It is rare for a post on iPhone J.D. to generate controversy, but one series of posts to do so has been my reviews of the Gogo airline internet service. People often leave comments saying that the service has not worked well for them. However, I was traveling most of this past week with day-long depositions and other meetings and often one of the few times that I could stop to take a breath was when I was above 10,000 feet. I often found it useful to use my iPad mini — perfect for even a tight seat on a plane because it is small and light — to connect to Gogo and catch up on emails. I even saw a plan that I had not seen before, a 30-minute plan for only $4.00. You can make it through a lot of emails and download a lot of files in 30 minutes, and then use the rest of the time on your flight to read and revise the documents that you downloaded. That productivity was well worth $4.00, and I hope that Gogo continues to offer this plan. One complaint about Gogo is speed, but for simple emails and downloading documents, it has always been fast enough for me. And this may improve substantially in a few years; Edward Wyatt of the New York Times reported this week that the FCC is paving the way for faster Wi-Fi on planes. Sounds great to me. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
If you want to maximize your productivity on your iPhone or iPad and don’t mind getting a little geeky to do so, check out the latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast. Florida attorney Katie Floyd and California attorney David Sparks discuss some great apps and tricks for automating tasks on iOS.
Apple always has great photographs of its products in its ads, and a lot of the credit for that goes to photographer Peter Belanger. Michael Shane of The Verge has a great interview with Belanger in which he explains how he produces those great photographs.
The camera on the iPhone is great and keeps getting better with each new version of the phone. Photographer Lisa Bettany, one of the brains behind the great Camera+ app, posted some great comparison pictures that show pretty dramatically how much the camera has improved from the first generation iPhone to the current iPhone 5.
And finally, the following video showing 10,000 iPhone 5s as dominoes is fake, and was created by Aatma Studio using computer graphics, but it is still really cool to watch:
Nobody wants to have their username and password hacked on any service, and this includes your Apple ID. If a bad guy can log in with your ID, he might be able to buy music, apps, movies, books, and other items and make you pay for them. Apple recently added two-step verification as a free, optional security enhancement for your Apple ID username and password. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks, and it works well and I can recommend it.
Apple calls it “two-step verification” but I usually see this type of protection called “two-factor authentication.” Whatever you call it, the idea is that even if someone knows the password for your username, he still cannot log in unless he also has something that only you should have. For example, some companies protect their secure websites by requiring that users have not only a username and a password but also be able to type in the number displayed on an RSA SecurID Hardware Authenticator, a number that changes every minute. A bad guy might somehow get or guess your username and password, but he presumably won’t also have the SecurID that is on your keychain.
Apple implements this by making your iPhone your hardware authenticator, which makes sense because presumably only you have your iPhone. A bad guy in another country might somehow guess or hack your username and password, but he won’t have your iPhone … and if he does, you have bigger fish to fry.
To turn on the service, you need to first sign in to your Apple ID on the Apple website. Select Password and Security, and under “Two-Step Verification” click get-started. If your current password isn’t sufficiently complicated (not long enough, lacks upper and lower case characters, etc.) Apple will ask you to change your password and imposes a three-day waiting period before letting you make additional changes … long enough for Apple to send you an email and to ensure that it is really you making the changes. Then you can sign in again, select Password and Security, and get started with two-step verification.
There are two ways to use your iPhone for verification. First, you can use the Find My iPhone app. I wasn’t able to use this option because, like many long-time Apple users, I have two Apple IDs — one that I use to buy things on the iTunes Store and the App Store (an ID that I have used since the iTunes Store opened 10 years ago and long before I had an iPhone), and one that I use for services like Find My iPhone, iCloud, etc. If you only have one Apple ID, then this option can work for you. Second, you can have Apple send you an SMS text message for verification, and this is the option I chose.
Now that I have configured two-step verification, if a bad guy were to try to log in to the Apple website with my username and password, he would encounter this screen telling him that he needs to verify his identity:
Similarly, if a bad guy tries to download something from the iTunes Store, App Store or iBookstore on his iPhone or iPad, he’ll encounter a screen like this one:
Of course, if it is you trying to access your own account, you simply tell Apple to send you a code. For the text message approach, in about five seconds you’ll get a message with the code. Then simply enter that code to confirm your access to the Apple website or to continue your purchase from the iTunes Store or App Store.
I was able to test Apple’s two-step verification in two different ways. First, I tested using it to access the portion of the Apple website that manages my Apple ID. Second, I recently had a problem with my iPhone so I brought it to an Apple Store and they swapped it out for a new one. When I tried to start buying apps on the iPhone using my Apple ID username and password, Apple wouldn’t let me do so until I verified my identity via the text message. Since this iPhone had my own AT&T SIM card, of course I got that text message, but if I were not me, I wouldn’t have received that message.
Note that once you authenticate hardware (iPhone, iPad, etc.) as yours, you won’t have to use two-step verification again. But the first time that you use a new piece of hardware, Apple will verify that you are who you say you are.
What happens if you lose your iPhone and still need to access the Apple website to change something on your Apple ID? When you first configure the two-step verification service, Apple gives you a unique recovery key that you are told to print out. Store that recovery key someplace safe, such as a safe deposit box. If you ever lose your iPhone, you can still access your account so long as you have your name/password and that recovery key. Similarly, if you ever forget your password, you can still access your account so long as you have your iPhone and your recovery key. Note, however, that if you lose access to two of these three items at the same time — (1) password, (2) iPhone and (3) recovery key — then you will be permanently locked out of your account. This makes sense because the whole point of two-step verification is that a bad guy might gain access to one of those three (such as your password or your iPhone) but he wouldn’t have access to two of those three, let alone all three of them.
If you want to learn more, Apple has a good article with all of the nitty gritty details on two-step verification. It takes a short amount of time to configure, and it is a slight nuisance every time you log in for the first time from a new device, but I think that it is well worth it to protect your security. It has worked well for me, and if you want additional security, I recommend that you check it out.
Yesterday, Apple released a small update for iOS, but only for the iPhone 5. iOS 6.1.4 provides an updated audio profile for the speakerphone. I’ve searched everywhere I can think of to try to figure out what that means, and so far I’ve found nothing. But if you use the speakerphone on your iPhone 5, I’m sure that you don’t want to be one of the uncool kids who isn’t using the latest audio profile. And that reminds me: last Friday, I mentioned that Apple’s WWDC developer conference will be held on June 10-14, 2013. I should have also mentioned that there is always a keynote at the beginning of the conference which Apple often uses to announce new operating software, so I expect that the next version of the iOS operating system, presumably named iOS 7, will be announced about a month from now. Hopefully it has more new features than iOS 6.1.4 does. And now, for the other iOS news of note from the past week:
Florida attorney Mark Astor asked me to announce the launch of Lawser, a social networking platform for members of the legal profession including lawyers and law students.
If you use the VPN feature on the iPhone or iPad, you may have heard that Apple recently lost a patent lawsuit concerning VPN on demand behavior and, as a result, announced that it was going to remove the ability to keep a VPN connection always on. Eric Slivka of MacRumors reports that Apple has changed course or at least delayed making the change, so for now, that VPN connection will stay active.
If you use the iPhone’s built-in calculator and wish there were a way to backspace, it turns out that there is. Killian Bell of Cult of Mac reports that you can do so with a swipe gesture. Neat.
The App Store is about to hit 50 billion downloaded apps. Whoever downloads the 50 billionth app will get a $10,000 App Store gift card, and the next 50 customers after that will each get $500 App Store gift cards. Details are here.
Apple also announced the all-time top paid and free apps. Federico Viticci of MacStories has them listed so you can see how many you own.
And finally, Apple has a long history of running commercials that are as well-made as their products, and they are currently running a great one called Photos Every Day. If you have watched TV this week you may have already seen it, but if not, here it is. It is a great, powerful, beautiful commercial. The background music is also great; it was composed by Rob Simonsen, who has composed music for many movies and TV shows. Simonsen also composed the great song used in the Apple ads that ran in the Fall of 2012 when the iPhone 5 was introduced (such as Physics and Cheese).
I am pleased to welcome WestlawNext as a sponsor of iPhone J.D. I’ve been a fan of the WestlawNext service ever since I first used it on my computer. I find the service to be incredibly efficient and effective, and it helps me to find the best cases, statutes or other legal authorities to cite, having a direct impact on the quality of the legal arguments that I write.
Moreover, I really like the implementation of the service in the iPad app. As I noted when I first reviewed the app in December of 2011 (and long before Westlaw first approached me about being a sponsor) the app’s interface is simple enough to be intuitive and to not get in your way,
but the app is powerful enough to satisfy all of your legal research
needs. The app has received numerous updates since it was first released so it keeps getting more powerful, and I often use my iPad to do legal research even when I am in my office and could be using my computer just because the iPad app works so well.
If you want to learn more, click on the ad on the left to read some WestlawNext customer success stories. If you already subscribe and you are ready to try the iPad app, download it today at no additional charge. While there is not a dedicated WestlawNext app for the iPhone, simply access http://next.westlaw.com from your iPhone to use the efficient mobile version of the website.
When I reviewed ABBYY TextGrabber + Translator yesterday, I noted that the translation in that app uses Google translation services, which means that an Internet connection is required. But what if you don’t have Internet access, perhaps because you are in a location with poor reception and no WiFi, or perhaps you are in a foreign country with no data access? Fortunately, ABBYY makes an iPhone app called Lingvo that can perform translation right on the iPhone with no Internet connection needed. I purchased it to see how it worked in conjunction with TextGrabber, and while that was disappointing, Lingvo on its own is a fantastic app.
The TextGrabber app has a dictionary button that you can tap to send text to Lingvo, so I thought that I would be able to scan a document, tap a single button to send all of the text to Lingvo, and then have Lingvo translate the entire document — much like the support for Google translation within the TextGrabber app. But that’s not how it works. Lingvo can only get 5 words or 200 characters from the clipboard, so sending an entire scanned document from TextGrabber to Lingvo will only give you the translation of the first few words. Thus, Lingvo has limited utility as an accessory to the TextGrabber app.
But as a stand-alone app, Lingvo is incredibly useful. The app supports dozens of different dictionaries that you download within the app itself. Some of the key, core dictionaries can be downloaded at no extra charge when you purchase this app. This includes basic English translation to (and from) Chinese, Czech, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Turkish. But you can also purchase additional dictionaries that includes more words, including specialized dictionaries.
For example, the basic, included English to French dictionary has 44,000 entries. For $9.99 (although currently on sale for $4.99) you can purchase the “Universal” French-English dictionary with 175,000 words. You can also purchase the Harper Collins French-English dictionary with 86,000 entries for $20.99 or other specialized dictionaries such as the Law, Politics and Economics French-English dictionary with 30,00 entries for $11.99. If you are interested in Russian, there are specialized dictionaries for computer terms, electronics, marketing, finance, management, law, politics, patents and even wine.
Once you download one or more free or paid dictionaries, you are ready to go. One way to use this dictionary is to simply type in a word in English or some other language. Then the app will give you a definition and a translation, depending upon which dictionary you selected. So in this example, I downloaded the free, basic KD English-French dictionary and typed in the word pomme. The app quickly told me this means apple in English.
Some definitions are simple like this. Other times the definitions give you more information. For example, when I typed bathroom in the basic KD English to French dictionary, I saw two definitions, the first of which was a more literal translation of “bath” and “room,” but the second translation gives you a head’s up that “salle de bains” in French is a room where you take a bath, but you want the “toilettes” if you are looking for a lavatory. And the Russian to English basic dictionary tells me that Салат can mean either salad or lettuce.
There are lots of iPhone apps that can translate between different languages, and one thing that sets Lingvo apart is the ability to download so many different dictionaries. But Lingvo comes from ABBYY, a company that has specialized in scanning and reading documents since the late 1980s, and what makes Lingvo incredibly neat and different from other apps is the built-in support for ABBYY’s on-device OCR technology for mobile platforms. The way that it works is almost magic.
Simply take a picture of a document, or choose a picture from your Photos. In the following example, I’m using the same Russian menu that I used in yesterday’s review. Tell the app which dictionary to use, such as the Russian to English dictionary, and then give the app a second or two to perform an OCR of the document. All of this happens in the app itself; no Internet connection is required. Then you can simply tap on a word to see a translation of each word. So in this example, I tap on each of the words in the description of one of the salads and I learn that it is a “salad” “out of” “apple” “and” “cabbage” “with” “orange” “dressing.” It is like having a translator at your side telling you what every word in a menu means as you point to it.
By comparison, when I used the TextGrabber app yesterday and did the translation using Google translate services, I was told this was a “Salad with apples and cabbage with orange sauce” — essentially the same thing, but it is more helpful to have access to a full dictionary in Lingvo to see that “соусом” in Russian has several translations: sauce; gravy; dressing.
Note that the photo translation function does not work for the Kazakh or Chinese dictionaries. Note also that while this is a universal app that works on the iPad, the photo input feature only works on the iPhone and iPod touch. [UPDATE: ABBYY posted a comment to this review to state that they are working on adding photo input to the iPad.]
If you just want to translate a specific word or phrase, you can also use the crop tool to create a smaller rectangle on the screen. Then the app will only OCR and translate the words in the crop rectangle.
The free dictionaries for the most part work fine, but a few times I noticed that they did not contain a word I was looking for. For example, in that Russian menu, the basic dictionary did not understand кальмарами. If you have an Internet connection, the app gives you the option to search online using another service such as Google or Wikipedia, which in this case will tell you that кальмарами means squid — which is probably information that you would want to know before you order that dish. But as noted, you can purchase additional dictionaries with more words, including specialized dictionaries such as legal dictionaries.
The app includes a flash card feature to help you learn a foreign language. Select any dictionary entry and tap the card button. Then when you are ready to start a lesson, the app will quiz you with the word in one language and when you tap the card it turns over to show you the translation in another language.
Some of the dictionaries have recorded pronunciations of words, but none of the free ones that I tried have that feature. The FAQ gives you a list of which dictionaries have recorded pronunciations.
I’m impressed with Lingvo. It performs well as a basic dictionary app when you need to look up a word, but the ability to use ABBYY’s top-notch OCR technology to scan and translate words on-the-fly makes this an incredibly useful app. And all of this talk about reading menus in French, Russian and other languages is making me want to plan a vacation abroad!
As much as many attorneys want to go paperless, we still encounter paper every day. If you are in your office and you want digitize a document, you can feed it in your scanner and perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on your computer using Adobe Acrobat or other software. But if you are away from the office, your iPhone can help to digitize documents. I’ve reviewed lots of apps that can scan (take a picture of) a document, but if you need get the text on that document so that you can email it, revise it, etc., you need an app that can do OCR. Earlier this year I reviewed ABBYY FineReader Touch, an app that can scan and OCR a document, but that app performs the OCR function by uploading data to the FineReader Online OCR Service. If you don’t have an Internet connection, or if you just don’t like the idea of sending confidential text to a third party, you instead want an app that can perform the OCR right on the iPhone itself. ABBYY recently sent me a free review copy of its TextGrabber + Translator app, a $9.99 app that performs OCR using ABBYY’s on-device OCR technology for mobile platforms. ABBYY has been creating software to scan and translate documents since the late 1980s, so there is a lot of experience that goes into the technology used in this app. I’ve been using this app for several weeks now, and I’m impressed.
The app is simple to use. You start by snapping a picture of a document. In the following pictures, I am using a sample document I created when I reviewed Readdle’s Scanner Pro app last year, an app that can scan but cannot OCR documents. By default the app is prepared to do an OCR in the English language but the app has support for 61 different languages. Press the gear icon to change that language. You can tap an icon at the top to activate the iPhone’s LED light to shine additional light on a document. Tap another icon to turn the crop tool on and off to indicate whether you want to select a portion of a document to OCR, as I have done in the following example. You can also select a picture from your Camera roll to perform OCR.
After a few seconds — and with no Internet connection required — the app performs OCR to read the text in the document. In my tests, if the quality of the original is decent, the OCR is excellent with virtually no errors. I only encountered trouble when I tried to scan an old copy of a contract with very small text, but even my own eyes had trouble with that one. The resulting text is then displayed on the screen and you can edit it if you need to correct any mistakes. From here, you can select and copy some of the text so that you can paste it elsewhere, or you can tap the button in the bottom right corner to see more options such as copy all text to the clipboard, place the text in the body of an email, send the text to Evernote, etc.
As the name of the app suggests, you can also use this app to translate text. For example, I told the app that I wanted to perform OCR in Russian and then scanned a Russian menu. The app correctly read the text from the menu.
You can then tap the Translate button at the bottom to translate to English. Note that the app uses Google to perform the translation, so you have to have an Internet connection from this to work. But if you do have an Internet connection, you can translate from 45 languages to 50 languages, giving you the ability to read pretty much any menu or other document you are likely to encounter no matter where you are in the world. In my experience, Google translation is often not perfect, but is good enough to get by, and in this example was more than good enough to navigate this menu.
If you are in a foreign country, you might not have a data connection to perform the translation, but ABBYY makes a separate $5.99 app called Lingvo Dictionaries that can perform translation right on the iPhone and that works with this app. My review of Lingvo Dictionaries is coming soon.
As a lawyer, I consider this app useful because I can take text from a paper document without having to retype it and then use the text in an email or another document, but this app is also useful for those with vision difficulties. For example, the app can display the text in larger fonts, so this app can literally help you read the fine print in a document. The new version 3.0 of this app released earlier this month also has full support for VoiceOver, an Apple technology built-in to the iPhone that can help those who are blind or have poor vision use an iPhone.
ABBYY TextGrabber does an excellent job of taking words in a physical document and converting them to text using OCR. I love that you don’t even need an Internet connection to perform the OCR. For those with an international practice, the ability to read text in so many different languages is a plus. And for those who encounter foreign languages or need to work with people who do not speak English, the ability to use Google to translate (if you have an Internet connection) is very useful.
Click here to get ABBYY TextGrabber + Translator ($9.99):
This week, Apple announced that its conference for software developers, WWDC, will be held on June 10-14, 2013. Originally this was a conference for developers of Mac software, but starting in 2008 (the year that Apple allowed third party apps on the iPhone), the scope expanded to iOS developers. Not coincidentally, 2008 was the first year that WWDC sold out. It sold out again in 2009, 30 days after tickets went on sale. In 2010, it sold out in 8 days. In 2011, in 10 hours. In 2012, in 2 hours. This week, WWDC was completely sold out only 2 minutes after tickets went on sale. I love this statistic because it shows the increasing eagerness to develop apps for the iPhone and iPad, which should mean even more, better apps for those of us who use an iPhone and an iPad every day. And now, the news of note from the past week … and there isn’t much, because it was a pretty slow news week in the world of iOS:
Would you like to have coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple headquarters? The website CharityBuzz is taking bids to do so, with the proceeds to benefit the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights. The bidding started at $50,000 and as of Thursday night was up to $230,000 … and there are still 19 days left to bid. [UPDATE: As of Friday morning the highest bid is up to $560,000.]
Apple celebrated the 10th anniversary of the iTunes Store this week. I purchased quite a bit of music for my iPod when the iTunes Store went live, and I see that some of my first purchases were Soak Up The Sun by Sheryl Crow, Clocks by Coldplay and an accoustic version of Unwell by Matchbox Twenty (which doesn’t seem to be in the iTunes Store anymore) — three songs that I like but haven’t listened to in a while, so now I’m listening to them as I type this post.
If you want to dial back the nostalgia even more, John Biggs of TechCrunch reviews Classic Note, a $3.99 iPhone app that makes your iPhone take notes like a 1980s Macintosh computer. The app reminds me of the Mac Plus that I bought my sophomore year in college with the money I had earned working over the summer. I added an external 20 MB hard drive, which made it almost as cool as my roommate’s fancy Macintosh SE. I’ve been buying and using Apple products ever since.
Joe White of AppAdvice reports on recent iPhone sales by U.S. carriers as announced in their latest quarterly earnings reports. In the last quarter, AT&T sold 4.8 million iPhones (out of a total of 6 million smartphones), Verizon sold 4 million iPhones (out of a total 7.2 million smartphones) and Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones (out of a total 5 million smartphones).
And finally, one of the most expensive iPhone accessories was unveiled this week by Volkswagen: the new iBeetle car, due out in 2014. This specially-designed Beetle has an iPhone dock and integrates with a special app in lots of different ways. The app can compare driving times, distances and fuel economy value for different routes; a Postcard function sends a digital postcard to your friends with a map of your current location; and the iPhone can work as an extended on-board instrument with an oil and coolant temperature gauge, a chronometer, and a compass. Click here for the press release.
Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2013 fiscal second quarter (which ran from December 30, 2012 to March 30, 2013) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. Apple reported revenue of $43.6 billion and net profit of $9.5 billion. Revenue was higher, but profit was lower, than the same quarter last year. But as always, I’m less interested in the financial aspects and more interested in the iPhone and iPad-related announcements. 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. But if you just want the highlights of the call that might of be of interest to iPhone and iPad users, then let’s get started.
Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones in the quarter. By my count, that means that as of March 30, 2013, Apple had sold over 352 million iPhones. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer cited a comScore report that the iPhone was the #1 smartphone from December 2012 to February 2013 with a 39% share.
Over 30,000 companies are creating their own iPhone apps to be used by their employees.
Apple sold 19.5 million iPads in the quarter. By my count, that means that as of March 30, 2013, Apple had sold over 140 million iPads.
Cook said that iPads are now being used in 95% of businesses in the Fortune 500.
Over 45 billion iOS apps have been downloaded. App developers have made over $9 billion in sales, and Apple is now paying developers over $1 billion every quarter. Oppenheimer said that 74% of all smartphone apps sold in the world during the last quarter were iOS apps.
As always, Apple has some new cool products planned for later this year. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a prepared statement: “We see great opportunities in front of us, particularly given the long-term prospects of the smartphone and tablet market, the strength of our incredible ecosystem which we’ve planned to continue to augment with new services, our plans for expanded distribution and the potential of exciting new product categories. … Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services that we can’t wait to introduce this Fall and throughout 2014. … And of course, we have a tremendous culture of innovation with a relentless focus on making the world’s best products that change people’s lives. This is the same culture and company that brought the world the iPhone and the iPad and we’ve got a lot more surprises in the works.”
Note that Cook did not just say new products, he said “new product categories,” which implies something brand new. Gene Munster — an analyst who asks almost every quarter whether Apple plans to start selling TVs — asked Cook to confirm that he had said that there would be a new product category. In response, Cook confirmed that “one of our areas for growth are potential new categories, and we’re very excited about those.”
When will we see new products and new product categories? Cook’s prepared statement referred to the “Fall and throughout 2014" so an analyst asked whether that meant that Apple would not announce any new products before Fall of this year. Oppenheimer responded: “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.” That sort of sounds like a “yes” to me, but we’ll see.
One analyst asked Tim Cook whether Apple is considering making an iPhone with a larger screen. Obviously, Apple is not going to spill the beans on any future product plans, but here is what Cook did say in response: “My view continues to be that iPhone 5 has the absolute best display in the industry. And we always strive to create the very best display for our customers. Some customers value large screen size, others value also other factors such as resolution, color quality, white balance, brightness, reflectivity, screen longevity, power consumption, portability, compatibility with apps, many things. Our competitors have made some significant trade-offs in many of these areas in order to ship a larger display. We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these trade-offs exist.” That’s an interesting answer because I don’t hear Cook saying no. I hear him saying that Apple won’t create an iPhone with a larger screen until the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, which of course could happen at any time in the future as technology advances. So maybe, in the future, we will see iPhones in more than one screen size, just like we now have both the iPad and the iPad mini.
It’s been a long time since I have reviewed time entry apps on the iPhone, mainly because I don’t currently use those apps in my practice. One app that I looked at four years ago (and then again in September of 2009) is Time Master + Billing by On-Core Software, an app that has changed substantially since I last mentioned it. Denver attorney Gary Marsh recently told me how much he likes this app, and he gave me permission to share his thoughts here. If you are considering using your iPhone or iPad to handle time entry and billing, here is Gary’s perspective on how this app has worked in his practice:
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Time Master, by On-Core Software, LLC, is now in Version 5.7 (support documentation most recently revised February 5, 2013). It has grown into a full-featured program that rivals or, indeed, exceeds any PC or Mac desktop programs that I’ve seen – and I’ve tried quite a few.
The basic package is $9.99 (for timekeeping); the invoicing add-on module is another $9.99; and the synchronization add-on module, which allows the user to sync the app back and forth between an iPad and an iPhone, is another $6.99. (The also has a $5.99 Quickbooks export module, but I haven’t purchased that component and so don’t feel qualified to comment on it.)
I’ve been using Time Master for over a month now, and it has changed the whole way the financial side of my practice works. Formerly, I was using the desktop SaaS program TurboLaw Time & Billing, at $30 per month per computer. I was dictating my time into my iPhone’s recorder; then using iTunes to burn the recordings to a DVD disk; then handing off the disk each week to an outside bookkeeper, who was then listening to the recordings and posting them, one at a time, to TurboLaw. Why the DVDs? The files, which were in Microsoft Access .mdb format, could not be sent
as e-mail attachments because the servers viewed them as being
virus-infected; thus, a physical hand-off of disks every week had to be
carried out.
The fact she did this on a second computer meant I had to pay for two separate TurboLaw licenses. I had to pay the outside bookkeeper $800+ per month just to post all of my time and expense entries. Then she would run preliminary invoices, which I would have to review and correct for misspellings, mispostings, and other problems. I would then hand-deliver the corrected versions back to the bookkeeper, who would then run final versions and send them out.
At the end of our typical monthly billing period, we were usually lucky to have our client invoices out the door by the 10th of the following month – in a good month. When instances arose where I was tied up in meetings, or court appearances, or out of the country, sometimes we just rolled the entire month over into the next month, and redid the whole process all over again. Not exactly the preferred way for a law firm to manage its cash-flow.
Enter Time Master, which lets me post my own entries for both time and expenses on-the-fly, to either my iPhone or my iPad, whichever happens to be the most convenient at the time. For this past month of March, we had all of our client invoices out by April 3rd. And that was just because we were still familiarizing ourselves with the program, which is extremely user-friendly. By the time the month of April is concluded, I fully expect we will be ready and able to send all of our client invoices out on the evening of April 30th.
Time Master has made great strides since your September, 2009 review. It should be in every lawyer’s briefcase on an iPad, or at the very least on every lawyer’s smart phone. With the money I’ll be saving on my former TurboLaw subscription ($720 per year), plus what I’ll save from not having to have the outside bookkeeper manually post entries ($9,600 per year), plus the increased regularity of cash-flow I’ll achieve by being able to get invoices out immediately at the end of each calendar month (priceless), the Time Master app more than paid for itself on the very first day I started using it. It would be pretty hard to beat that R.O.I. any other way, with any other app of which I’ve ever heard!
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Thanks, Gary, for sharing your thoughts on this app. I see that it also has integrated support for TextExpander, which can make it even faster to enter your time. I’ve also seen other attorneys rave about this app in the past (such as Alabama attorney Clark Stewart), so I know that it can be a great solution.
In a week in which the real news has been terrifying and bordered on the absurd, perhaps we can all gain from a break in which we just think about fun topics like mobile technology. Here is the iPhone and iPad news of note that caught my attention this week:
Missouri attorney Todd Hendrickson identifies his top 5 iOS apps in a post for Lawyerist.com.
The Law Firm Mobile website reports that 22 firms on the 2012 AmLaw 200 list have mobile apps, while 54 have mobile compatible websites.
Houston attorney Reginald Hirsch wrote to tell me that the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad, which was almost $100 when I posted a review a few months ago, is now selling on Amazon for about $75. One of my partners picked up one of these a few weeks ago and he loves it. I’m still not a fan of any keyboard with keys smaller than full-size, but if that doesn’t bother you, this is a very nice keyboard.
We all know that you need to silence your iPhone in court or you might get sanctioned by the judge. Laurel Newby reports on the Law.com Legal Blog Watch that a Michigan judge found himself in contempt after his unidentified phone started talking (sounds like Siri, but this is unclear).
South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn discusses some apps that can scan documents and create a PDF.
South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of the Hytech Lawyer reviews the Seagate GoFlex Mobile Wireless Plus 1TB mobile drive, a wireless hard drive that you can use with an iPad.
If you need to take a full-size screenshot of an entire webpage, you’ll want to check out this review of the Barry app by Federico Viticci of Macstories.
Joseph Keller of iMore reports that the YouTube app can now stream live events.
The humor website Funny or Die released its first movie this week, iSteve, staring Justin Long as Steve Jobs.
And finally, it occurs to me that my children will look at cassette tapes (and albums) the same way that I look at eight-track cartridges: something that I know my parents used for playing music, but something that I only barely remember myself. If you want to combine the nostalgia of old technology with the new technology of your iPhone 5, then you’ll want to check out the $14.99 Cassette Case by Rocket Cases, available in six different colors. Killian Bell of Cult of Mac posted this review.
