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In the news is typically the Friday post here on iPhone J.D., but this is probably my last post of this week.  If you want more, you’ll have to come to Chicago and see me at ABA TECHSHOW.  

Even if you cannot make it to Chicago this year, you can still attend the pre-TECHSHOW event that occurs tonight, Ignite Law 2010, because it will be streamed live to the Internet starting at 7:30 Central.  Click here for more information.

Here are some of the interesting iPhone-related items that I came across over the last few days.

• As reported
  
  by Dan Moren of Macworld, Apple has added the ability to send someone
  
  an iPhone app as a gift.  Art of the iPhone provides more
  
  information on how it works.  Still unclear to me:  what happens if
  
  the person already has the app?
• This time last year, Apple allowed you to buy an iPhone in the U.S. without a two year AT&T contract, although the phone was more expensive and still only worked with AT&T.  Presumably it was an effort to clear inventory before the new iPhone 3GS came out in July.  Well here we are, one year later, and once again Apple is doing the same thing, as reported by Dan Moren of Macworld.  If you want to spend more, $499 to $699, for an iPhone you can get one without an AT&T contract.  But again, the only U.S. carrier it will work with is AT&T, so I suspect that few will want to do this.
• Rocket Matter, which sells online time and billing software for law firms that can be accessed from a computer or iPhone, produced a short, fun YouTube video to preview the schwag that they plan to give out at ABA TECHSHOW this week, as well as the schwag that they decided not to provide.
• Harry McCracken of Technologier has used an iPhone for years but recently switched to a Droid for a few weeks to see what Android is all about.  Here is his report of the advantages and disadvantages of a Droid versus an iPhone.
• Similarly, the ABA Journal asked attorneys Finis Price and Ryan McKeen to debate the merits of the two phones for lawyers.  The result is this article.
• Lex Friedman of Macworld compares Dragon Search and ACTRocket, two search apps for the iPhone.
• Steve Jobs was a critical impetus for a bill pending in California that would require the DMV to ask whether each person with a driver’s license wants to become an organ donor.  (Currently, a person needs to know to ask to have a sticker put on his license.)  AppleInsider reports on and has the video from the press conference by Steve Jobs, Governor Schwarzenegger, and others.  It seems like a reasonable bill that should be the law everywhere.  It is very rare to see Steve Jobs speak in public outside of an Apple event.
• What is becoming less rare is to hear about Steve Jobs personally responding to e-mails asking about upcoming Apple products and features.  When these reports come out, one never knows if they are true, but Michael Grothaus of TUAW rounds up some recent reports on e-mails reportedly sent by Jobs.  One that caught my eye was a supposed e-mail from Jobs saying that Apple is adding a universal inbox to Mail on the iPhone.
• Dave Caolo of TUAW writes about iPhone apps that can be used to track packages.
• Matt Newburg of TidBITS reviews Things, a To-Do List program for the Mac that syncs with an iPhone client.
• Art of the iPhone writes about and shows a video of Opera Mini, a web browser for the iPhone that was submitted to Apple for approval.  I don’t know whether Apple will approve it; there are no other third party browsers on the App Store that don’t rely on webkit, the backbone of Safari.  If Apple does allow Opera Mini, it would be significant because it would be approval of an app that duplicates a core function of the iPhone.  Note that this video shows Opera Mini being many times faster than Safari, but John Gruber writes that the speed increase may noticeable mostly on slower Edge connections; on Wi-Fi the speed advantage may decrease and the rendering is likely to be worse than Safari.  We’ll see.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that “Apple has seen strong demand” for the iPad and has already pre-sold “hundreds of thousands of units,
  
  say people familiar with the matter.”
• Most people need to wait until April 3 to get an iPad, but a select few — including  Major League Baseball, The Wall Street Journal and The New
  
  York Times — have one already, according to Brad Stone and Jenna Wortham of the Times who describe the secrecy required by Apple for those who currently have an iPad.  Douglas MacMillan of BusinessWeek has a similar report.
• Attorney Dennis Kennedy writes in the ABA Journal about whether the iPad could replace the legal pad for lawyers.
• And finally, here is a fun video showing someone using the icons on an iPhone to create the alphabet.  It took 540 icons to do.

I’m flying to Chicago tomorrow for the ABA TECHSHOW conference that runs Thursday through Saturday.  I look forward to talking with as many iPhone-using lawyers as possible to find out your favorite apps and uses for the iPhone, so please stop me to say hello if you are there!  (I look like this and this.)  And to help you find me, here are some items already on my schedule.  (You can get the complete TECHSHOW conference schedule in PDF format here.)

Wednesday

7pm – 8:30pm:  Ignite Law 2010.  I plan to attend this event, at which 16 speakers get just 6 minutes and 20 slides each to discuss the future of law.  Should be interesting.  It is free to attend, and you can sign up and get more details here.

Thursday

4pm – 5pm:  60 Apps in 60 Minutes.  Reid Trautz and I will be giving this presentation.  I hope that you can attend and I’d love to chat after the session.  The location is room Northwest 2.

5pm – 6pm:  ABA TECHSHOW Welcome Recption.  At the Normandie Lounge at the Hilton.  I will try to stop by after my presentation.

6pm – 7pm:  TechShow Tweetup.  LexisNexis is sponsoring the ABA TechShow Tweetup from 5:30 to 7:30 at Kitty O’Sheas Pub at the Hilton.  I’ll probably stop by whenever I leave the Welcome Reception.

7:15pm – ?:  Taste of Techshow.  Ernie Svenson and I are leading the iPhone-themed Taste of Techshow dinner.  If you own an iPhone, and if you eat dinner, then you should plan to join us.  There will be a sign up sheet at the show, at the concierge desk.  I believe that the location for our dinner will be Tutto
Italiano Ristorante.

Friday

2pm – 4pm:  Concierge Booth.  The concierge booth always tends to be a gathering spot throughout TECHSHOW so you may find me there frequently, but I’m specifically assigned to work at the booth on Friday from 2 to 4.

5:30pm – 7:30pm:  Beer for Bloggers.  The ABA Journal and legal blogging expert Kevin O’Keefe, the founder of LexBlog, Inc., are hosting the Beer for Bloggers event at the Lakeside Green Lounge in the Hilton.  You can get more information and sign up here on O’Keefe’s site or here on the ABA site.

Saturday

8:30am – 9:30am:  iPhone Tips for Lawyers.  Ben Stevens and I will be giving this presentation on tips and tricks for using your iPhone, including ways to
maximize the built-in iPhone apps such as Mail, Contacts and Safari, strategies and third-party apps that can help you
better integrate the iPhone into your law practice, and more.  Our location is room Northwest 5.

11am-Noon:  60 Sites in 60 Minutes.  I’ll definitely attend this final presentation of TECHSHOW, which is always a lot of fun.  You can see some of the sites selected in past years here.  This year, the speakers are Toby Brown, Debbie Foster, Adriana Linares and Ernie Svenson.  Of course, there will be hundreds of people attending, so the chance of you finding me in the room are pretty small, but I’ll be there somewhere.

Finally, this week I’m following the hashtag #techshow on Twitter so I’ll be listening to you if you include #techshow in your tweets.

For those of you headed to Chicago, I look forward to seeing you this week!

iPhone owners love to download apps, so it is understandable that many companies have produced iPhone apps for the purpose of marketing the company.  Even law firms have gotten into the act, and I discussed some early efforts this past January.

Morrison & Foerster, a megafirm that has been around since the 1800s and has over 1,000 lawyers, recently unveiled new marketing initiatives.  First, the law firm — which calls itself MoFo — unveiled a new website.  The design sparked a lot of controversy, but I like it; it’s unique and fun.  My only critique is that the font is Arial, and if a law firm wants to be seen as a leader, it should select the font Helvetica instead of Arial in light of the Arial’s reputation of being a cheap imitation of Helvetica.  (Having said that, I acknowledge that few people know the difference.)  The firm also unveiled an iPhone app called MoFo2Go (which uses Helvetica, not Arial, giving the app that extra touch of class over the website).  I’m still undecided on whether an iPhone app makes sense as a law firm marketing opportunity, but if you are going to do one, you need to check out the MoFo2Go app because this is an example of how to do it right.

First, the app is functional.  What would a client want in a law firm app?  Bios on attorneys and easy links to call or e-mail them, firm addresses, and perhaps firm news.  This app has all of this, and every screen is nicely formatted for the iPhone.  The attorney bio pages are organized either by attorney, by practice area, by office or by law school.  You can also do a search to find a person, although the app only searches for names and does not do a full text search of each attorney’s bio.

The Locations portion of the app is particularly well done.  Locations brings up a nice Google Map displaying not only a black pin for the office location, but also red pins for travel locations (airports, parking), green pins for recommended nearby restaurants, and blue pins for recommended nearby hotels.  This makes it very easy for a client to find places near the law firm.

I don’t know how often people would want to use an iPhone app to read news releases from a law firm, but the app also includes a news page brings up standard law firm news releases, including tech-related articles with pictures that are nicely formatted for the iPhone.  A user can also create notes related to an article, another feature that I suspect will get rare use, but its inclusion doesn’t take anything away from the app so why not include it.

In addition to the function, the app has some fun.  First, the app includes a maze game, giving the user a reason to start up the app even if he is not looking to get MoFo information.  Second, the app itself, like the website, is nicely laid out and has a vibrant, fun feel.

One problem with the app is that every time you launch it, you need to wait for the app to download new information — presumably updated bios, new news, etc.  I understand why this is necessary to ensure that the app is always current, but it is a drag to have to wait.

Overall, while I remain on the fence about whether a law firm should have an iPhone app, MoFo has shown one way to do it well.  Some other bloggers have been less kind
about this app, but I like it, and if I were a client of MoFo I could
see myself both using the app and having positive thoughts about the
firm because of the app.  I give the firm credit for doing something unique and doing it well, although some of the credit also goes to Rubenstein Technology Group, the developer of the app.

Click here to get MoFo2Go (free): 

The number of iPhone users should continue to grow, the New York Times loves talking about the iPhone, lots of people love to speculate about the iPhone, plus cheese, all in this week’s edition of In The News.

• Reuters has an article about patients being told by attorneys to use their iPhones to record appointments with their doctors, without telling their doctors.  Obviously, the doctors are not happy about this, nor are the malpractice attorneys who represent them.
• GigaOm has a neat infographic on smartphone OS share.
• As that GigaOm chart shows, there are still a lot of Blackberry owners, but Art of the iPhone reports on a study by Crowd Science that finds that 40% of Blackberry owners want their next phone to be an iPhone.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, 10% of Microsoft employees are using iPhones.  I presume they are hiding them in paper bags or something.
• Attorney Finis Price of TechnoEsq.com discusses PadNote, an app for the upcoming iPad that will allow you to easily annotate PDFs.  Price predicts that this could be very useful at trial, considering that the iPad has a VGA out port.
• Charles Starrett of iLounge writes
  
  that Apple is banning from the Apple Store all products which are, or
  
  which include, protective screen film.  I don’t use one of these
  
  products myself — I find the iPhone screen sturdy enough, I prefer the
  
  feel of the iPhone screen without a cover, and I especially like the
  
  oleophobic coating on the iPhone 3GS — but having
  
  reviewed the Invisible Shield product last year I can understand
  
  the appeal, and my wife likes having one on her iPhone.Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports on an update to the PayPal iPhone app that lets you send someone else money just by bumping iPhones, giving you an easy way to pay someone back or divide a check.
• Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times reports that the cable channel Epix is developing a new TV series called “iCon” written by Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons and television veteran Larry Charles.  The show will focus “on a fictional Silicon Valley CEO whose ego is a study in power and
  
  greed.”
• Brad Stone and Miguel Helft of the New York Times report on a rumored spat between Apple and Google because of Google coming out with phones to rival the iPhone.
• And the iPhone articles from the New York Times aren’t over yet.  Jenna Wortham has written several interesting iPhone-related stories
  
  for the New York Times over the last few months (previously discussed
  
  here: 1,
  
  2,
  
  3,
  
  4). 
  
  Her latest is this
  
  one in which she speculates that Apple may be developing a service
  
  called iGroup that would “use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to allow a group of
  
  users in the same area to
  
  share information such as contact information or chat about an event
  
  while it’s happening.”  Interesting, if true.
• If you are in the mood for more iPhone speculation, AppleInsider
  
  reports on an Apple patent that would add walkie-talkie
  
  capabilities to an iPhone.
• Let’s keep the speculation coming:  Stan Schroeder of Mashable reports
  
  that Chetan Sharma Consulting estimates that mobile app downloads on
  
  all smartphones, which were around 7
  
  billion in 2009, will jump to almost 50 billion in 2012, at which time
  
  the market
  
  will be worth $17.5 billion.
• I’m not sure if this is inside information, speculation, or just hopeful thinking, but according to Art of the iPhone, the parent company of T-Mobile USA has said that it hopes to offer the iPhone on T-Mobile by the end of 2010.
• Ars Technica reports on a study by mobile analytic firm Localytics which concludes that most iPhone app use occurs around lunch-time and around 9pm on weekdays, and throughout the day on weekends. 
• If you are a woman, you like to use your iPhone while you workout, and you don’t mind giving people a reason to stare at your chest, TiPb writes about Gracie Gear workout clothes with an iPhone holder built-in to the top.
• And finally, are you trying decide what food you serve when you have a party to celebrate your love of the iPhone, or perhaps the arrival of the iPad?  Ken Aversano, Director of Public Relations at the cooking enthusiast website CooksDen.com, with the help of his wife Diane, created a sculpture of Steve Jobs’s head made out of mozzarella cheese, and his website gives you step-by-step directions so that you can create one yourself.  Aversano even suggests three different servings:  Apple Cheese Plate, iPad Thai, and my personal favorite, Spicy Steve Nachos Supreme which starts out looking like Steve Jobs and then melts over your chips.  Here are a few pictures, but you should really check out The Cooks’ Den to see all of them.  Aversano’s creation has gotten him much attention, including an article in the L.A. Times.  I give the credit to New Orleans attorney Dewey Scandurro for bringing this one to my attention:

 

Last November, Gary McFarlen, a computer consultant in Texas, wrote a comment on iPhone J.D. asking if there were any time tracking apps that synced with Timeslips, a popular Windows product used by many law firms and other companies that bill by the hour.  Back in November of 2009, there were not, but as I posted last week, the new iSlips app is the first to do so.

Since the release of iSlips, Gary and I have been talking via e-mail about various topics including this app.  At $49.99, iSlips is one of the more expensive apps you might purchase for your iPhone, so if you are thinking about buying iSlips I’m sure that you are interested in hearing from someone who has actually used the app.  Because I don’t use Timeslips at my law firm, I won’t be able to give iSlips a formal review myself, but when Gary told me about his experiences I thought that it would be something that others might like to read.  Gary gave me permission to post his e-mail, so here is one person’s first-hand experience with iSlips after the first week of use:

I wanted to give you some feedback about the new iSlips app for use with Timeslips.  I have been testing a copy for over a week now.  As I had related previously, I have previously used a product from iambic named “Timereporter for Timeslips” that ran on the Palm platform.  I have used it for years and it has been a tremendous productivity tool.  I had attempted to locate a similar item for the iPhone with no success.  I had recently entered into discussions with a programming group to develop this type of product [but iSllips] eclipses my own design interests. 

I ran into a couple of hiccups getting it originally installed on my iPhone.  This was due more to my own ignorance than anything else.   The best technique is to buy through the iTunes store and sync it directly into the iPhone.  Once installed on the phone, it is necessary to go to Brain Freeze software’s website and download and apply the iSlips Sync software to your computer.  This need is not readily apparent at purchase.  Fortunately, between Steve’s timely support and my own “Never Say Die” attitude, it was easy to figure out. 

After installing both pieces of the software, configuring the PC portion for my Timeslips database, I was ready for action.  The sync between the iPhone and database takes place wirelessly.  So it is imperative that a WIFI connection is available between the iPhone and the PC.  Once this was enabled, my first sync transferred all of my clients, fee and expense categories into my iPhone.  Fantastic!  I began entering time and expense entries from that point forward and they synchronized into my Timeslips without fail.  All I have to do in Timeslips is edit the entries for content and accuracy. 

A built-in feature allow the iPhone to [calculate] mileage using the built-in GPS.  This is a great tool for expense recapture of that nature. 

On a support note, I reported some anomalies that I observed in the Sync interface on the PC and an amended / corrected version was posted in just a few days. 

So far, I am very pleased with this application.  I will be recommending it to my colleagues and clients.

Thanks to Gary McFarlen for sharing his thoughts on this app.

[UPDATE 5/26/2011:  McFarlen wrote me again to provide some follow up on his use of this app a year later:

The original release was a very well developed product.  Nevertheless, some minor tweaks and improvements have been made over the last year to further enhance the wireless sync activities, etc.  My daily use to capture consulting fees and expenses has been greatly enhanced.  I find I capture my time more accurately and methodically with iSlips.  The automatic updates of my client list, categories, etc. is a huge time saver.  I wirelessly dump my data to Timeslips, perform slight edits and fire off electronic billings to my clients.   As an example of maximized cash flow, I have performed work that was entered in iSlips, sent an electronic bill later in the day, and received a check in the mail the very next day! 

And now for the good news.  iSlips has just been released for the iPad.  I had the pleasure to work with both beta, and the shipping versions.  I would write this in All Caps, but shouting is not cool.  This is a “Must Have” app for any attorney or contractor that bills by the hour and uses the Timeslips billing program.  The original interface for the iPhone has been modified to take advantage of the larger iPad screen.  The availability of the larger iPad onscreen keyboard makes working with the interface a snap.  Yes, I am extremely fired up about this app.  Not only do I get the familiarity of the original version for the iPhone, I now have a much more useful device for its use.  I have shown this app to a number of attorneys and they all want it.   At this point it is only available for the Timeslips platform for $64.99.   I have had very little need to contact the vendor, Brain Freeze Software, for support.  However, every instance has been met with genuine interest and very prompt response.  I could not be happier with this product.

Thanks for the update!]

Click here for iSlips ($49.99): 

 

Law Practice Magazine is the publication from the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA.  The magazine has always included good articles on legal technology.  Indeed, the reason that I joined the section in the 1990s — back when I was an associate and had nothing to do with the management side of a law firm — was that the magazine included a column by attorney Erik J. Heels, one of the pioneers in the use of the Internet by lawyers.  In 1992, Heels published an electronic and print book called The Legal List which compiled law-related resources on the Internet.  You can now read the old editions of The Legal List on his website, and it is an interesting trip down technology memory lane, back in the days when “The Internet” meant GOPHER, FTP, WAIS and BBS.

Fast-forward to the present, and lawyers interested in the Internet and legal technology are gearing up for ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago later this month.  The current edition of Law Practice Magazine includes tech tips from many of this year’s TECHSHOW speakers, including a short column I wrote
recommending a few iPhone apps for lawyers.  It reflects a small portion of the “60 Apps in 60 Minutes” presentation that Reid Trautz and I are giving on March 25.  

I also enjoyed reading the columns suggesting Blackberry apps by Toby Brown and
Dan Pinnington and Palm Pre apps by Erik Mazzone and Nerino Petro.  (UPDATE 3/19/10: The print issue of the magazine also has recommended apps for the Motorola Droid running the Android OS by Rick Georges, but I don’t see that column is online.)  Some of the apps suggested in those columns include:

• Documents to Go and other apps to view Word, Excel and PDF files
• Twitter clients
• Task managers
• Flight information apps
• Instant messaging clients
• Voice control apps such as Vlingo and Google Mobile
• Compilations of statutes and rules
• Internet radio apps such as Pandora
• GPS navigation apps
• Evernote
• Weather apps
• e-Book readers

In light of those two columns, if you are wondering what would happen if you had to use a smartphone other than the iPhone, apparently the answer is that while you would lose the elegance and power of the iPhone, the apps that you would be using would for the most part be very similar to the apps that you are using now with the iPhone.  Interesting.

I’ll recommend two more good articles from the current issue of Law Practice Magazine:  this
article by Nicole Garton-Jones with tips for lawyers who travel, and this one which collects a wide variety of legal technology tips from many different TECHSHOW presenters.

On my desktop computers (both my PC at work and my Mac at home), I’ve long been a fan of a free service called Readability.  It allows you to take a website that contains an article and a bunch of other extraneous information on the side (ads, other stories, etc.) and reformat the page so that all you see is the text of the article itself and the pictures, plus you can format the text into beautiful fonts at different sizes on a nice background.  It is sort of like taking the text of an article and placing it into an elegant book reader on your computer screen.  By increasing the text size, the text becomes easier to read, and by stripping away the ads, you remove the distractions and can just focus on the articles.  Here is a link to a great post by David Pogue of the New York Times which describes Readability better than I can.

It never occurred to me that this service could work with an iPhone until I saw this article by Darren Becket on iPhone Alley, which prompted me to do some more digging and locate this post from Herm Greider last year.  The steps to set it up are a little complicated, but essentially you use your computer to create a bookmarklet for the Readability site, and then you transfer that bookmarklet to your iPhone.  There are two ways to do this.  If you already use MobileMe to sync your Safari bookmarks on your computer and iPhone, then just create the Readability bookmark on your computer and it will automatically sync.  Greider describes that easier method, and also gives step by step instructions on a more complicated way that I used which involves sending yourself an e-mail containing the javascript for the bookmarklet.

Once you have it set up, here is what you can do with it.  Let’s say you are reading the New York Times using Safari on your iPhone and you see an article like this:

There is a lot of extraneous information on that page, such as all of the ads on the right and the related stories on the left.  You can of course double-tap on the text of the article to zoom in, but you still have some of this distracting information.  But with the Readability bookmarklet, you can just tap your Bookmarks icon, then select Readability bookmark that you created, and then the article that you were looking at will instantly be reformatted.

Here are two examples which both use the settings of Newspaper style, Extra Large size but the one on the left uses a Wide margin and the one on the right uses the Extra Wide margin (to get an even more narrow column, which you can double-tap to get even larger text):

The text in the Newspaper / Extra Large / Extra Wide Margin version is obviously quite huge, but I like that I can hold my iPhone far from my face and still easily read the text.  Of course, with fewer words per page I have to do more scrolling, which is a reason to instead use Newspaper / Extra Large / Wide Margin.  I actually set up two bookmarklets on my iPhone, one with each size of margin, so I can just choose the one that fits my mood.

I prefer the white background and typeface of the Newspaper style, but if you want something different you can choose other styles such as Inverse (on the left) and Novel (on the right):

For those of you planning to get an iPad, keep this tip in mind as I’m sure that Readability would look fantastic on the iPad’s large screen.  But even on the iPhone, it is wonderful to have a fast option for stripping away the extras and focusing on just the text in an article.

Apple started accepting sales for the iPad this past Friday, and at the same time updated some of the pages on its website concerning the iPad.  One interesting update was to add this page on the Apple website containing this picture:

 

Before this past Friday, Apple had not previously mentioned a “screen rotation lock” button the the iPad, and I presume that this witch was not on the sample iPads that selected journalists were shown back when the iPad was first announced — if it had been, people would have written about it.  [UPDATE: iPhone Alley reports that this switch was on demo units, but Apple previously called this the Mute switch, just like we have on the iPhone.  Now the function has been changed to a screen rotation lock switch.]

For iPad enthusiasts, it is exciting to see Apple adding new features to the iPad that were not previously discussed.  Macword’s Dan Moren wrote this helpful article to describe some of the features only recently learned from the new pages on the Apple website.

As an iPhone user, what interests me most about the iPad is that it may provide evidence of what Apple is planning to bring to the next version of the iPhone, which I presume Apple will introduce this June as the company has in the past.  I would love to see a screen rotation lock added to the iPhone.  At least once a week I find myself using my iPhone in a bed, while lounging in a chair, or in some other location where I must be tilting the iPhone as I look at it because the iPhone suddenly thinks that I want to switch from portrait to landscape mode (or vice versa) and the rotation changes.  Ugh!  Whenever it happens, I find myself wishing there was some way to tell the iPhone not to rotate the screen.

Of course, the iPhone is much smaller than the iPad, leaving much less space for buttons and switches, and thus I can see Apple deciding to include this as a software feature accessible in Settings instead of a hardware button on the side.  Plus, a software update would be helpful for all current iPhone owners, whereas a hardware button would require a new purchase.  On the other hand, pressing a switch to stop screen rotation is much faster than having to dig into the Settings app.  However it is done, I just hope that Apple adds this feature.

I see a few other newly discovered features in the iPad that might also be nice on the iPhone.  One example is the advanced data consumption information and warnings so that you know how much 3G data you have consumed.  If you are in the U.S. on an unlimited data plan, this information is not all that important, but if you travel abroad and purchase one of AT&T’s international roaming plans, you’ll want to place very close attention to the amount of data you are using because the charges if you go over are very high. 

Another example is that the iPad has a separate app for Videos, whereas on the iPhone your videos are part of the iPod.  The iPad has an iPod app too, to play both music and music videos, but it appears that if you want to play a movie or TV show you use the separate Videos app.  A separate Videos app would also make sense on the iPhone.

Since the iPhone was released in 2007, Apple has essentially only sold one model at a time.  Sure, some units had more RAM than others, and there were different colors, and Apple continued to sell some older units at the same time as the newer units, but there were never truly different, equally new models at the same time.  With the iPad, Apple will for the first time be selling two, current generation iPhone OS-using devices at the same time.  It will interesting to see which new features on one pop up on the other.

My post on Wednesday about the Blue Marble default iPhone wallpaper has resulted in record traffic to iPhone J.D. thanks to John Gruber, who linked to the post on his great Daring Fireball site, and tons of folks who mentioned the post on Facebook and Twitter.  For example, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, noted in this tweet that the Blue Marble is his wallpaper on both his iPhone and his computers.  Likewise, I’ve had the Blue Marble set as my iPhone wallpaper for the last week.  It really is an amazing image that makes me think about how small the Earth really is (not to mention how cool it would be to be an astronaut).  I mention all of this today because if you enjoyed the original post, you’ll want to go back and read the very interesting comments, especially the ones at the end by Kevin Purcell of Seattle who added some great links to other fantastic photographs of Earth from space.  And now, on to the iPhone news of note from the past week:

• Adam Engst of TidBITS wrote an excellent review of the WeatherBug Elite app.  I’ve had the free version of WeatherBug for a long time now.  I always considered it one of the best iPhone weather apps, along with AccuWeather and The Weather Channel.  (I also like the Weather Underground website which is formatted for the iPhone.)  But I didn’t realize all that the WeatherBug app can do until I read this review, which prompted me to spend the dollar to get the “Elite” version which doesn’t have ads.  The ads do get in the way of the maps and charts, so if you decide to get WeatherBug after you read the TidBITS review, I recommend that you spring for the Elite version.  Click here to get WeatherBug Elite ($0.99): 

  

• Nicholas Bonsack of Macworld writes about a Stanford survey on iPhone addiction.  Hey, I could quit the iPhone anytime I want, I just … ahem … oh who am I kidding, yes I’m addicted.
• Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times writes about mobile apps that outperform websites.
• Court Days is a great date calculator app by Dan Friedlander that only costs $0.99.  I reviewed the first version last year, and now the app is about to be updated to version 2.0.  The new version isn’t in the App Store yet, but you can read about it on the LawOnMyPhone website.  [UPDATE 3/14/10:  The update is now available in the App Store.]  There are some great additions, including the ability to add custom court holidays. 
• The West Virginia Record writes about Charleston, WV attorney Robert Bailey who wrote iPhone apps containing the rules of procedure for West Virginia state and federal courts.
• If you are looking for a way to stream video from your computer to your iPhone, even video that is in a format that the iPhone normally wouldn’t be able to play, Gizmodo has a review of an app called Air Video.  I’ve tried it and it works great.  Click here to get Air Video ($2.99): 

  

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  I purchased one or two Emanuel study guides when I was in law school.  For anyone out there planning to take the Multistate Bar Exam, Emanuel now has six iPhone apps to help you prepare.  Each one costs $12.99, and the subjects covered are (these are links to the App Store):  Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Property and Torts.
• Apple makes iPhone app developers agree to keep the terms of Apple’s developer agreement confidential, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed that NASA is an iPhone developer, so the EFF submitted a FOIA request to NASA to get the agreement, and then posted it on its website.  Interesting strategy.  If you want to know more about the agreement, click here.  Frankly, a lot of what EFF highlights is also contained in Apple’s App Store Terms and Conditions, which are available to the public on Apple’s website and which I analyzed in my post last year entitled “No refunds and no nukes:  a look at the Apple iPhone App Store Terms and Conditions.”
• I always enjoy reading about how lawyers use their iPhones.  Rick Georges writes on his FutureLawyer site about all of the things that he does with his Droid phone, and since the items on his list are all things that you can also do with an iPhone, I thought some of you might enjoy reading his article.
• Putting aside the fact that AT&T still doesn’t allow tethering on the iPhone, I’ve wondered whether you could tether an iPhone to an iPad, making it unnecessary to buy the more expansive version of the iPad and 3G monthly service.  As Engadget notes, Steve Jobs apparently says no.
• And finally, Doritos sponsored a contest for people to come up with a video that would go viral, and one group produced a cute one that mocks Apple’s video on the upcoming iPad.  You can read more on Mashable and you can view it right here:

Ever since iPhone Software 3.0, we’ve had the ability to copy text and pictures from one app and paste into another app.  But what if you want to store the copied text or photo so that you can use it again later?  Pastebot is a useful app from Tapbots that addresses this need.  Tapbots gave me a free review copy of the $2.99 app, and I really like it.

When you launch the app, it takes whatever you last copied and adds it to the top of a list of clippings.  If you want to take something that you have already saved into Pastebot and copy it to the iPhone clipboard, just tap it once and a blue dot will appear to the right of the clipping, indicating that it is now loaded into memory and you can go to another app and paste it.  You can store up to 99 clippings in the main portion of the app, plus you can create folders to hold up to 99 clippings each so you can essentially hold as many clippings as you want.

If that was all that Pastebot did, it would be a useful app that I would recommend.  But that is just the beginning.  Tap on the arrow to the right of any clipping and you see a large screen containing the text.  From there, you can easily edit the text in the clipping, add a title for the clipping, or see some statistics about the clipping such as the date of the clipping, the number of characters and the number of words.  Even more impressive, if you tap the icon at the bottom left, you can select a filter to do things like convert the text to lowercase or uppercase, find and replace within the text, and even translate to a different language (a feature just added in the 1.1 update on February 23, 2010).

If the clipping is a picture, Pastebot will tell you the dimensions in pixels, and the picture filters give you some basic picture editing functions such as adjusting brightness or saturation or converting to black and white or sepia tones.

Indeed, you don’t have to even bring up the full page version of a clipping to get at most of the functions.  When you tap once on a clipping, in addition to setting the blue dot and copying the clipping into memory, a mini-dashboard pops up below the clipping from which you can access filters and other functions.

While the main feature of Pastebot is to copy and paste into the iPhone’s clipboard, you can also press a button to send a clipping directly to e-mail, to save a picture to the iPhone Photos app, or to send text to Google to perform a search in Safari.  The 1.1 update to Pastebot added the ability to duplicate clippings, useful if you want to make changes to a clipping but also keep the original.

The app also works with a free Mac application that will allow you to wirelessly send clips from a Mac to Pastebot and vice versa.  I haven’t had a reason to try this yet — for me, the main value of the app just comes from using it on an iPhone — but I’m glad to know that the function is there if I want to use it in the future.  If this feature is of interest to you, you’ll want to read this great post by Shawn Blanc which talks about the different file types that can be shared using Pastebot.

Perhaps best of all, Tapbots give you form, not just function.  If you have ever used the other two apps sold by Tapbots, Convertbot or Weightbot,
you know that Tapbots makes beautiful apps.  The panels on each screen slide gracefully and make satisfying noises.  It is really a joy to use any
of the Tapbots apps; I use Convertbot all the time, not just because it is useful to make conversions, but also because it is, frankly, fun to use.  In the last week that I’ve been testing Pastebot, I’m finding that is equally true for this app.

What’s not to love?  The only big negative for me is that the app doesn’t handle all of the types of items that you can copy and paste on the iPhone.  For example, you can copy portions of a webpage in Safari including both pictures and text and paste that into an e-mail, but you cannot paste that into Pastebot.  Similarly, you can copy rich text from one e-mail (containing bold, italics, etc.) and paste it into another e-mail, but you cannot use Pastebot as a go-between.  Why not?  According to Ars Technica, Apple doesn’t currently allow third party apps to use these features.  Darn.  Hopefully Apple will change this in the future because it would be a welcome addition to Pastebot.

Pastebot is useful app that is a joy to use.  If you use copy and paste on your iPhone and want to get more sophisticated features, you won’t regret buying this great app.

Click here for Pastebot ($2.99):