In the news

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If you will be in the New Orleans area two weeks from today, I will be presenting a one hour CLE at Noon on Friday, August 24 with tips for using an iPad in your law practice.  The CLE is free if you are a member of the New Orleans Bar Association.  Click here for more information.  We still have about a month to go before mid-September, when I expect Apple to announce the 2018 versions of the iPhone and iPad Pro, and considering that it is also the end of Summer, things are pretty slow in the land of iOS right now.  But there have been a few interesting developments, and here is the news of note from the past week:

Lawyer iPhone stories: Jay Brinker

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I love to hear how other attorneys are using an iPhone or iPad in their law practice, so I always appreciate it when one of you is willing to share what you are using with the rest of the readers of iPhone J.D.  Today I am happy to share a submission from Jay Brinker, an estate planning attorney in Cincinnati, OH.  Jay also has a blog, which he uses to share interesting estate planning-related stories.  When I first started talking to Jay about the apps that he uses, he told me that he didn’t use anything special, and said that because he is not a litigator, he doesn’t use many of the well-known legal apps.  But I find that I always learn something no matter what kind of law practice someone has, and I am sure that most of you would agree.  So with no further ado, take it away, Jay:

– – – – –

When Jeff asked me if I could share my iPhone experiences with his readers, I was hesitant to do so because my use of iOS apps is limited compared to the litigators who use apps in trial and for trial prep.  Jeff persuaded me that my more non-power user approach could be useful nonetheless.  So here goes.

Background

I am a solo estate planning attorney who just passed the five year anniversary of my first iPhone purchase.  I was slow to adopt because my prior cell phone provider offered a stupidly low rate ($100 or so for three lines) but did not sell iPhones nor support them, so I suffered through with a BlackBerry until the limitations became untenable.  Expectedly, that carrier is now out of business.

I view my iPhone as a life convenience device rather than a work tool, although it does assist with the large part of my life that is my law practice.

Some Apps for Work

SugarSync is my preferred file syncing and file sharing service because it plays well with my file organization.  It has a nice app for iOS which allows me to easily access any document on my office PC from my phone.  Twice in a six month period, I was out of the office (Marco Island and Prague) when I received an email requesting a client’s living will.  I was able to send the document to the requesting person almost immediately from my phone.

Square is my credit card processing app.  I appreciate its simplicity and relatively low cost.  The customer satisfaction of a client paying with a credit card and getting airline miles is worth the 2.75% or haircut I take.  A quote from a client:  “You take credit cards?  This gets better all of the time.”  That is worth $50 in reduced fees.

Office Lens from Microsoft is a free scanning app that I have been using recently to scan documents on the go.  I can scan and send the document to a myriad of cloud based services.

OneDrive by Microsoft is my cloud storage provider of choice for miscellaneous documents like travel itineraries, tickets, reservations, and other personal documents I want to access quickly.  The iOS app is easy to use.

Apple Pay Cash.  I love Apple Pay.  If Kroger accepted Apple Pay, my grocery shopping experience would be sublime.  Apple Pay Cash allows you to transfer funds to friends and others via text without the privacy concerns of Venmo nor transaction costs of other methods.  A younger out of town client wished to pay an invoice expeditiously last year, so I gave her my cell phone number and she paid via Apple Pay Cash.  I then transferred the funds to my office checking account.

Other Apps I Like

Overcast is my preferred podcast app thanks to Jeff.  I can build playlists and skip ahead or rewind in time allotments of my choice.  You can use the app for free.

Spotify is my music streaming app of choice.  The $240 annual family plan allows my children and me to access nearly any album ever released, build playlists of favorites, and listen to new CDs the day they are released.  I can download playlists onto my phone for offline playback in my car while also controlling music on my PC from the phone.  I am not sure how sustainable this business model is long term, but I love it.  There is also a free version if you do not mind commercials every fourth song.

Key Ring allows me to keep my loyalty cards on my phone and avoid having to carry a “Costanza wallet.”  This app is free.

Banking app.  I love the convenience of mobile banking.  I have greatly reduced the number of bank trips for personal check deposits due to the app for my bank.  If my business bank had a larger monthly mobile deposit limit, life would be really sweet.

I also use the Zelle app to send money directly to a family member’s bank account which easily beats writing a check. 

Most Indispensable App

Starbucks Mobile App with its order ahead feature saves me between five and ten minutes every time I visit Starbucks.  I also accumulate rewards points for free drinks.  The app is free.

Deleted Apps

To save space, I recently deleted all of the free Microsoft Office apps.  I never use my phone to edit documents so there was no point in having them.

Apps Never On My Phone (or iPad)

Any social media app.  Pox on all of their houses.

iPads

I have a home iPad and an office iPad.  The home iPad is primarily for newspaper and blog reading.  I take the office iPad into meetings so I can quickly answer a question such as how a house is titled or the status of an estate.  I also use it to schedule the follow up meeting for clients to sign their estate planning documents.  I find it less intrusive than having a laptop for the same purposes.

Thanks for reading and thanks to Jeff for asking me to write.  I hope there was something helpful here.

– – – – –

Thanks again, Jay, for taking the time to share some of your favorite apps!  I had never heard of the Key Ring app, so I’ll have to check that one out.

If any of you are willing to share your own experiences using an iPhone or iPad in your law practice with other iPhone J.D. readers, I’d love to hear from you.  And no, you don’t have to be a litigator!  In case you missed any of them, here are stories that I previously shared from other attorneys:

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BlawgWorld_POTW_Logo_600This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award on August 13, 2018. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.

In the news

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The market capitalization or “market cap” of a company is simply the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding, and is one method of indicating the public’s opinion of the net worth of the company.  Yesterday, Apple became the first company in the U.S. to ever have a market cap of over a trillion dollars.  When the market closed, Apple’s market cap was $1.002 trillion.  I thought that this comment from John Gruber of Daring Fireball was interesting:  “That ‘.002’ looks insignificant but represents $2 billion — about what the entire company was worth in 1996.”  It was obvious for a while now that this day was coming, so a number of news sites had articles ready to run when the milestone was crossed.  I’ll recommend two of them that were particularly good:  an article by Jack Nicas in the New York Times, and an article by Brad Stone of Bloomberg.  There are lots of reasons that Apple achieved this success, but there is no question that the number one reason was the iPhone.  And now, the news of note from this past week:

  • Illinois attorney Warren Freiberg wrote an article for TechnoLawyer recommending apps that are useful for attorneys.  I myself use recommend almost all of the apps identified in that article.  Click here to download the article in PDF format.
  • I went back and forth about whether to link to this article because the premise is so shaky.  In an article for the ABA’s GP Solo, legal consultant Seth Rowland asked his son Samuel Rowland, a college student, to try to figure out what mobile apps lawyers might want to use.  The older Rowland explained that he did this because he hasn’t practiced law in two decades and his primary focus is PC software, not mobile apps.  Um, okay, but asking a journalism major to pick the best apps for lawyers seems about as valuable as asking me to pick out the best apps for dentists.  The only qualification offered for the younger Rowland was that he is “an avid cell phone user.”  Of course, that also accurately describes most of the kids at my son’s middle school.  As you might guess, the article fails to mention a ton of useful (and obvious) apps.  But I’m linking to it anyway because it also names some truly good apps, and any time you look at a list of apps there is always the chance that you will come across an app that speaks to you.  So if you dare, click here to read Legal Apps for the Lawyer on the Go.  (And while I disagree with the premise of this article, kudos to Sam for giving it the old college try and finding some of the good apps.)
  • Earlier this week, I reported on Apple’s 2018 fiscal third quarter.  In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell offered four interesting takeaways from the results.  And in an article for Six Colors, Snell digs a little deeper into the results.
  • Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac recommends some of the best iPhone weather apps.
  • Vanity Fair has an interesting excerpt from an upcoming memoir by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of Steve Jobs, called Small Fry.  They had an awkward relationship, to say the least, and I enjoyed this excerpt.
  • And finally, this short 15-second video advertising the iPad does a good job of showing why I love my almost-completely paperless law practice, which wouldn’t be possible without my iPad.  It is called Paperless Paperwork:

MacTrack / iTrack — go to Disney World to learn more about using your iPhone and iPad in your law practice

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One of the best ways to learn more about getting more out of an iPhone or iPad in your law practice is to hear directly from other attorneys with expertise in this area.  This is one of the reasons that I enjoy going to ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago every Spring.  Having said that, the last few TECHSHOW conferences have not focused on mobile technology as much as I would have liked.  For years, I have heard great things about the MacTrack Legal conference.  The conference has traditionally been focused on helping solo and small firm lawyers who use Macs, but this year — the 10th year of the conference — it will be called MacTrack / iTrack Legal, and most of the conference will focus on using iPhones and iPads.  If you are looking to attend a conference to learn more about using your iOS device, I cannot think of a better place to go.

The conference is September 27 to 29, 2018, at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL.  It is easy to get flights to Orlando from most anywhere, and it may be easier to justify the trip if your family can join you and attend the parks while you are at the conference.  The conference occurs during the Epcot Food & Wine Festival.  Attendees can take advantage of a discounted hotel rate not only during the conference, but also for three days before and after the conference.

While the venue alone makes this conference attractive, the real reasons for you to go are the speakers and the attendees.  In past years, the speaker list has been fantastic, and the folks who are already identified on the conference website this year are fantastic.  Not only do they know a ton about using an iOS device (and a Mac), but they are also friendly folks and great teachers.  Just to mention a few, I’m big fans of Florida attorney Katie Floyd (of MacPowerUsers), legal tech consultant Brett Burney, New Jersey estate planning attorney Victor Medina (who is planning the conference), Canadian attorney Bjorn “Barney” Christianson, and Pennsylvania attorney Evan Kline.  I’ve seen all of them teach sessions on using iOS devices, and in some cases I’ve even co-presented with them.  In addition to the speakers, numerous attorneys have told me that they attend this conference again and again because of the great folks who were attending, which makes sense because this is a smaller and more intimate conference — the opposite of a mega-conference like TECHSHOW.

I had hoped to be able to speak at this conference this year given the focus on iOS, but unfortunately my schedule doesn’t permit it.  But if your schedule does, I encourage you to give this one a look.  I know that it will be an enjoyable and incredibly informative conference.

Here is a video in which Victor explains what makes this conference so special:

Here is a link to a PDF file with more information on the individual sessions.

Click here for more information on MacTrack / iTrack Legal.

Apple 2018 fiscal third quarter — the iPhone and iPad angle

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Apple logo 48Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2018 fiscal third quarter (which ran from April 1, 2018 to June 30, 2018) 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).  During the fiscal third quarter, most potential Apple customers — which for the most part means iPhone customers — are waiting to see what new products Apple will introduce in the Fall.  Even so, Apple had their best fiscal third quarter ever, with quarterly revenue of $53.3 billion.  Apple CEO Tim Cook attributed the impressive revenues to three factors:  iPhone sales, service revenue such as the App Store and Apple Music, and wearable product sales such as the Apple Watch and AirPods.  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 transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha, or a transcript prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors.  Apple’s official press release is here.  As always, I’m not as interested in the financial details as I am the statements of Apple executives during the call that are of interest to iPhone and iPad users.  Here are the items that stood out to me.

iPhone

  • During the past quarter, Apple sold 41.3 million iPhones, just slightly more than the 41 million iPhones sold in 2017’s third fiscal quarter. The all-time record for iPhone sales in a fiscal Q3 was in 2015, when Apple sold 47.5 million iPhones.
  • While the increase in the number of iPhones sold versus 2017 Q3 was modest, the increase in revenue from iPhone sales was more impressive thanks to sales of the more expensive iPhone X.  iPhone revenue was $24.8 billion in 2017 Q3, but it rose to $29.9 billion in 2018 Q3, a 20% increase.
  • By my count, Apple has sold 1.421 billion iPhones since they first went on sale in 2007.
  • What kinds of iPhones are people buying?  For the second quarter in a row, the top-of-the-line iPhone X was the best-seller.  The critics who predicted that few folks would want to pay more for a more powerful iPhone were clearly wrong.

iPad

  • Apple sold just over 11.5 million iPads in the fiscal third quarter, around 100,000 more iPads than Apple sold a year ago. 
  • I don’t know if Apple will ever return to the larger iPad sales numbers that the company saw many years ago, including a high of 19.5 million iPads in 2013 Q2.  Nevertheless this is now the fifth quarter in a row that the average number of iPads sold has increased, if you look at a four quarter average.
  • By my count, Apple has sold over 415 million iPads since they first went on sale in 2010.
  • Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that almost half of iPad purchases in the past quarter were by customers new to iPad.

Other

  • A relatively new area of revenue for Apple is app subscriptions, such as apps that are free to download but for which you pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee to access more advanced features.  Cook said that the App Store now includes almost 30,000 apps which offer subscriptions.
  • Because the App Store turned 10 years old last month, Cook spent some time noting its impressive numbers, and the App Store saw its largest ever quarterly revenue in 2018 Q3.  He did not disclose how much of that was spent on the game Fortnite.
  • Cook noted that this past quarter saw all-time highs for both the number of monthly active users of the Messages app and for the number of FaceTime calls made.  If my son is an accurate guidepost, then a lot of those text messages and FaceTime calls are the result of kids being on summer vacation.
  • In the first three quarters of fiscal 2018, there were over 100 billion Siri requests.
  • Here in New Orleans, the two major pharmacies are Walgreen’s and CVS.  One of the reasons that I typically choose Walgreen’s is that it works great with Apple Pay.  But Cook announced that this Fall, Apple Pay will start to be accepted at CVS (and 7-Eleven too).
  • Cook said that when iOS 12 comes out, the iPhone will be noticeably faster.  The camera on the iPhone will launch up to 70% faster, the keyboard will appear up to 50% faster, and apps will be able to launch up to twice as fast.
  • Cook discussed the impact of President Trump’s recent trade war.  He said that tariffs are “a tax on the consumer and wind up resulting in lower economic growth.”  Having said that, Cook said that none of Apple’s products were directly affected by three recent tariffs, and that Apple was still evaluating another one.  Cook concluded by saying that he was “optimistic that the countries will get through this, and we are hoping that calm heads prevail.”
  • Everyone knows that Apple is now developing TV shows and movies and that it will at some point have some service to announce.  Cook said that he wasn’t yet ready to share the details, but that he “couldn’t be more excited about what’s going on there, and we’ve got great talent in the area that we’ve sourced from different places, and [we] feel really good about what we will eventually offer.”
  • Over 50 million people are now using Apple Music, although an (undisclosed) number of those are in a free trial period.

In the news

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As noted by Juli Clover of MacRumors, Google’s Street View app for iOS was updated this week to support the larger screen of the iPhone X.  I’ve had this app for a while, but this update caused me to try it out again this week, and it is amazing how powerful it is.  Enter any address, hold up your iPhone and tap the street view image and then tap the compass button at the top right, and you can move your iPhone around and “see” the area almost as if you were standing there at the address.  For an even more immersive experience, place your iPhone in an inexpensive Google Cardboard device.  Choose some interesting locations like in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC for some free virtual reality tourism.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

  • Chicago attorney John Voorhees is also an app developer and an editor at MacStories, and he was recently interviewed by Filip Brož of the Czechoslovakian website iPure.
  • A post on the GoodNotes blog provides tips for taking electronic notes at a conference.
  • William Gallagher of AppleInsider provides an overview of all of the ways to create text on an iPad:  text editors, note-taking apps, and word processors.
  • If you want an app to help you remember things which is a little more powerful than the built-in Reminders app, Federico Viticci of MacStories reviews the GoodTasks app.
  • Rosemary Orchard discusses some useful apps which run within the Messages app.  To be honest, the idea of running a mini-app within Messages still seems a little strange to me, so I haven’t really explored this very much.
  • Chance Miller of 9to5Mac notes that Carrot Weather, my favorite weather app, was recently updated to add the ability to provide hurricane tracker notifications.  Like most folks who live in the Gulf South, I’d rather not be thinking about hurricanes, but we are definitely getting closer to the peak season.  (Hurricane Katrina made landfall` on August 29, 2005.)
  • Ian Fuchs of Cult of Mac reviews Documents by Readdle, a very useful app.
  • Drew Coffman of The Sweet Setup reviews the Lutron Caseta dimmer switch, a HomeKit-compatible light switch that I use throughout my house and which I really like.  (My review.)  I also see that the Lutron Smart Bridge, which I bought for over $100, is now $79.95 on Amazon.
  • And finally, Apple released a new video advertisement for the iPhone X which shows off its computing prowess at running powerful games.  The ad is called Unleash.  As John Gruber of Daring Fireball noted, it seems strange for Apple to release a new ad for the iPhone X when, presumably, the successor to the iPhone X will be unveiled in two months.  Regardless, it’s a neat video:

1Password secure notes, now with Markdown formatting

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The main reason to use a password manager is to create, store, and automatically type usernames and passwords.  But one side benefit of the major password manager apps such as 1Password and LastPass is the ability to store secure notes.  This is a digital notepad where you can store some text, much like you would using the built-in Notes app.  The difference is that these notes are safely stored in the password manager app, which is secured with your complex password (or your fingerprint or your face if you have that enabled).  I like this feature because there are rare instances in which someone else has access to my iPhone or iPad.  I wouldn’t let them use my device if I didn’t trust the person, but even so, I don’t want that person accessing my truly confidential information, even accidentally.  Someone else using my iPad could open the Notes app and see the numerous notes that I have stored there, things like grocery and packing lists, the members of my daughter’s soccer team, etc.  But the person wouldn’t be able to open my 1Password app, and thus couldn’t see my truly private notes.

What type of information do I store in secure notes?  I have some medical information about me and family members in there.  I have birthday present ideas.  I have financial information such as a history of salaries for me and my staff members.  I have a list of all of my former addresses, going all the way back to high school.  And I have some confidential information related to my cases, which will sometimes include items like settlement authority.  Having all of this important, confidential information in one secure location is incredibly valuable.  If you use a password manager and don’t currently take advantage of the secure notes feature, I encourage you to do so.

I’ve been thinking about secure notes for the past few days because 1Password, my preferred password manager, recently added the ability to use Markdown in secure notes.  This means that you can add some simple symbols to your text to format the text.  For example, if you want something in a note to be bold, you can just begin and end it with two asterisks or two underline symbols.  Thus, if you type something like this:

**The Title**

__Another Title__

It will be formatted in 1Password to look like this:

The Title

Another Title

You can also use one underline symbol before and after to do italics, three dashes to add a line, etc.  1Password lists some common Markdown commands on this page, and if you want a more comprehensive description of Markdown you can view this page created by John Gruber, who created Markdown many years ago.

For those of you who used WordPerfect way back when, you may remember how WordPerfect fans loved the reveal codes feature, making it easy to see the commands that told the computer to format your text.  Markdown is the same idea.  When you are in the edit mode, you see the symbols like ** but when you are in the normal view mode, you see the end result such as bold text.  What all of this means is that it takes virtually no time to make your notes look even nicer and easier to read in 1Password.

I’d love to show you some examples of how I am using Markdown in my secure notes, but obviously my secure notes are private so I am not going to post them on a public website.  Instead, I created two sample secure notes in 1Password.  One is the Preamble to the Constitution.  The other one is something I copied from my Notes app.  Over the last year or so, my kids and I have been working our way through the James Bond movies.  Not all of them — I selected what I think are the better ones.  (Feel free to disagree with my choices.)  I have a list to remind me of what we have already seen and what is next.  Here is what part of each note looks like when I am in the edit mode in 1Password:

 

And here is what the notes look like with the simple formatting applied (bold text, a numbered list, and a dividing line).  So this is what you would see when you normally view the note:

 

Looking at the James Bond list reminds me that the next movie up for us is Goldeneye, our first Pierce Brosnan movie.  I remember being excited when he (finally) took over the role because I used to watch the Remington Steele TV show in the 1980s.  Okay, enough about Bond, let’s get back to 1Password now.

Markdown formatting looks great.  I wish that 1Password would add the ability to adjust the text size — the text is crisp and clear on my iPhone X and my iPad Pro, but I wish that the text could be larger — and perhaps that will be added in the future.  But my notes are much easier to read with formatting than they are without formatting.

If you use 1Password and you have been waiting for an excuse to create some secure notes, perhaps this can be the impetus for you to start using this feature.  And if you are not yet using a password manager, now you have yet another reason that you should be doing so. 

(Last year when 1Password was a sponsor of iPhone J.D., they created this special page for iPhone J.D. readers to signup and get a free trial, and it looks like it is still working.  Or you can just go to the main iPassword website and sign up there.)

In the news

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I have been using handheld devices since the late 1980s, starting with a Sharp Wizard, then numerous Palm and BlackBerry devices, and finally a Palm Treo 650.  But 10 years ago on July 22, 2018, I started using an iPhone 3G, and it was vastly superior to anything I had used before.  (This post from three years ago shows the last important email I ever read on my Palm Treo 650.)  It was the second generation of the iPhone and the first iPhone that was truly useful for attorneys becuase we could use faster 3G data, the App Store, and Microsoft Exchange.  Stephen Hackett wrote a post for MacStories this week looking back at the iPhone 3G.  As much as I loved that iPhone 3G at the time, it is amazing to think of how far the iPhone has come in the past 10 years, and it is hard to even imagine what kind of handheld device I’ll be using in another 10 years.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

Apple previews new emoji coming in iOS 12

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After all of the news from yesterday, and indeed the past week, I think we all deserve an escape from reality.  Fortunately, Apple has some nice pictures for us to look at.  To celebrate World Emoji Day today, Apple is previewing some of the new emoji characters which will be a part of iOS 12 this Fall.  The ideas for new emoji are considered and approved by the Unicode Consortium, and the new emoji in iOS 12 come from the Consortium’s Emoji Version 11.0, approved earlier this year.  The Consortium has general rules on what each emoji is supposed to look like, but each company has a lot of flexibility in the specific designs, which is why emoji can look different on iPhone, Android, your computer, etc.  As always, the designers at Apple have done a really nice job with these.

First, we have a male and female superhero, the infinity symbol, and a Nazar Amulet (which Emojipedia explains is an “eye-shaped amulet believed to protect against the ‘evil eye'” and which is common in Turkey:

Next we have a parrot, lobster, kangaroo, and peacock, which are some of the new animals in iOS 12 (along with a racoon, llamo, hippotamus, badger, swan, and mosquito):

iOS 12 will include many more food items.  Here are leafy green, mango, moon cake (a Chinese pastry), and cupcake.  Other new food items will include a bagel and salt.

There are new faces in iOS 12.  Here are partying face, pleading face, cold face, and smiling face with three hearts.  The other new faces are hot face and woozy face.

The new emoji also contain more hair options for both sexes:  red hair, curly hair, bald, and white hair, each of which is presented in a generic format plus five different skin tones.  For example, here are larger versions of the six different versions of the new female with red hair:

Here are all of the new hairstyles and colors:

Of course, if you have a new iPhone such as an iPhone X, you will also be able to use Apple’s new Memoji feature to create an emoji that looks like yourself.  To show this off, Apple has changed the page of the Apple website that shows the faces of Apple’s executives, and today instead of photographs it includes Memoji.  Look at the page for all of the new faces, but here are some of them:

There are also new objects in iOS 12.  Here are yarn, softball, and test tube.  Other new objects include compass, brick, skateboard, luggage, firecracker, red gift envelope, flying disc, lacrosse, jigsaw, teddy bear, chess pawn, abacus, receipt, toolbox, magnet, petri dish, DNA, fire extinguisher, lotion bottle, thread, safety pin, broom, basket, roll of toilet paper, soap, sponge and pirate flag.


In all, Apple says that there are over 70 new emoji characters.  However, according to Emojipedia, the actual number is closer to 150 when gender and skin tone are taken into account.

In the news

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I know that I talk about password managers frequently, but that’s because I think that in this day and age of new security concerns every week, having unique and complicated passwords is a critical primary defense between your confidential information and the bad guys.  There is a slight learning curve when you first start using a password manager, but trust me, you are smart enough to figure it out.  And if you use a service that offers a family plan, you can share some passwords with your spouse and other friends and family while keeping other passwords private to you.  Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post agrees with me and recommends that you use a password manager.  He prefers Dashlane, but also recommends 1Password (my favorite) and LastPass.  Password managers are going to be even easier to use on the iPhone and iPad when iOS 12 comes out in a few months because they will be more integrated, reducing the number of times that you need to open the password manager app to copy a password and then switch back to the previous app to paste it.  If you are not using a password manager yet, you could wait until iOS 12 comes out, but I recommend that you get one now and start to enter all of your current passwords and secure information (which takes time to do, but fortunately you only have to do it once) and that way you will be ready when iOS 12 comes out.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

  • I enjoyed listening to the latest episode of Brett Burney’s Apps in Law podcast.  He talks with Pennsylvania attorney Evan Kline, and they discuss the DEVONthink app.  (Evan Kline was one of the folks who did the awesome Galactic Empire v. Han Solo CLE that I discussed a few years ago.)
  • Burney also posted a video in which he discusses version 4.5 of iAnnotate, a PDF annotation and file management app, which I reviewed back in 2013.  As Burney notes, one of the neatest features of iAnnotate is that you can customize the toolbar to just include the tools that make the most sense for your practice.
  • Yesterday, Thomson Reuters announced the next generation of Westlaw, which will be called Westlaw Edge.  Law librarian Jean O’Grady did a good job of describing all of the new features of Westlaw Edge in a post on her Dewey B Strategic blog.  She notes that there will be a new iOS app.  (Note that Westlaw is a current sponsor of iPhone J.D.)
  • If you use Quicken, the iPhone app should be getting new features soon.  Quicken CEO Eric Dunn announced yesterday that at the end of this month, Quicken will release “an all-new mobile app which works better, looks better, and does more than the existing app.”
  • In light of the App Store celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, Alex Guyot of MacStories looks back at the last 10 years of apps.
  • Jonny Evans of Computerworld recommends some neat iCloud tips.
  • Trevor Daugherty of 9to5Toys recommends portable Apple Watch chargers for travel.  My travel solution is to just bring a USB charging cable with me (the one  that comes with the watch) along with an Anker PowerPort, which I use in my hotel room every night to charge my Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, etc.
  • When I was in college, I very much wanted a device like the iPhone, but that technology was far away.  Instead I used a Sharp YO-620 electronic organizer, and I followed with much interest a company called General Magic, which was rumored to be working on something very neat in this product category.  The company itself didn’t make it, but the folks who worked there went on to create lots of technology that we use every day.  Thus, I was interested to see a report by Stephen Silver of AppleInsider about a documentary about General Magic that first debuted earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival.  His post includes the trailer.
  • And finally, Frederic van Strydonck created a really neat short film using an iPhone partially submerged underwater.  He calls it Spltch, and it is worth watching:

© 2008-2026 Jeffrey Richardson