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Earlier this week, Minneapolis attorney Lisa Needham explained on Lawyerist.com
why she loves the GoodReader app.  My last post dedicated to GoodReader was over a year ago, but in case anyone forgot, I love the app too.  Indeed, I probably use GoodReader
more than any other app on my iPad except for the Mail app, and it is one of my top recommendations for lawyers using an iPad.  She also notes
in her article that the “good folks over at iPhonejd.com” — those
“folks” would be the triumvirate of me, myself and I — recently reviwed iAnnotate, but she likes GoodReader better.  Frankly, I do too, but I use them for different tasks.  For simple reading and annotating of documents, GoodReader is awesome.  But if you need to do more complicated work with a PDF file, a more sophisticated app like iAnnotate or PDFpen or PDF Expert can manipulate and annotate PDF documents in ways that GoodReader cannot.  And I also recommend that all attorneys get the Adobe Reader app because sometimes it can handle PDF files that other apps cannot, plus it is free so why not have it for just in case you need it.  Enough about PDFs, let’s get on to the news of note from the past week:

• It’s a good idea to be ready for power outages, especially now that we are in hurricane season.  Last year I wrote an article with tips for using an iPhone during a lengthy power outage for the TechnoLawyer BigLaw newsletter, and it was recently posted on the TechnoLawyer blog.  Check it out for my advice.
• If you use ProVantage for your law firm time billing and financial management, you can now use Bellefield’s iTimeKeep to access ProVantage records on your iPhone and iPad as noted in this press release.
• Jesse Londin of Law Technology News writes about Bike Crash Kit, a free app with tips for those who end up in a bicycle offered by personal injury law firm Flanzig and Flanzig.
• 1Password is one of the most useful apps on my iPhone and iPad.  Read my review to find out why.  The app usually costs $17.99, but it is currently on sale for only $7.99 — a great price for an incredible app.  Click here to get 1Password: 
• David Pogue of the New York Times reviewed the new Moto X smartphone this week, the latest Android smartphone.  I mention the article becuase in it he notes that there are more than 4,000 touch-screen phones available — including six different models of the iPhone and 3,997 different Android phones.  Gulp.
• I recently wrote about Wireless Emergency Alerts on the iPhone such as AMBER Alerts.  This week, there was an AMBER Alert in San Francisco around 11:00 pm, and that was the first AMBER Alert that many iPhone users in the area had ever seen.  It resulted in a lot of articles about these alerts, such as this one from Lex Friedman of Macworld.  If you still don’t understand what these alerts are, I encourage you to read about them now so that they make sense to you when they occur.
• T-Mobile started selling the iPhone in April, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that as a result, T-Mobile gained customers last quarter for the first time in four years.  Note, however, that as reported by Kevin Bostic of AppleInsider, T-Mobile insists that its new “Un-carrier” ad campaign is the real reason, not the iPhone.  Regardless of who is right, I’m glad that T-Mobile users can finally buy an iPhone.
• Long before the iPhone or the iPad, Apple sold the Newton.  Mat Honan of Wired wrote a good article on the Newton’s lasting impact.
• And finally, I’ve long been a fan of the great commercials used by Apple.  I really like the current series of commercials called Photos Every Day, Music Every Day and the latest FaceTime Every Day, all of which you can see on Apple’s YouTube page.  But you can also turn back the hands of time and watch this video of none other than Siskel and Ebert reviewing Apple commercials back in 1986.  I miss those guys.

If you are interested in hearing me talk about the iPad and iPhone, here are some of my upcoming speaking engagements.

The New Orleans Bar Association is currently hosting the Free on Fridays CLE, a series of one-hour CLEs that address the latest technology issues and cutting edge topics relevant to lawyers.  If you are in New Orleans this Friday, August 9th, I’ll be giving an iPad for Lawyers presentation from 10 am to 11 am.  The CLEs are free for New Orleans Bar Association members; non-members pay $35.00.  To register, you can email Rebekah Burg or call NOBA at (504) 525-7453.

If you practice employment law, consider attending the 7th Annual Labor & Employment Law Conference, sponsored by the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law.  The conference is in New Orleans November 6th through 9th, and on Thursday, November 7 at 2:15 pm, I’m on a panel to discuss Apps for Employment Lawyers along with James McKenna of Morrison & Forester in San Francisco, Natalie Kelly of the Georgia State Bar in Atlanta (and Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2014) and Jeff Taylor of Absolute Legal Services in Oklahoma City (and publisher of The Droid Lawyer).

And finally, if you are a member of the Product Liability Advisory Council, I’ll be talking about using the iPad as a litigator at the Fall Conference in Las Vegas.

If any of those work into your schedule, I’d love to see you.  Otherwise, you can find me here on iPhone J.D.

I work with a large number of PDF files in my law practice, and I’m sure that I’m not alone.  All federal court pleadings on PACER are in PDF format and many state courts are moving to PDF electronic documents, other counsel frequently send me files in PDF format, when I do legal research I download the cases in PDF format, exhibits are in PDF format, etc.  Perhaps most importantly, when I know that I’m going to work with a document on my iPad, I usually prefer that it be in PDF format.  The iPad has the built-in ability to view PDF files, and the free Adobe Reader app offers even more options, but for professional work with PDF files it is nice to have a more powerful app.  A few weeks ago, Branchfire sent me a free review copy of their $9.99 app iAnnotate, and I am incredibly impressed.  This seems to be the most powerful and sophisticated app that I’ve seen for working with PDF files on the iPad.  I am not sure that I would recommend this app to a mere casual iPad user because it is going to be overkill, but for those who want all of the tools at their disposal, this is a fantastic app.

There is typically a tension with PDF apps.  On the one hand, you want to have access to lots of tools to annotate a document.  On the other hand, you don’t want all of those tools cluttering up the screen when you are just trying to read a document.  iAnnotate strikes a perfect balance by providing tools on both the left side of the screen that you can easily make disappear with only a tiny tab remaining so that you can access them again when you need them.  Similarly, you can tap in the middle to make the tools at the top disappear, or tap again to see them.

Let’s talk about those tools at the top.  The top left tab brings you to the main screen (more on that in a moment) but most of the tools at the top are tabs to your open PDF documents.  Keeping multiple PDFs open at a time is incredibly useful, making it easy to switch back and forth between several documents.  The gear at the far right brings up app preferences, and right next to it is a Dropbox circle.  If you are reading a document that you accessed from your Dropbox account and you have modified the document on your iPad, the circle turns red to warn you that you are working with a changed version of the document.  But if you tap that circle (or close the document) the changes are synced back to Dropbox.  It is a great Dropbox integration that works really well.

On the right there are tools to work with the document.  All of the common tools are there in the default toolbar, but what makes this app truly useful is that you can both modify the default toolbar and create your own additional toolbars.  A simple flick from the right side of the screen switches between your active toolbars, so you can create toolbars with different tools for different types of tasks.

And boy are there a lot of tools to choose from.  Here is a picture showing all of them, which I had to stitch together from three different screen shots on the iPad:

The tools include, for example, two instances of the pencil tool so that you can use one set by default to drop thin black lines and another set by default to draw thick, translucent yellow lines (useful for highlighting a scanned document).  There is also a true highlighting tool which works great with OCR’d documents.  There are tools for navigating within the document, tools for rotating the document, and tools for adding and working with bookmarks.  You can use the standard pencil tool to sign a document, or you can use a specialized signature tool that makes it easier to sign and create a stamp of your signature that you can quickly and easily apply in the future. 

Speaking of stamps, the app comes with a lot of built-in ones, and you can add any picture as a stamp.  I created a picture of an Exhibit sticker and made a stamp out of it so that I can easily place virtual exhibit stickers on documents.  For a stamp you use frequently, you can even create a custom stamp tool for the toolbar on the right that applies that specific stamp; the icon on the stamp tool even changes to a picture of that stamp.

If you ever need to save a copy of a website, iAnnotate does a better job than any of the browsers on my computer.  And there is even a tool icon that brings up the full list of tools so that you can quickly select one that isn’t normally on one of your toolbars.

And those are just the tools on the right side of the screen.  On the left side of the screen, there are five sets of tools such as Thumbnails and Actions that give you even more options for editing aspects of the document, copying a document, etc.

On the main screen, you can view a list of files that are local on the device (either in list view or in icon view) or tap Connections to access cloud-based storage such as Dropbox.

When it is time to export documents, you can either keep your annotations intact or export a flattened PDF document. 

iAnnotate also has the ability to annotate Microsoft Word documents.  This is a really neat and useful feature.  Simply open a Word document in iAnnotate and as you start to annotate the document, the app will create a PDF version of the document.  You can then highlight, markup in a red pen, etc. all over the document and then you can email that PDF file to someone else.  If you want to markup a brief for another attorney or secretary to make the edits, iAnnotate is a powerful tool for doing so.

Even after a few weeks of using this app, I know that I am still just scratching the surface of what it does.  Suffice it to say that if you want a sophisticated tool for working with PDF files on your iPad, and if you don’t mind a slight learning curve to figure out everything that this app can do, iAnnotate is an excellent choice.

Click here to get iAnnotate ($9.99): 

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I’m reading a great novel by Patrick Rothfuss called The Name of the Wind.  Much of the book involves the main character, Kvothe, recalling the (exciting) events of his life with great detail.  At one point he notes that his most defining attribute is his memory, and I’ve always been jealous of people (like my wife) who are great at remembering things.  It always seemed that they barely needed to study in school; they hear or read something once, and then they know it.  Fortunately, my iPhone does a perfect job of remembering things so that I don’t have to.  I jot down something in a Notes app or tell Siri to remind me of something, and the iPhone never forgets, freeing up my brain to focus on analyzing issues instead of worrying about rote memorization.  New York Times columnist David Pogue (the keynote speaker at ABA TECHSHOW earlier this year) wrote a great article in Scientific American discussing how smartphones are starting to make memorization obsolete.  It’s a good read.  And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• Pennsylvania attorney Sara Austin showed me an iPhone charging connector called the Kii that is small enough to fit on a keychain.  Neat idea.
• New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson told me that he encountered a strange bug that was preventing him from updating apps on his iPad.  He pointed me to this thread on Apple’s forums to show that he is not alone.  But I see that the very latest posts on the forum indicate that Apple may have finally done something on its end to fix it, so if you are having the same problem, hopefully you won’t have it for much longer.
• Readdle is celebrating its sixth birthday by reducing the price of six apps by up to 70%.  This includes the great Scanner Pro for $1.99 instead of $6.99 (my review) and PDF Expert for $4.99 instead of $9.99 (my review).
• Serenty Caldwell of Macworld offers advice for traveling overseas with your Apple devices.  One suggestion:  bring an iPad instead of a laptop.  I agree; I travel a lot within the U.S., but I can’t even remember the last time I brought a laptop.
• If you ever receive an iMessage that is spam, Lex Friedman of Macworld explains how to report it to Apple.
• Friedman also offers advice on the best battery cases for the iPhone 5.
• Jeff Gamet of The Mac Observer shares a neat trick that was new to me for selecting multiple photos in the Photos app that involves using two fingers at once.
• Rene Ritchie of iMore shares a few more tricks, gestures you can use in Siri, Mail, Safari, Calendar and the keyboard.
• Daniel Eran Dilger explains what the future holds for iPhone and car integration.  Sounds great to me.
• Brad Nicholson of Touch Arcade notes that Bad Piggies, a game from the folks that brought you Angry Birds, is Apple’s app of the week.  Meaning it is free.  I’ve never played it, but my seven-year-old son likes it.
• And finally, here’s a product that is still in development but looks promising:  Egg Minder, an egg tray that holds your eggs in your refrigerator and tells your iPhone how many eggs are in the tray.  No more sleepness nights wondering how many eggs you have left!

Every year, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center conducts a survey to gauge the use of legal technology by attorneys in the United States.  My thoughts on the prior reports are located here:  2012, 2011, 2010.  No survey is perfect, but the ABA tries hard to ensure that its survey has statistical significance, and every year this is the best resource I am aware of to reveal how the approximately one million attorneys in the United States are using technology.  Yesterday, the ABA released Volume VI of the report titled Mobile Lawyers.  This year’s report shows that a huge and growing number of attorneys are using iPhones and iPads.

Over half of all attorneys now use an iPhone

This year’s survey reveals that 91% of all attorneys use a smartphone, and that percentage increases with the size of the law firm.  For example, smartphones are used by 85% of solo attorneys, 90% of attorneys in a firm of 10 to 49 lawyers, 97% of attorneys in firms of 100 to 499 lawyers, and 99% of lawyers in firms of 500 or more lawyers.  About two-third of attorneys using smartphones are using a device that they own, while about one-third are using a smartphone assigned to the attorney by their law firms.

For the 91% of attorneys who are using smartphones, what smartphones are they using?  The survey reveals that 62% are using an iPhone, 22% are using an Android phone, 16% are using a BlackBerry, about 1% are using Windows Mobile, and about 1% either don’t know or selected “other”.  Yes, that adds up to 102%, but perhaps some folks use more than one device.  Here is a pie chart to give you a sense of the big picture:

As you can see, 2013 is the first year in which we can say that over half of the attorneys in the United States are using an iPhone.  

This is the third year in a row that the ABA survey has collected this kind of information, which gives us the ability to see how the percentages have changed over time:

Over just the last two years, we have seen the BlackBerry drop from being an item used by 40% of all attorneys to only 14%: a drop of 26 percentage points.  At the same time, the iPhone has grown from 31% to 55%: a gain of 24 percentage points.  Android has also seen some growth, from 15% to 20%, and the number of attorneys who don’t use a smartphone at all has dropped from 12% to 9%.  Thus, while some former BlackBerry users are now using Android phones, it appears that for the most part, BlackBerry’s loss from 2011 to 2013 has been the iPhone’s gain.

What are attorneys doing with their smartphones?  The survey reveals that most attorneys are using their smartphones for e-mail, telephone, calendar, contacts, the Internet and text messaging.  Less than 10% of lawyers report using their smartphones for expense tracking, time and billing, document creation, spreadsheets, web conferencing or presentations.

Over 400,000 attorneys use an iPad

Apple released the first iPad in 2010.  The survey data for 2011, 2012 and 2013 has been consistent in one respect; every year, about 9 out of every 10 attorneys using a tablet have used an iPad.  Specifically, the percentage was 89% in 2011, 91% in 2012, and 91% in 2013.  (For those few attorneys who use a tablet but don’t use an iPad, more than half of them use an Android tablet and the small remainder use a Windows tablet or something else.)  The survey reveals that over 80% of attorneys using a tablet own their device; less than 20% of tablet users are using something issued to them by their law firm.

While the iPad’s incredibly dominant marketshare for attorneys has remained relatively steady over the years, what has changed is the number of attorneys using a tablet at all.  In 2011, about 15% of attorneys used a tablet.  In 2012, about 33% of attorneys used a tablet.  This year, 48% of all attorneys report using a tablet.  With about a million attorneys in the United States and with the iPad being used by 91% of the 48% of attorneys using a tablet, this means that in 2013 there are around 436,000 attorneys using an iPad.

These numbers are impressive in their own right, but I also see a lot of room for growth.  We now see 9 out of every 10 attorneys using a smartphone, and while I don’t expect tablet use by attorneys to get quite that high in the short term, it could get close.  The iPad is ideal for reading and carrying around documents, managing email and using the Internet, tasks that attorneys do every single day.  I rarely make it through a week in my office without another attorney sticking his or her head in my door to proudly announce that they “finally” got an iPad.  I expect this trend to continue.

A large market

With around a million attorneys in the U.S., these number suggest that there are over a half a million attorneys using an iPhone and almost a half a million attorneys using an iPad.  That’s a lot of potential customers for law-related iOS apps.  This is good news for those who already create apps for lawyers, and hopefully will encourage others to create even more great legal apps. 

As reported by Lex Friedman of Macworld, Apple announced this week that over 1 billion podcasts have been subscribed to on iTunes.  I love listening to podcasts on my iPhone in the car or when doing things around the house, although sometimes I instead use my iPod nano which is convenient because it is so portable.  My
favorite podcasts currently include MacBreak Weekly, Mac Power Users, The Talk
Show with John Gruber, This Week in Law, the Macworld podcast, the iMore
show and The Incomparable, but I’m listening to new ones all the time.  So far I like the new Clockwise podcast from TechHive, and my brother recently encouraged me to start listening to the Radiolab podcast from WNYC and the Accidental Tech Podcast.  Too many podcasts, not enough time … especially considering that I also like to listen to audiobooks on my iPhone every once in a while.  And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• Virginia attorney Rob Dean discusses building a trial notebook on an iPad on his Walking Office site.
• New Jersey attorney Richard Console explains why he likes the apps Fishead Analytics, SpeakWrite and JotNot Scanner Pro in a post on Attorney at Work.
• Rulebook is a great app that I’ve reviewed in the past (here and here).  Not only can you download statutes in it, you can also purchase a digital copy of the Bluebook.  This week, the Rulebook announced that it is adding new sources from the Texas Law Review Association:  (1) The Greenbook: Texas Rules of Form (a style guide for legal citation in Texas) and (2) Manual on Usage & Style (a writing guide).
• South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer reviews the New Trent Arcadia Grabbit iPad case that lets you hold an iPad with one hand while you are giving a presentation.
• Kevin Parrish of Tom’s Hardware reviews an interesting iPad (or iPhone) accessory, the SanDisk Connect.  It is a tiny device — either a small flash drive or a slightly larger hard drive — that connects via WiFi to your iPad.  They come in capacities of 16, 32 or 64 GB, and the larger model also has an SD slot.  The idea is that you can store lots of media on these devices, such as pictures or video, so that they don’t take up space on your iPad, but the devices are so small that it is easy to carry them around with you.  I often tell attorneys that documents and apps are only going to take up so much space on an iPad; the real deciding factor on whether you need to spend extra money on a larger model is how much space you want to have available for photos and movies.  But if you keep your media on a SanDisk Connect, I suppose you can get a less expensive iPad.  As you can see, I’m intrigued by this new device.  Prices range from $49 for the 16 GB flash drive to $99 for the slightly larger 64 GB Media Drive (with SD slot).  (Thanks to Houston attorney Reginald Hirsch for the link.)
• Mary Ellen Gordon, Ph.D., has an interesting post on the Flurry site analyzing the price of apps.  She notes that the average cost of an iOS app is 19 cents.
• Nick Bilton and Brian Chen of the New York Times speculate on what might be Apple’s next new product.
• If you use DirecTV, you can now talk to your iPhone to find a show.
• And finally, Mike Wehner of TUAW shows off some of the more ridiculous iPhone-related items on Etsy, such as the Cowboy Hat iPhone Charger, perfect for all of the times when you … um … oh I give up.  

Whenever a litigator asks me to recommend useful iPad apps, one of my first recommendations is TranscriptPad.  If you own an iPad and you work with depositions, you will love this app.  And if you don’t have it yet, I encourage you to buy it immediately before the price goes up, as noted below.

First, a little background on what this app does.  As I explained in my January 2012 review, TranscriptPad imports the text versions of depositions provided by a court reporter and organizes them into cases.  [UPDATE: If you need to work with .ptx files, read the very helpful comments to this post that discuss strategies for doing so.]  You can then use the app to read and annotate the deposition.  And instead of simply marking all of the important stuff with a yellow highlighter (although you can do that too), TranscriptPad lets you add issue codes as you review a deposition.  So if a Question and Answer are relevant to damages in a case, you can select those lines and apply the “Damages” issue code (or whatever other issue codes you want to create).  When you are finished reviewing the deposition, the app creates a handy report organized by issue code so that you can, for example, see all of the key “Damages” testimony at one time, all of the key “Comparative Fault” testimony at one time, etc.  I’ve used TranscriptPad extensively in my own practice for the last 18 months and the app has been very helpful for many of my cases.

Last night, the app was updated to version 1.6.9.  Several new features were added, but by far the most important addition was a vast improvement to the reporting feature.  The best addition is the ability to run a report across several transcripts.  For example, if a deposition of a plaintiff is in three different volumes, you can now run a single report on all three volumes.  Or even more useful, you can now run a report across an entire case.  Thus, you can easily see the most important testimony of every single witness that was deposed on the issue of damages or comparative fault or whatever in a single report.

To run these new reports, first navigate to the level on which you want to run a report.  In the following example, I have navigated to the top case level where I have all depositions in the case.  In this example, I have depositions from Joe Plaintiff and Polly Plaintiff.  Simply tap the Reports button at the bottom of the left column.

Tapping that button brings up the new and improved Report dialog box:

To prepare a report that shows you the actual transcript testimony (the report that I find most useful) select “Detail” type of report under PDF Reports on the left.  You can then decide what to include in the report.  By default, every annotation will be included and every issue code, but you can turn off particular types of annotations.  For example, if you are only interested in Damages, you can just run a report on the issue code of damages.

Once your report is prepared, it is displayed on the right so that you can preview it. 

If you like what you see, then tap the export button at the top right of the screen.  That gives you the option to email the PDF report, print the document to an AirPrint printer, send the document to your Dropbox, or open the PDF file in another app.  In the following example, I chose to open the file in iAnnotate PDF, another app that I am currently evaluating for an upcoming review.  As you can see, the PDF reports are easy to read with the page and line numbers and the full testimony.

These reports are incredibly useful to me because with the passage of time, I often forget all of the important testimony from a deposition.  A TranscriptPad report allows me to quickly see all of the key testimony in a case, organized by topic.  After spending a few minutes reviewing a report, I am once again up-to-speed on what is good for my client (or sometimes, not so good) about the testimony of a witness.

Note that the text of the report is in black and white.  If you chose to highlight or underline text (instead of applying an issue code) as you were reading, that is simply treated as another type of annotation.  So just as you might have a report on the “Damages” issue code, the app creates a report of all testimony that you highlighted in yellow, all testimony that you underlined in blue, etc.

The Detail PDF Report is the most useful report for me, but you can create other types of reports.  The Summary PDF Report will give you the page and line designations but not the actual testimony.  The Annotated (Full) and Annotated (Mini) reports prepare a PDF version of the entire deposition with your annotations included.  You can also create reports in .txt format (useful if you want to work with the file in Microsoft Word), Excel format, Sanction format and TrialDirector format.

The ability to create reports across several depositions is a key feature for me, but there are lots of other useful improvements in version 1.6.9.  For example, you can now create a mini report with four transcript pages on each page, useful if you are printing out the annotated transcript and you want something that doesn’t take up much space in your briefcase.  There are also improvements in the ways that issue codes are handled across a case, including the ability to hide issue codes that are not used in the particular deposition that you are reviewing.  The full list of improvements in this update is as follows:

 What’s New in Version 1.6.9 

◆ New and updated report options, including new “Annotated (Mini)” report.

◆ Reports of Flags and Notes are now included in all reports, and can have unlimited text.

◆ Create reports at any level of your organizational structure: at the transcript level, the folder level, or even across a whole case.

◆ Highlights and Underlines can now be included in reports.

◆ Create report as an Excel file with Issue Codes, Flags, and other annotations in separate Sheets.

◆ Easily show/hide Issue Codes used in other transcripts, e.g. only have medical Issue Codes show in a doctor’s deposition.

◆ Added Copy Text option to Create Designation dialog, and pasted text will include the sources page and line information.

◆ Double-tapping a page/line designation jumps to that area of transcript and brings up the Create Designation dialog.

◆ Search field now also finds exhibit, file, and folder names, in addition to text in transcripts.

◆ Now supports 4 character page numbers for large depositions (current page indicator, page number on slider, page number in transcript, and search result hits).

◆ Added Recent button to allow you to easily and quickly jump back and forth between different transcripts.

◆ Enhanced transcript import to handle additional formatting scenarios.

◆ Rename dialog now updates immediately.

◆ Search results now sorted alphabetically.

◆ Renamed “Pack Case and Send” to more intuitive “Email Case”.

◆ Various minor bug fixes and improvements.

If you haven’t purchased TranscriptPad yet, I encourage you to do so today because the price is about to increase.  Ever since the app was first released, it has cost $49.99, but because Apple doesn’t allow developers to charge for app updates, the developer told me that he is raising the price of the app to $89.99 to cover the future cost of development.  I believe that the price increase will occur on Monday, July 29, 2013.  Even $89.99 is a great price for useful litigation software, but if you don’t have TranscriptPad yet and you want to save $40, you have a few days left.  Whatever price you pay, you’ll find that TranscriptPad transforms your iPad into a sophisticated tool for reading and annotating transcripts.

Click here for TranscriptPad ($89.99): 

Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2013 fiscal third
quarter (which ran from March 31, 2013 to June 29, 2013) and held a
call with analysts to discuss the results.  This is typically not a big
fiscal quarter for Apple; the important quarter for Apple every year is
the first fiscal quarter containing the holiday sales season.  And many potential Apple customers have been in a wait-and-see mode because it is widely known that Apple will be announcing new products in just a few months.  Nevertheless, it was yet another profitable quarter for Apple, with
Apple announcing quarterly revenue of $35.3 billion (essentially the same as the $35 billion that Apple saw this time last year) and and quarterly net
profit of $6.9 billion (down from the $8.8 billion in profit this time last year).  If you want to get all of the nitty gritty
details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference
call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha.  Apple’s official press release is here.  Here are the things said on the call yesterday that I think would be of interest to iPhone and iPad users:

• Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones, which is pretty impressive considering
  
  that there is a large number of people who are waiting until this Fall
  
  to purchase an iPhone when Apple announces the new model for 2013.  That’s the largest number of iPhones that Apple has ever sold in a fiscal third quarter.  Apple CFO Peter Openheimer said:  “iPhone sales were ahead of our expectations, and we were particularly
  
  pleased with very strong year-over-year growth in iPhone sales in a
  
  number of both developed and emerging markets including the U.S., UK,
  
  Japan, Brazil, Russia, India, Thailand and Singapore.  iPhone 5 remains
  
  by far the most popular iPhone, but we were also very happy with sales of
  
  iPhone 4 and 4S.”  By
  
  my count, as of June 29, 2013, Apple had sold over 383
  
  million iPhones.
• Oppenheimer emphasized the success of the iPhone for corporate users:  “iPhone also continues to be the smartphone of choice for business.  Given the security and stability of iOS, enterprise and government customers continue to deploy iPhone on their networks in ways that go far beyond personal productivity.  Companies have built tens of thousands of custom apps to improve every aspect of their business.  Global companies including American Airlines, Cisco, General Electric, Roche and SAP have deployed more than 25,000 iPhones each across their organizations.  U.S. government organizations such NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the ATF and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency are supporting and managing thousands of iPhones on their networks and continue to create both customer facing and internal iOS apps.  In just this past quarter, iOS 6 was granted FIPS 140-2 validation by the U.S. Federal Government, and approval by the U.S. Department of Defense to connect to their networks.  Combining sales for business, government and education customers, iPhone holds a 62.5% share of the U.S. commercial market based on the latest quarterly data published by IDC.”
• The iPhone accounted for 51% of Apple revenue last quarter.  Apple may have once been known as a computer company, and perhaps at some point in the future they will be known primarily as an iPad company, but right now it would be fair to think of Apple as an iPhone company.
• iPhone market share is always difficult to determine because other companies don’t report precise numbers like Apple does.  But Apple noted yesterday that according to business analytics company comScore, the iPhone had 39% of the U.S. smartphone market in March through May of 2013.
• Apple sold 14.6 million iPads.  By my count, that means that as of June 29, 2013, Apple had sold over 154 million iPads.
• Just as he did for the iPhone, Oppenheimer emphasized that corporate customers love the iPad.  “In every major industry around the world, companies are developing, deploying and supporting apps for iPad.  Government organizations as well as global enterprise companies across diverse fields, including automotive, insurance, energy services and healthcare, are using iPad and custom apps to create unique, meaningful experiences for their employees, partners, and customers.  The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service has deployed thousands of iPads to in-person interviewers resulting in higher response rates and decreased cost.  And companies including Eli Lilly, Novartis, Cathay Life, Roche, and SAP have deployed over 20,000 iPads each across their organizations.”
• The iPad accounted for 18% of Apple’s revenue last quarter.  Put that together with the iPhone and that means that almost 70% of the company’s revenue came from iOS devices.
• Apple never announces new products in a fiscal results conference call, but when asked about new product categories, Apple CEO Tim Cook did say: “We are working on some stuff that we are really proud of and we will see how it does, and we will announce things when we are ready.”  Recall that three months ago, Oppenheimer said:  “I don’t want to be more specific, but I’m just
  
  saying we’ve got some really great stuff coming in the Fall and across
  
  all of 2014.”
• I think it is safe to assume that some of the “great stuff” coming in “Fall” of 2013 is a new iPhone.  But when will we see it, September or October?  (The iPhone 5 was announced on September 12, 2012 and went on sale September 21, 2012.)   We are currently in the Apple fiscal fourth quarter, which will end in late September, and an analyst asked on the call whether we would see new products in the Apple fiscal fourth quarter.  Unsurprisingly, Apple executives declined to answer the question, so we will just have to wait and see.

After discussing Wireless Emergency Alerts last week, I thought I’d discuss another topic related to alerts on the iPhone — the Do Not Disturb feature of iOS 6.  From conversations I’ve had with others, I know that there is some confusion about how this feature works, and it is important for iPhone users to understand when alerts can occur.  After all, you don’t want to be this guy who brought a performance of the New York Philharmonic to a halt, nor do you want a similar thing to happen to you in court.

[UPDATE 10/24/13:  Note that Do Not Disturb works a little differently in iOS 7.  For example, in iOS 7 it suppresses alerts even if you are using your iPhone.]

It is easy enough to activate the Do Not Disturb feature.  Just open the Settings app and on the first screen you will see an option called Do Not Disturb.  Turn it on to activate it.  You can tell when the feature is activated because a moon icon appears to the left of the time at the top of your iPhone’s screen.

 

When the feature is enabled, your iPhone will not disturb you (subject to settings discussed below).  Phone calls to your iPhone will go straight to voice mail without the phone ringing at all.  Thus, the feature gives you a way to silence phone calls, FaceTime invitations, alerts, and notifications. 

You need to be careful about the Clock app, however.  When it sounds an alarm, the alarm always goes off.  This means that an alarm trigged by the Clock app will make noise even if the iPhone is in Do Not Disturb mode.  It makes noise even if your ringer switch is turned off.  I suspect that this is how most of us will want the function to operate; if you ask your iPhone to wake you up in the morning, you probably intend for an alarm to go off even if you don’t want to be disturbed by other alerts.  Just be aware of this and don’t assume that the Do Not Disturb feature makes it impossible for your iPhone to make noise.  An alarm that you set in the clock app to go off at a specific time, and an alarm that sounds when the countdown timer reaches zero, is going to make noise.

Even when Do Not Disturb is turned on, it only goes into effect when your device is locked — in other words, the screen is turned off.  If you turn on Do Not Disturb while you are in court but you are using your iPhone such that the screen is on, then calls, alerts and notifications will still come through (and will make noise if your ringer/silent switch is in the up position).  The point of the Do Not Disturb feature is to keep your iPhone quiet and unobtrusive when you not otherwise using it.  

In the Settings app, just below the on/off switch for Do Not Disturb, you can tap the word Notifications and then, on the next screen, tap the word Do Not Disturb to change the settings for this feature. 

 

One option is to automatically use Do Not Disturb on a schedule.  I like this feature because I keep my iPhone in an iHome device next to my bed to charge it at night so it is very close to my bed.  I don’t want to be awoken by a simple alert such as a notification that I have a new email.  Even if the ringer switch is turned off, many alerts will still appear on my iPhone’s screen and turn on the screen for a few seconds — which can seem quite bright in an otherwise dark room at night — and some alerts such as incoming phone calls may also make your iPhone vibrate, which can seem quite loud in a quiet room.  Thus, as you can see above, my iPhone turns on the Do Not Disturb feature automatically every night between 1:00 AM and 6:00 AM.

You can create two types of exceptions so that alerts pass through even when the Do Not Disturb feature is turned on.  First, you can allow calls to ring through to your iPhone either from everyone (which somewhat defeats the purpose of the setting), everyone in your contacts (which helps guard against unsolicited calls), everyone in a subgroup of your contacts (you can create such groups using iCloud; click here for instructions), or everyone in your Favorites, which is the setting I have enabled.  My Favorites on my Phone include people such as my close family members and a few folks at my law office including my secretary.  If one of them calls me in the middle of the night or when I otherwise have Do Not Disturb turned on, I figure that there could be a good reason for it.

The second exception that you can create is for Repeated Calls.  The idea is that if someone calls you from a number that is not in your exception list — such as a family member calling you from a pay phone — and they do so more than once, the second such call will go through because, presumably, it is important. 

While I’m talking about the Do Not Disturb feature on your own iPhone, keep in mind that other people might use it as well.  If you ever need to urgently reach another person on their iPhone, if your first call goes straight to voice mail, that might mean that the person’s iPhone is turned off or it might mean that the person has the Do Not Disturb feature enabled.  Thus, if your call is important, consider calling a second time to see if the call goes through because the Repeated Calls option is turned on.

If you’re only concerned about blocking normal phone calls, one alternative is to use Airplane mode, which disables the cellular data service on the iPhone.  Once airplane mode is turned on you can then turn WiFi on, but note that if you do so alerts such as iMessage text messages and emails will still come through, and even phone calls from other services such as Skype or FaceTime will come through.

There is always one guaranteed way to make sure that your iPhone doesn’t bother you.  Just turn it off.  Hold down the on/off/sleep/wake button at the top right of the iPhone until you see the Slide to Power Off option, and then select that option.  But if you don’t want to shut down your phone and you find yourself in a place where you are supposed to be quiet, make sure that you understand the ins and outs of iPhone alerts so you can take the necessary precautions.

As Apple and iOS app developers continue to focus their efforts on getting ready for iOS 7 later this year, the world of iOS was relatively quiet this week, but there were a few interesting stories that caught my attention:

• New York attorney and TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante reviews the new 2.0 version of  NoteSuite, an iPad (and Mac) app for taking, organizing, and searching notes.  The app lets you import a Word document and then convert it to PDF so you can annotate it.
• St. Louis attorney Todd Hendrickson discusses whether the iPad or the iPad mini is more valuable in the practice of law in this post on Lawyerist.com.  I use both of them extensively and have a different favorite depending upon the task.
• If you need to book a hotel room but you can wait to do so until Noon on the day when you need it, Florida attorney Rick Georges discussess an app called Hotel Tonight on his FutureLawyer site that can get you some good deals.
• South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer explains how to give a wireless presentation with an iPad, an Apple TV and a VGA projector.
• Joe Patrice of Above the Law describes a lawsuit filed by a lawyer (on his own behalf) who asserts that Apple’s is responsible his ruined marriage because Apple made it possible for him to view pornography using the Safari web browser.
• Microsoft released a version of Outlook for the iPhone and iPad, but it is only for a small group of Outlook users.  If your office subscribes to Office 365 and you can already use the Outlook Web App, then the new OWA app for iOS provides a native client.  But as Tom Warren of The Verge reports, support for Exchange on-premises is planned for the future.
• Ashton Kutcher, who plays Steve Jobs in a movie being released next month, explained on Quora why he took the part.
• Brad Molen of Engadget reports on new plans offered by AT&T, T-Mobile and (possibly) Verizon that let you pay for an iPhone in monthly installments and get new phones every year.  It sounds sort of like leasing a car versus buying a car.
• If you ever need to charge up to five iPads and/or iPhones at the same time, this week Griffin announced the PowerDock 5, a $99 relatively small charging station that provides a place to hold and store up to five devices.  We already have four iPads in my house (I have an iPad and an iPad mini; my wife has an iPad; and we have an older iPad 2 that my kids use) and I suspect we are not alone in having many iOS devices in one house.
• Killian Bell of Cult of Mac reports on an Oregon man who was looking at vintage cars on the eBay app on his iPhone and didn’t sign out of the app before he let his 14 month old child play with his iPhone.  Apparently the child opened the eBay app again and bid on a car, and the man subsequently “won” the auction and became the proud owner of a 1962 Austin Healy Sprite.  Oops.
• And finally, I don’t play a lot of games on my iPad but I did enjoy playing Angry Birds Star Wars.  It mixes the fun Angry Birds concept with sound effects and characters from the original three Star Wars films that I loved as a child.  This week, Rovio announced that it will release Star Wars II on September 19.  The second version will track the Episode I, II and III movies and works with 30 collectable figures sold by Hasbro.  You buy a figure, such as a Chewbacca Angry Bird, and place it on a pod place on top of your iPad’s camera to insert the character into the game and play it.  Interesting idea.  Here is a video showing the upcoming game, and in the meantime, you can currently get the original Angry Birds Star Wars HD (normally $2.99) for free: