that the Files app is much improved. Jason Snell of Six Colors discusses the new Files app.
This year, Apple introduced clear cases for all of the new iPhones. I haven’t had a chance to try one out yet, but Jeff Benjamin of 9to5Mac reviews the new Apple clear cases and is impressed, especially considering that the Apple clear case he bought last year for the iPhone XR has held up well.
In August, I noted that the improved version of Apple Maps was available in Texas, Louisiana, and parts of Mississippi. Given the direction on a U.S. map that Apple seemed to be moving, I predicted that places like Atlanta and Mobile might be next. I was wrong; Apple instead added parts of the Northeast this week. Justin O’Breirne wrote a comprehensive post explaining what is new in the Maps app.
Apple has released a large number of updates to iOS 13 since it first released iOS 13.0. Josh Centers of TidBITS explains that we are now up to iOS 13.1.2, and more updates are expected this year.
And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal created a humorous video to show off Apple’s new Sign in With Apple feature, which allows you to use your Apple ID to authenticate yourself on another website or in an app. As she explains, Apple respects your privacy much more than similar options from Facebook and Google.
It has been possible to use an external keyboard with an iPad since the very first iPad was released in 2010. But whenever you needed to switch from typing to selecting something on the screen, you have always had to reach up your hands from the keyboard and touch your screen with your finger. Although the touch interface is fantastic when I’m using my iPad as a tablet, when my iPad is propped up to be a screen behind my keyboard, it is more awkward to have to touch the screen. Thus, I’ve long wanted to have optional mouse support on an iPad, for those times when I’m using my iPad the same way that I would typically use a computer. With iPadOS 13, we finally have that capability. It is limited, but it works well, and it helps me to be more productive with my iPad. Here are details on how it works, including the (numerous) steps necessary to get started.
Pairing a mouse
This is Apple’s first implementation of mouse support on an iPad, and Apple has prioritized mouse support for folks with special accessibility needs. Thus, to pair a mouse and configure your settings, you need to open the Settings app and go to Accessibility -> Touch -> AssistiveTouch. On the AssistiveTouch screen you can turn on AssistiveTouch (so that it recognizes a mouse) and then you configure your mouse by using the Pointer Devices section.
Tap Devices to pair your mouse. You can use three types of mouse. First, you can use most Bluetooth mice. (Surprisingly, Apple’s own Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad don’t seem to work; I’ve read that the Magic Trackpad 2 works but only with a Lightning cord, not over Bluetooth.)
Second, you can connect a wired mouse. Since wired mice use USB, you will need a connector. If you have a third generation iPad Pro with USB-C, the HyperDrive 6-in-1 that I reviewed in August works great for this. I plugged in an old Apple wired mouse and it just worked immediately. You can also use Apple’s $29 Lightning to USB Camera Adapter (for an iPad that uses Lightning) or its $19 USB-C to USB Adapter (for the third generation iPad Pro). Leif Johnson of Macworld reports that if you use a wired mouse that requires anything more than minimal power, you might find that older iPads which use a Lightning connector cannot provide enough power. However, if you have a third generation iPad Pro — the one with USB-C — it provides more than enough power for a mouse.
Third, you can connect a wireless mouse that uses a USB dongle. For many years now, I’ve had a Logitech wireless mouse with a dongle for use with my PC laptop. The model that I have (C-UAY59) is no longer for sale, but it is similar to the Logitech M525 that you can get for $19.99 on Amazon.
One you have paired a device, tap or click on it on this screen and you can assign the buttons on your mouse. By default your left-click button will be assigned to Single-Tap. There is no right-click on the iPad, but in iPadOS 13, a Long Press is similar, so I assigned my right-click button to Long Press. And on my mouse, pressing down on the scroll wheel is a third button, so I assigned that to Home so that when I press it, it is similar to swiping up from the bottom of the screen, showing the app icons on my Home screen.
There are a huge number of shortcuts that you can assign to buttons, so if you are using a mouse with a lot of buttons, you can get pretty creative on what you assign. For example, you can assign shortcuts that you create in the Shortcuts app to a mouse button, which allows for lots of sophistication.
On the AssistiveTouch screen, you can also change the tracking speed. I also recommend that you select Pointer Style and make the pointer size as small as possible. That still makes it a circle much larger than a typical computer cursor — remember that you are using the mouse to replace the tip of a finger — but it is small enough that it doesn’t get much in the way. On that same screen, under Visual, I recommend that you also turn on Auto-Hide so that the circle mouse circle disappears if you are not moving the mouse. I have mine set to Auto-Hide in five seconds, and that seems to work very well.
Here is one final tip for your initial configuration. I recommend that, in the Settings app, you go to Control Center -> Customize Controls and then add Accessibility Shortcuts to the “Include” section of the Control Center. And then, in the Accessibility section of the Settings app, under General, tap Accessibility Shortcut -> AssistiveTouch. That way, in the future, you can just swipe down from the top right of your screen to bring up the Control Center and then tap the icon for Accessibility Shortcuts to easily turn on or off the mouse function without having to dig into the Settings menus to do so.
Using a mouse
When you move the pointer around the screen with the mouse, it is like you are hovering the tip of your finger over the screen but not yet touching the screen. And then whenever you press the left mouse button, it is as if the tip of your finger is touching the screen. Thus, to scroll up or down, you hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse while you are still holding down. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, it is supported in some apps on some functions, but not all. For example, the scroll wheel works fairly well in Apple’s built-in apps like Safari and Mail. The scroll wheel mostly works in third-party apps, but I’ve seen inconsistent results in apps like Microsoft Word and Things.
But what works very well is moving the cursor around the screen and selecting text, which is the main thing that I want when I am typing a long email or editing a Microsoft Word document with an external keyboard. For example, in Word, I can use the mouse to select a paragraph, which makes it easy to cut it and paste it somewhere else in the document.
There are still times when I prefer to use my fingers on the iPad screen, such as to invoke multi-finger gestures like pinching two fingers in or out to zoom in or out. Having said that, thanks to keyboard and mouse shortcuts, you no longer need to use your fingers for many tasks. For example, switching apps by using Command-Tab is much better than putting all five fingers on the screen and swipe right or left to change apps.
Although using a mouse with an iPad is not exactly the same as using a mouse with a computer, it still works very well when you are using your iPad and an external keyboard to work with text, whether you are drafting or modifying a document or just writing a long email.
Citrix
Sometimes I need to work in a PC environment on my iPad to get something done for work. I currently have two ways of doing that. First, I use the LogMeIn app on my iPad to connect to the PC in my office. Using an external mouse works reasonably well for that, but the scroll wheel doesn’t work, and a right-click on the mouse doesn’t equal a mouse-click in the PC environment. But it still works well enough that I find a mouse useful in LogMeIn.
Sometimes I use the Citrix Workspace app to connect to a Citrix virtual environment at my law firm. With iPadOS 13, a normal mouse will generally work, but just like in the LogMeIn app there are some things that it cannot do like right click, use a scroll wheel, and perform certain hover events. However, Citrix sells a $60 mouse called the Citrix X1 Mouse. As explained on this page of the Citrix website, if you use the X1 Mouse with the Citrix Workspace app, it works just like a normal mouse on a PC (so you can right-click and scroll), and as a bonus you can also use the X1 Mouse with other apps to perform normal mouse functions that are enabled in iPadOS 13. I haven’t tried the X1 Mouse myself, but if you plan to purchase a Bluetooth mouse to use with your iPad and if your law firm uses Citrix and you plan to use it regularly, I can see some real advantages to buying that Citrix mouse instead of a standard Bluetooth mouse.
Conclusion
The mouse support in iPadOS 13 is limited, but it does work, and in my tests over the last week or so I have found it very helpful. I suspect that almost every time that I use an external keyboard with my iPad Pro, I’ll also take out my mouse so that I can use it too. Hopefully this is just a first step and Apple will improve mouse support in the future. Nevertheless, it works well enough now that if you have ever missed having access to a mouse while you use an external keyboard with an iPad, you should definitely try it and see what you think.
I have been using an iPhone 11 Pro (256 GB space gray) extensively for over a week, and I’m very happy with the 2019 version of the iPhone. For an overview of the new features, take a look at this post, which I wrote when the iPhone 11 Pro was announced. In today’s review, I am focusing on the features that stood out the most to me as I was using it, especially the photographu improvements and the better battery life.
Photography: three cameras
If you enjoy taking pictures with your iPhone, the iPhone 11 Pro is a big improvement for numerous reasons. The most obvious change is the new Ultra Wide camera — obvious because you can now see three lens when you look at the back of the iPhone. The Ultra Wide camera lets you take pictures that simply were not possible before. After trying it out for the past week, I find that there are two reasons that I really like this Ultra Wide camera.
First, the Ultra Wide camera allows you to capture the entire scene that you want to capture. This was the advantage that I expected. For example, a few days ago, I walked into the Carousel Bar, one of my favorite bars in the French Quarter in New Orleans, which is currently celebrating its 70th anniversary. I love this bar for its great cocktails, but the bar is famous because of its slowly rotating main bar which looks like a carousel. When I walked inside and tried to take a picture with the normal 1x camera, which Apple calls the Wide camera, I wasn’t able to capture the entire carousel even when I had my back to the wall.
But when I switched to the new Ultra Wide camera, I was able to capture the entire carousel:
With that Ultra Wide picture, I can see the ground and see how the carousel rotates, something that one cannot see in the 1x picture. I can even see the sign on the window, so when I back on this picture in the future. I will remember that this was when the bar celebrated its 70th anniversary. By showing the entire carousel, the Ultra Wide camera lets me include everything that I want in the picture.
Unlike the iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro also features a Telephoto camera (just like the iPhone XS). Even though I was standing in the same spot, with the Telephoto camera I was able to focus on the details on the top of the carousel.
Sure, I could have just walked closer to the bar to get a picture like this, but then I would have been right on top of the people at the bar. Plus, sometimes moving closer is not an option. When I take pictures or videos of my daughter playing soccer, I use the Telephoto camera almost the entire time; it’s not like I can walk out onto the soccer field to get closer.
After taking these pictures at the Carousel Bar, I continued down Royal Street to my real destination: the Louisiana Supreme Court. Again, the 1x Wide camera did not let me take the full picture of the building that I wanted. Even when I was across the street with my back to the front of the shops facing the Supreme Court, this was the most that I could fit in with the 1x lens:
But with the Ultra Wide camera, I could see the entire building:
Because it is such a wide angle lens, you do get some distortion, with some objects appearing bigger or more stretched. But the Ultra Wide camera lets you capture the entire scene that you want to be in your picture. In the past, I would try to make the 1x camera capture a big scene by using the Panorama feature, but whenever you have movement in your photos (such as people walking) you get poor, sometimes comical, results with a Panorama photo. Thus, I love having the option of using the Ultra Wide camera so that more is in my picture.
The second advantage that I have seen with having three different lenses on the iPhone 11 Pro is that it allows me to tell a different story. We’ve all heard the phrase that a picture is worth a thousand words. How you frame your shot will change, sometimes dramatically, what those words are.
Let me show you what I mean. In front of the Louisiana Supreme Court there is a statue of Justice Edward Douglass White, who served on both the Louisiana Supreme Court and, for 26 years, on the U.S. Supreme Court (10 of those years as Chief Justice). By standing on the top step in front of the statue I was able to take three different pictures using the three different cameras, and they each tell a different story. With the Ultra Wide camera, the picture shows the story of the statue as a part of the front of the Supreme Court building. This picture is just as much about the building itself as it is the statue.
When I look at the picture that I took with the Wide lens, I no longer pay attention to the building behind the statue (except perhaps for the sign saying that this is the Supreme Court of Louisiana). Instead, this picture is about the pedestal and the statue.
Finally, when I look at the picture taken with the Telephoto camera, the story is all about Justice White himself. Unlike the other photos, I find myself looking at his face and other details in the statue.
You can’t say that any one of these three photos is the best photo. It’s just that they each tell a different story. With three different lenses, you get to decide which story you want to tell with your pictures. Or better yet, take multiple pictures, and then you can decide later which picture best represents the moment that you want to capture.
Here’s another example, three pictures of a jazz band playing on Royal Street in the French Quarter. The band was playing on the side of the street, and while Royal Street is sometimes closed to vehicles, it happened to be open to traffic when I was taking pictures during my lunch hour on Friday, so a big crowd was watching from across the street. In this first picture, I used the Telephoto camera to get a fairly cropped picture of just the band. When I look at this picture, my mind focuses on the people in the band. (The version on my iPhone is even better because thanks to the Live Photos feature, I can hold my finger down on the screen and hear the band playing a few notes.)
When I look at the picture taken with the Wide camera, I’m no longer thinking about just the band; now, I’m also thinking about the band in the setting of the French Quarter with the interesting balconies.
The final picture is taken with the Ultra Wide camera, and this photo tells a completely different story to me. I took this picture when no cars were passing and thus the street was empty. With the wide open street in front of the performers and with relatively few people in the picture, this picture creates the illusion that the band is just playing without an audience or anyone else listening to them. As I noted, that’s not true — there were actually lots of people standing next to me on the other side of the street from the band — but nevertheless this picture makes me feel almost a sense of loneliness. Or, more optimistically. a sense of dedication to music even if nobody is paying attention.
I’ll show one last example. This first picture, using the Telephoto Camera, makes me concentrate on a small group of people standing in the alley next to the House of Blues on Decatur Street in the French Quarter.
But when I look at this next picture taken in the same spot, using the Ultra Wide camera, I barely even notice the people, and instead the story is about how long this alley is.
Although I’ve focused on photographs, the three lenses are also great for videos. I took a lot of videos of my daughter’s team playing a volleyball game. With the Ultra Wide camera, I was able to capture almost all of both sides of the court at once. With the Wide camera, I could see one side of the court but not the other side. With the Telephoto camera, I was able to focus more on the expressions on my daughter’s face. I took video clips with all three cameras, then later I took the highlights from all three different cameras and created a short movie using Final Cut Pro on my iMac. The final movie is great, and is much more interesting because it alternates between different views thanks to the three different cameras.
With the ability to capture more in your photographs and the ability to tell different stories by using different lenses, the three-camera system on the iPhone 11 Pro is fantastic for photography.
Photography: low light
The other big advantage of the iPhone 11 Pro (and the iPhone 11) is the ability to take much better pictures when there is very low light, such as when you are in a bar or a restaurant at night. This is not the first time that Apple has improved low light photography on the iPhone. That was also a feature of the iPhone 7 in 2016, and if you look at my review you will see some low light comparison pictures taken with an iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone 7.
But this feature works much better, in much lower light, on the iPhone 11 Pro (and the iPhone 11). It is so much better that Apple gave it a specific name: Night Mode. For these next few pictures, I turned down the dimmer on my overhead lights as low as they would go. In this first picture, I used my son’s iPhone X. Even though I tried to hold my hand as still as possible, the picture looks pretty poor with the light this low.
The next picture is with the iPhone Xs. It is a better picture, but still not that great.
With the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone senses that it is in a low light situation and then tells me to hold my hand still as it keeps the shutter open for three seconds to gather as much light as possible while also doing a good job of reducing blur in the picture. The end result is dramatically better:
But that’s not all; the iPhone 11 Pro has one more trick up its sleeve. If you use a tripod or set your iPhone on a flat surface such that the accelerometer inside of the iPhone senses that there is no movement, the app will give you the option to keep the shutter open for even longer. For this picture, the phone let me choose up to eight seconds, which resulted in this picture:
This is a good point for me to mention that all of the pictures in this post have been reduced in size and quality so that this page does not take forever to load. Even so, if you click or tap on the last two pictures to see versions of them that are 1,500 pixels wide, you can see the difference if you look closely. To make the difference easier to see, here are cropped versions of both pictures showing the Lego figures; the left side is when the shutter was open three seconds, and the right side is when the shutter was open for eight seconds. I encourage you to click this picture to see it larger:
Everything is a little more grainy on the left side, and everything is a little more sharp on the right side when the shutter was open for longer. The picture that took eight seconds to take is the one that I would want to keep.
In the above examples, Night Mode allowed me to capture a picture when the lights were low enough that I could see with my eyes, after they adjusted to the light, but a normal cellphone camera would have trouble. Night Mode can also be used to create low light photos that are far better than what you can see with your own eyes, especially if you can use a tripod or set your iPhone down on a flat surface to keep it still. For the next set of pictures, I went to my backyard around 10pm. There was some light coming over the fence from my neighbor’s house, but my backyard was pretty much completely dark. I took this first picture with Night Mode turned off on my iPhone 11 Pro, and this is actually pretty close to what it looked like to my own eyes; I really couldn’t see much of anything:
For the next picture, I turned on Night Mode, used a tripod, and let the Camera app use what it selected as the default setting, which kept the shutter open for 10 seconds:
Obviously, this is a dramatic difference. Indeed, this picture makes everything look much brighter than it was in real life. For example, the sky looks blue enough that you might think that the sun had just set, even though I took this picture around 10pm. Do you want to take a picture in which you can see more detail in the photograph than you could with your own eyes? For me, that depends upon the circumstances, but it is nice to have the option.
Next, I told my iPhone to stay open as long as possible, and with the steadiness of the tripod and this very low light situation, the iPhone let me choose to keep the shutter open for up to 28 seconds. (I’ve never seen my iPhone 11 Pro offer more than 28 seconds, so I think that is the maximum.)
At first look, the 28 second picture looks pretty similar to the 10 second picture:
But if you look closer, the 28 second picture is much less grainy. In this next composite picture with crops from the last two pictures, the 10 second picture is on the left and the 28 second picture is on the right. Both pictures are somewhat blurry, but considering that it was almost pitch black, it is amazing that you can see this much, and in the 28 second picture there is much less distortion.
As you can see, the new Night Mode on the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro gives you the ability to take pictures in circumstances in which, for all practical purposes, you had no ability to take a picture in the past. You can take a picture when the light is low that matches what your eyes can actually see. And if you keep your iPhone perfectly still, you can even take pictures in low light that are better than what your eyes can actually see.
Other Photos improvements
Although the three cameras and Night Mode are the major new features, there are other nice improvements in the Photos app. As I mentioned in my initial overview of the iPhone 11 Pro, the new QuickTake feature means that you can hold down the shutter button that you normally use to take a photograph to switch to taking a video. By saving you the time and trouble of switching modes manually, you are much less likely to miss an opportunity when a video, not a photo, is the perfect way to capture the memory.
I also like that, even when you take a 1x Wide photograph, the iPhone stores the 0.5x Ultra Wide photo for 30 days, as long as you have this feature enabled in Settings -> General -> Camera -> Composition. That way, if at some point during the next 30 days you are looking at your photo and you decide that it would be better if you could get just a little more in your shot, you can zoom out and take advantage of the additional image area that was captured by the Ultra Wide camera. Or, if the 1x Wide photograph is not straight, you can straighten the picture without having to also zoom in.
And there are other improvements like better selfie pictures, better video quality, etc. But the three cameras an the Night Mode are, in my opinion, the two best photography improvements.
Battery life
The other major improvement in the iPhone 11 Pro is increased battery life. Apple says that the iPhone 11 Pro lasts four hours longer than the iPhone XS. The iPhone 11 Pro Max (which I have not tested) gets five additional hours of battery life over the iPhone XS Max.
Although I haven’t run any scientific battery tests, I have noticed a huge difference in battery life. In the past week, I don’t think that I have seen my iPhone go below 50%. Admittedly I do sometimes charge my iPhone at my desk, and whenever I am driving around using CarPlay the iPhone is getting charged, but I did all of those same things with my last iPhone and the battery life was much lower at the end of the day.
Unlike the photography section of this review where I had lots to say and lots of pictures, there isn’t much more to say about the better battery performance. However, that shouldn’t take away from what a dramatic improvement this is. If you want extra battery life without having to worry about carrying around charging cables and/or external batteries, you’ll love the iPhone 11 Pro. (And thanks to its larger size and larger battery, the iPhone 11 Pro Max gets even more battery life.)
More to come
As much as I like these new features, there is more coming in the future. As I noted in my prior post, Apple plans to add a feature called Deep Fusion that will improve pictures taken in normal indoor lighting situations. And a feature called Ultra Wideband isn’t of much use today, but presumably in the future will open up new possibilities for precisely locating another item.
Conclusion
For the 2019 version of version of the iPhone, Apple focused on the two areas that are the most important for most people: photography and battery life. If you are just using your iPhone to help you get your work done, then the photography improvements are not that big of a deal, but if you enjoy taking pictures like I do, this is a major improvement. And everyone will appreciate the additional battery life in the iPhone 11 Pro. A few extra hours at the end of the day can make all of the difference in the world when your day doesn’t end until well past 5pm.
And those are just the improvements from last year’s model. If you are upgrading from an even older iPhone, you will see even more advantages, such as the HDR photograph improvements and better performance from last yearand the edge-to-edge OLED screen and Telephoto camera from two years ago.
Even if you are ready to upgrade, you don’t need to get the iPhone 11 Pro. Although I generally don’t recommend the entry-level version of any iPhone because I think many folks won’t have enough space, you can get the iPhone 11 128GB for $749, which is $400 less than the iPhone 11 Pro 256GB which costs $1,149. You don’t get the nicer OLED screen or the Telephoto camera, and there are some other differences like being a little less water resistant and the 128GB vs. 256GB capacity. But $400 is a big difference, especially if you don’t care very much about photography.
You know how you use your current iPhone. If you use it to take pictures and you want to take better pictures, then the iPhone 11 will be a good phone for you. And if you think a Telephoto camera would be useful to you, then the iPhone 11 Pro may be a better phone for you. You also know whether you have battery issues with your current iPhone. If you don’t need extra battery life, then the iPhone 11 might be best for you. But if extra battery life would make a different to you, then you’ll want to look at the iPhone 11 Pro. And finally, while I haven’t reviewed it myself, if you want the largest screen and don’t mind holding or carrying around a larger phone, then the iPhone 11 Pro Max might be best for you.
For me, I don’t like the large Max size, but I do like the features of the iPhone 11 Pro. In part this is because photography is important to me. I love being able to look back at older pictures of friends and families, and once you take a picture, you can almost never improve a picture or video at a later date when the quality wasn’t there in the first place. For example, as I look back at videos of my kids when they were very young, I took most of the videos using an HD video camera which recorded to tape, but I also took some videos using the smartphone I was using at the time — a Palm Treo 650 or very early iPhone models. I’m so glad that I have videos of that time period taken with the HD video camera because the quality of the other videos is so low that it distracts from the content. Taking better pictures and videos today is something that I will appreciate in the short term, but I will appreciate much more in the future. And while I didn’t really have a need for extra battery life, I have to admit that it is really nice to have it. If you have the same priorities that I do, then you’ll love the iPhone 11 Pro.
A week ago, Apple released iOS 13.0, but it had lots of bugs. This week, Apple released iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1, and unfortunately I’m still seeing some bugs, especially in the Mail app in iPadOS 13.1. I love all of the new features, but hopefully it won’t be long before we see another update so that we can appreciate all of the new features without seeing bizarre behavior in some of the built-in apps. [UPDATE: About 12 hours after I posted this, Apple released iOS 13.1.1 and iPadOS 13.1.1 to provide “bug fixes and improvements.” Hopefully, this will make a difference.] And now, the news of note from the past week:
As I mentioned last week, if you want to hear me talk about iOS 13 and you are in the New Orleans area, I’ll be speaking to the Krewe de Tech group at the Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library on Tuesday, October 1 at 6:30. The meeting is free and open to the public. Click here for more details.
This week, the Lit Software blog shared the story of New York attorney Gurfein Douglas who used the TrialPad app (my review) in a seven-week medical malpractice trial in which he obtained a verdict of $110,640,958.
iOS 13 has been a big news item for many weeks now, but if for some reason you are still running iOS 12, you should install the iOS 12.4.2 update which came out yesterday to address some security issues, as explained by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac.
Michael Simon of Macworld ranked all of the Apple Watch Series 5 watch faces, from worst to best. Even if you disagree with his rankings, he does a good job of explaining what is different in each face.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac shares the story of a mountain biker who flipped his bike, hit his head, and was knocked unconscious. But fortunately, he was wearing an Apple Watch, which automatically detected his fall, alerted 911 to his location, and texted his son.
And finally, the band Maroon 5 recently released a catchy new song called Memories. Of course, that is also the name of a feature of the iPhone and iPad in the Photos app. Members of the band are Apple fans, so they teamed up with Apple in two ways, as described by Heran Mamo of Billboard. First, the band created the music video for their song by using the Memories feature pointed at a folder of pictures and a few videos of the band members starting when they were young and then through the years. It’s a great music video, and it shows off the power of the Memories feature. Second, the song Memories is currently available (although only for a limited time) for you to use as a soundtrack with your own Memories movie. The Photos app may select that song for you automatically, but if it doesn’t, just create any movie in Memories (part of the For You tab), then pause the movie and tap Edit at the top right, and then tap Music to edit the music selection and then from the Soundtracks section, listed under Pop, select Memories by Maroon 5. It’s a great song, and the lyrics go well with any selection of old photographs of family and friends. I cannot embed the Maroon 5 music video in this post, but you can watch it if you click here or click on the picture below. If you don’t subscribe to Apple Music, you’ll see a 30 second preview. If you do subscribe, you can watch the whole video in the Apple Music app.
It has taken Apple a few years to get here, but the Series 5 version of the Apple Watch is the one to get. If you have been thinking about an Apple Watch for all of these years but haven’t done so yet, this is a perfect time. If you have an older model and you are ready to get something better, this is the perfect time for that too. The Apple Watch Series 5 is a great device. Two weeks ago, I wrote a longer overview of the Apple Watch Series 5, and you should consider that part one of this review. This second part of the review adds my own experiences with the Apple Watch Series 5.
From time to time
A little more than four years ago, Apple released the first version of the Apple Watch. It deserves credit for reinventing what it means to be a watch, much like the original iPhone in 2007 reinvented what it means to be a smartphone, but I wouldn’t recommend using either one of those devices today. They were full of potential but incredibly limited in what they could do. Apple started to fill in the missing pieces with the Series 2 in 2016, which added GPS, the ability to get wet, and a somewhat faster processor so that it wasn’t painfully slow. Series 3 in 2017 added cellular and even more speed. Series 4 in 2018 introduced a slightly larger screen that could show a lot more because the unused space on the edges got thinner, plus it was the first Apple Watch to be fast enough that you no longer really thought much about the speed of the device.
I was happy enough with the Series 4 that I didn’t plan to buy a Series 5 unless Apple did something special. But Apple did so, adding a screen that is always on so that it can always tell you the time, and other information on your watch screen. To state the obvious, the ability to always tell you the time is pretty important for a watch. As I am typing this sentence right now, I can glance down at my Apple Watch and see what time it is and the status of my daily activity circles. That’s something that I could never do in the past; I’d have to lift up my left arm or perform a jiggle or jerk motion to tell the Apple Watch to get out of its sleep mode.
Sure, that was only a minor inconvenience, but in daily use it makes a big difference. In my law practice, I spend a lot of time every day with my hands on a keyboard as I am typing, and it is great to have the ability to glance at my watch while I’m typing. The alternative — making that movement to activate the screen — pulls me out of my workflow. Also, when I’m in a meeting or in court, the motion required to activate an older Apple Watch screen can draw too much attention, alerting the outside world that I’m checking the time, and thus sending the impression that I’m getting bored or restless. Sure, sometimes I am indeed getting bored or restless, but I certainly don’t want to others to know that. Thus, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the Series 5 version of the Apple Watch is twice as useful because I find myself using the watch at least twice as often now that I can look and see the time and other information so easily.
The always on display
Here’s how the always on display works. If your watch is showing a watch face, after 15 seconds (or you can change this to 70 seconds in Settings) the watch face used to go completely black. But now, it just dims. The amount that it dims depends upon your environment, so if you are in a dark room it will dim even more. Also, there may be some information on the screen that is no longer displayed when in standby mode. For example, if you are using a watch face with a second hand, the second hand will disappear when the screen is dimmed.
I have had no trouble reading the dimmed screen when I’m inside and I glance at the watch. And even when I’m outside, I can usually see the dimmed screen well enough.
If something other than the watch face was being displayed — such as the Now Playing screen for a song or podcast or one of your apps — then the display blurs and dims so much that you can no longer read the screen and a digital clock appears on the top near the right of the screen. Thus, you can glance down at your watch and see what time it is, but you will need to wake the screen to see whatever the app was showing you.
There is currently one exception: the Workout app. If you are using the Workout app and you are in the middle of a workout, after 15 seconds the screen dims but you can still see almost all of the information on the screen. For example, instead of seeing the elapsed time to the hundredth of a second, you just see it to the second, but those seconds and minutes do update. This makes a big difference. For example, I often find that when I’m on a treadmill, or when I’m quickly walking or jogging outside, I want to quickly see some numbers on the Workout app such as the elapsed time, my heart rate, or my distance. But when I’m already moving my arm back and forth, it is particularly annoying and distracting to have to raise or jerk my left wrist, or reach over with my right hand to touch the screen, just to wake up the watch so that I can see those numbers. With the Series 5, I can just glance down and see the numbers as my arm is already moving. It may seem like a tiny change, but it is a major improvement.
Design and battery life
The design of the Apple Watch Series 5 is the same as the Apple Watch Series 4. As I noted in my review of the Series 4, that is a good thing. These last two versions of the Apple Watch use more of the screen and have a slightly larger screen, so you can see more on the watch.
Because the design hasn’t changed, that means that battery life hasn’t changed either. Even though Apple has done some amazing things to make the always on display work without sucking down too much of the battery, I do notice that my Series 5 uses more battery during the day than my Series 4. Perhaps a small part of that is me using the watch more over the past few days just because it is new, but I suspect that it is also the always on display using more battery life. I wear my Apple Watch all day long, not taking it off until I go to sleep late at night. With my Series 4, I usually had around 40% battery life at the end of the day. With my Series 5, it seems like it is closer to 20%. So in other words, I still have enough battery life to get through a day in which I use the watch quite a bit, but since all rechargeable batteries like this do hold less of a charge over time, I’ll be curious to see how the battery life will be doing at the end of the day a year from now.
For now, the trade off is certainly worth it. It doesn’t do me any good to have an extra 20% of battery life at the end of the day because I charge my watch every night. But it does to me a lot of good to have an always on display, all day long.
A sense of direction
No other new feature in the Apple Watch Series 5 is as useful as the always on display. Having said that, adding a compass to the Apple Watch does make sense if you are ever using the maps feature on the Apple Watch, such as to give you turn-by-turn directions.
Although you can use your iPhone for walking directions, I’m not a big fan of being that person walking around the city staring down at my phone too much — especially if I’m in another city where I don’t know the neighborhood very well. But walking around and looking down at my watch face is quick and fine. The map display on the Apple Watch shows you the street that you need to be walking down, and with the Series 5 you can see which way you are facing. In the two pictures below, in the first picture, I am facing the wrong way, and you can see the rays coming out of the blue dot indicating that I’m not facing the path that I need to be going. In the second picture, I have turned to face the path, and now the rays indicate that I’m faced the right way. It’s subtle, but it works to get you faced the right way.
And the rest
As much as I like the new features in the Series 5, what I like the most are the features that have been a part of the Apple Watch for a long time. I vastly prefer getting notifications on the watch — a reminder of an upcoming meeting, an email from someone I’ve marked as a VIP, a text message, a request to authenticate a two-factor authentication, etc. I also love being able to connect my AirPods directly the Apple Watch and then I can walk around and perform tasks while I listen to music or a podcast without needing to carry around my iPhone. I love being able to turn lights on and off in my house from my watch, thanks my HomeKit setup. And of course, the Apple Watch is fantastic for managing my workouts and encouraging me to be more active.
I’m a big fan of lots of products made by Apple, but my Apple Watch is the only Apple product that is with me all day long, from when I get dressed in the morning to when I go to sleep at night. And because I use a charging dock on my night stand, my Apple Watch is also right next to me all night long, always there to tell me the time using the Night Stand mode.
Conclusion
When the Apple Watch was a young product, the missing features were important enough omissions that the Apple Watch was best for early adopters. I’m sure that Apple will find ways to make the Apple Watch even better for many years to come. But at the current stage of Apple Watch development, with the Apple Watch Series 5, we are now at the point where I believe that anyone who owns an iPhone would find an Apple Watch to be a great and useful product. If you have been waiting for the right time to get an Apple Watch, that time is now.
Thank you to Bellefield Systems, the creator of iTimekeep, for sponsoring iPhone J.D. again this month. iTimekeep is one of the most useful apps on my iPhone, and along with Microsoft Word, it is one of those rare apps that I use almost every day on multiple computing platforms: PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone. iTimekeep greatly improves time entry and time management for attorneys. Billing time is one of the most annoying aspects of a law practice, so the ability to transform this task from a daily drudgery to something that can be done much more easily is a huge win. I posted a full review of iTimekeep two years ago, and last month I discussed how I use iTimekeep on my iPhone, iPad, PC and Mac. Here are are two additional reasons that I recommend that you incorporate iTimekeep into your law practice.
Track your performance
I have always found it more efficient to enter my own time, but I know that others jot down their time in some other way and have an assistant handle the time entry process. But the iTimekeep app is an incredible app for all attorneys, regardless of whether you enter your own time, because it makes it so easy to track your own performance.
First, the main screen of iTimekeep shows you a list of your most recent time entries. For each day, a number indicates the total number of hours (billable and non-billable) for that day. Scroll to the bottom and you can tap a button to load seven more days. This is a quick and easy way to make sure that all of your recent time was correctly tracked. And if you see a particular day that only has a few hours recorded or that doesn’t mention a task that you know that you did that day, that’s a red flag that you may be missing some time from that particular day.
Second, there is another way that iTimekeep can tell you if it looks like you may be missing time. In iTimekeep, you give yourself a daily goal. Mine is eight hours. Select the option in iTimekeep called Missing Time, and it will show you any days on which you were short of your daily goal. Usually, if I was short of my daily goal, there was a good reason for it that I already knew about, such as I got to work late or left work early because of something going on with my kids. But if there is a day when I should have recorded eight or more hours, it is useful for iTimekeep to alert me that I was short so that I can go back and figure out what I forgot to record.
Third, there is a Dashboard feature that you can use to get an overview of a week, month, or year. It shows you the number of hours (both billable and non-billable) that you worked, the average number of hours you billed every day, any missing time, and time entries with errors, any time entries that are incomplete, etc. This is a quick and easy way to see your overall progress, and you can do it on your iPhone, iPad, PC, or Mac.
Using all of these tools, it is easy to track your progress throughout the week, the month, and the year, not to mention fix anything missing before you forget about it. Indeed, even if you are not normally the person who enters your own time, if you see that a time entry is missing, or if something looks wrong in an entry, it just takes you a few seconds to add the missing time or fix the incorrect entry. You can spend less time fixing any mistake yourself then it would take you to explain to someone else what is wrong and how to fix it.
Capture all of your time
Discovering, and fixing, a missing time entry is good, but of course it is better if all of your time is entered correctly in the first place. And it’s the word “all” in that sentence that is sometimes tricky because attorneys frequently perform tasks throughout the day that we can forget to record, such as a short phone call or an email exchange. One of the best features of iTimekeep is that it gives you the power of anywhere timekeeping. If you are in front of your computer, you can just use the iTimekeep website in your browser of choice. But if all you have is your iPad or your iPhone, iTimekeep is there for you when you need it — with a simple, easy-to-use interface and ample security to protect your time entries.
Thus, iTimekeep makes it as simple as possible to enter time contemporaneously with the event. When you finish up a phone call, you can take a few seconds and immediately enter the time in the iTimekeep app before you forget about it — even if you are out of the office.
You are doing the work anyway. You might as well get credit for it. And over the course of a month and a year, those small time entries can really add up.
Conclusion
Everything about the time entry process is better with iTimekeep. You spend less time entering your own time, and you do so more accurately and efficiently. And because your iPhone is probably always with you, it is incredibly easy to enter time contemporaneously or record an entry from earlier in the day whenever and wherever you think about it. Additionally, reviewing prior time entries is simple, and iTimekeep will even alert you when you appear to be missing time from a day. Thus, even if you don’t enter your own time, iTimekeep makes it incredibly easy to see what time was recorded for you so that you can fix any mistakes earlier in the process. Thanks to iTimekeep for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month and for improving my own law practice.
