Unless you are using an older iPhone, I suspect that you are using an iPhone that can support 3D Touch.  This is a gesture similar to tapping, except that you push down a little bit more.  3D Touch was introduced with the iPhone 6s in September 2015, and also works on the iPhone 7, iPhone 8, and the iPhone X (and the Plus variants of those phones).  But even though 3D Touch has been around for many years, I talk to many folks who don’t even know that the feature is there.  Frankly, I forget about it sometimes too.  But there are tons of really useful things that you can do with 3D Touch.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Quickly jot something down

I often need to quickly jot something down, like a phone number, a name, a case number, etc.  The built-in Notes app is a great place to put that information.  Of course, you can open the app and then tap on the button to create a new note, but it is faster to use 3D Touch.  Just push down on the app icon on your home screen and tap New Note.

Perhaps even more useful is the option just below that:  New Checklist.  If you need to jot down a number of items, such as a grocery list, the New Checklist option after you 3D Touch will open the Notes app, create a new note, and then enter the checklist mode (normally accessed by pressing the icon of the check mark inside of a circle).  Using 3D Touch and tapping New Checklist is far, far faster that doing all of those steps one at a time.

 Compose a new email, without distractions

If you 3D Touch on the built-in Mail app icon, there is a New Message option.  Thus, using 3D Touch is a fast way to compose a new email.  But the real reason that I like this shortcut is that whenever I open the Mail app to compose a new email, the first thing I see when the Mail app opens is a list of emails, which probably includes some new ones that I haven’t seen yet.  Thus, I find myself distracted, and sometimes sidetracked, by those messages.  By the time I start composing my email, I may have even forgotten what I was going to say.  When I use the 3D Touch shortcut to compose a new email, I don’t see my Inbox until my new email is composed and sent. 

3D Touch cursor

When typing an email, or when typing virtually any other text, if you push down on the keyboard, the keys turn blank and the keyboard turns into a trackpad.  You can slide your finger around to move your cursor up a few lines to edit or add to text.  Not only does this save you the trouble of tapping to select a new location for the cursor, I also find that it is far more precise than just tapping on text you previously typed.

While you are moving the cursor around, you can 3D Touch again to select a word, and then drag your finger to select multiple words.

Message a specific person

If you tap on the Messages app icon, you will probably see your most recent text message conversation.  But if you 3D Touch on the Messages app, you will see a list of names of folks who have recently had text message conversations with you.  Assuming that you wanted to send a message to, or review a recent message from, one of those three people, this is a faster way to jump directly to the text message conversation with that person.

Beware of Contacts

This isn’t as much of a tip as it is a warning.  If you 3D Touch on the built-in Phone app, you see a list of four favorites.  Tap a name, and you call that person.  That makes sense.  What I don’t like is that if you 3D Touch on the Contacts app icon, you see that same list of Phone favorites, and tapping one of those names will also call that person.  That shortcut makes sense to me on the Phone app icon, an app used to call people, but not on the Contacts app icon.  It would make much more sense to me for a 3D Touch on the Contacts app to bring up the Contacts entry for that person so that you can review contact information.  And that might be the behavior that you were expecting as well, which can cause quite a surprise if you were intending to quickly bring up a person’s contact information to see some detail about the person and instead you find yourself calling that person’s phone.

Mark my location

If you 3D Touch on the Maps app icon, the first choice is to Mark My Location.  Tap this to drop a pin on the map at your current location.  This can be useful if you are parking a car or a bike and then you are going to walk somewhere else and you are worried that you might forget where your car or bike was located.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

I frequently have a need to open the Settings app and go to the Wi-Fi settings or the Bluetooth settings.  Both are located near the top of the list after you open the Settings app, but an even faster way to access these settings is to 3D Touch on the Settings icon and then tap Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Get this app first

Sometimes I want to start using an updated version of an app, so I will open the App Store icon, tap Updates, pull down from the top of the screen to see what updates are available, and then I’ll tap the button to update all of my apps.  Normally this works fine, but sometimes I find that I really want my iPhone to start by updating app X, and instead my iPhone is slowly updating apps Y and Z.  As I wait, I cannot even launch the app that most interests me because the app icon is gray.  Ugh.

To solve this, 3D Touch on the app icon on your home screen for the app in question, and then tap Prioritize Download.  This will tell your iPhone to put the other updates to the side and immediately start updating this app.

Speaking of the App Store, you can 3D Touch on the App Store icon to see a few choices, one of which is Search, which brings you directly to the search function of the App Store.

Adjusting 3D Touch

You can adjust how hard you need to press on the display to trigger 3D Touch.  Open the Settings app and go to General -> Accessibility -> 3D Touch to select Light, Medium or Firm.  You can also turn off 3D Touch, if for some reason you need to do that.

And much more

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to 3D Touch.  For example, you can also use it to “peek” at a link or a file before you officially open it.  And many third-party apps offer interesting 3D Touch options, such as the Launch Center Pro app which lets you see miniature icons.  Click here to see a short video by Apple showing off the features of 3D Touch.

If you are looking for something to do while in waiting in line at the grocery store, on a train, etc., take a few minutes to play around with 3D Touch in different places to find other interesting uses.  3D Touch is a useful, but I suspect underused, feature on the iPhone.

It seems like every time we get one security disaster behind us, the next one comes along.  This week it is Twitter, which announced yesterday that apparently all of its passwords were accidentally decrypted and stored in plain text for a period of time.  Twitter hasn’t said for long, and we don’t know if any hackers accessed it during this time period, but obviously Twitter is telling everyone to change their passwords just in case.  Twitter also has optional two-factor verification, so while you are updating your password, you should turn that on for extra protection if you have not yet enabled it.  But more importantly, even if you don’t use Twitter, this serves as yet another warning that you ought to use unique and secure passwords for every website and service — a task that is much more simple if you use a Password Manager.  (I use 1Password and was able to change both my @jeffrichardson and my @iphonejd account passwords very quickly.)  If you don’t currently use a password manager, I strongly recommend that you do so.  Better yet, get it for your entire family, like I recently did with 1Password Families.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Twenty years ago, Apple introduced the iMac, and Apple created a commercial called Simplicity Shootout to show how much easier it was to set up an iMac versus a PC.  I remember that commercial very well.  Michael Steeber of 9to5Mac explains how that video was made, and he even tracked down the two people who starred in that video.  The former PC-user now uses a 12.9" iPad Pro.  It’s a fun article and worth reading.
• Jennifer Vazquez of Channel 4 New York reports on a man who saw a notification on his Apple Watch telling him to seek immediate medical attention because something was wrong with his heart rate.  He immediately went to the ER and the doctors found a dangerous ulcer that could have killed him if he had waited.
• If you want to get an Apple Watch, for yourself or someone else, Lief Johnson of Macworld reports that they are currently $50 off at Macy’s.
• In my experience, games don’t work very well on the Apple Watch, but maybe I just haven’t tried the right one yet.  Andrew Hayward of Macworld recommends 15 Apple Watch games.
• If you use Wemo smart home products, you can add the Wemo Bridge to make it work with Apple HomeKit.  That normally costs $40, but as John Levite of iMore reports, you can currently get it on Amazon for only $30.
• Today is Star Wars Day.  To celebrate, you can now pre-order tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story at your local theater.  I just bought mine for May 25th.
• Yesterday, to celebrate French film director Georges Méliès, Google released a Google Doodle video.  Thuy Ong of The Verge has details.  You can watch it on YouTube, but if you have Google Cardboard, I strongly encourage you to watch the VR version of it using the Google Stories app on the iPhone.  It is an incredibly well done VR short cartoon.  You need to watch it multiple times to catch all of the fun details.
• And finally, here is an interesting picture recently tweeted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith that I don’t remember seeing before, although apparently it was also posted back in 2014 on MacRumors.  This is the hardware setup that Apple used to create the initial software for the iPhone before it was released in 2007:

Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2018 fiscal second quarter (which ran from December 31, 2017 to March 31, 2018) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results.  Apple’s first fiscal quarter is the one with all of the holiday sales, so Q2 is usually not a particular impressive quarter for Apple.  In fact, two years ago, Apple had a particularly rough second quarter.  In 2018, in contrast, Apple had its best Q2 ever, with record Q2 revenue of $61.1 billion,up from $52.9 billion in 2017 Q2 (and $50.6 billion in 2016 Q2). Apple CEO Tim Cook attributed the record quarter to three factors:  iPhone revenue was up 14%, services revenue (things like Apple Music and the App Store) was up 31%, and wearable revenue (things like the Apple Watch and AirPods) was up almost 50%.  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 Mikah Sargent of iMore.  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 52.217 million iPhones. The all-time record for Q2 was in 2015 when Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones, but this is the second most iPhones that Apple has ever sold in a fiscal second quarter (up from just over 50 million a year ago).
• By my count, Apple has sold almost 1.4 billion iPhones since they first went on sale in 2007.
• If you combine Apple’s over $38 billion in iPhone revenue in Q2 with its over $61 billion in iPhone revenue in 2018 Q1, you get to about $100 billion in iPhone revenue for the first half of 2018, which Cook said was a new record for iPhone revenue in the first half of the year.  I’m sure that a big part of the reason for this was that Apple has been selling the iPhone X, its most expensive iPhone ever, during these past two quarters.  But whatever the reason, I’m glad that Apple has numbers that it can boast about, because that encourages Apple to continue to develop the iPhone, and encourages smart engineers who work at Apple to stay at the company, all of which results in better iPhones for those of us who use them every day.
• What kinds of iPhones are people buying?  Cook said that in the past, the most expensive iPhone was not the best=selling iPhone.  In other words, the Plus model of the iPhone 7, iPhone 6, etc. sold less than the non-Plus model.  But in this past fiscal quarter, the most expensive iPhone being sold by Apple — the iPhone X — is also the best-selling iPhone.
• Before today’s call, there were rumors that the iPhone X was not selling as well as Apple had hoped.  Cook addressed this by pointing out what I just mentioned — that the iPhone X was the best-selling iPhone.  He also stated:  “I think that it’s one of those things where, like a team wins the Super Bowl, maybe you want them to win by a few more points, but it’s a Super Bowl winner and that’s how we feel about it.  I could not be prouder of the product.”
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball offered this take on iPhone X sales:  “Year over year, iPhone sales were up 3 percent on unit sales, but 14 percent on revenue.  Unit sales are close to flat, but Apple grew revenue by double digits.  There’s no other way to explain it than that iPhone X is a hit.”

iPad

• Apple sold 9.113 million iPads in the past fiscal quarter.  iPad sales were highest for Apple in 2013 to 2015; for example, Apple sold 19.5 million iPads in 2013 Q2.  iPad sales have been reduced in recent years, but Apple did sell a few more iPads in 2018 Q2 than it did in 2017 Q2 (when it sold 8.922 million).
• By my count, Apple has sold over 403 million iPads since they first went on sale in 2010.
• To help you to see iPad sales over time, I prepared a chart that shows two things.  The blue line shows the actual iPad sales each quarter (in millions).  The green bars show the average of the current quarter and the prior three quarters.  I think that this chart is useful because while the blue line shows peaks every year in Apple’s fiscal first quarter — the holiday quarter, when folks buy lots of iPads as presents — the green bars are more helpful for seeing iPad sales over time.  As this chart shows, the iPad was introduced in 2010 and saw a sharp rise in sales until the end of calendar year 2013 (the beginning of Apple’s fiscal year 2014).  From calendar year 2014 through 2017 Q2, iPad sales have decreased over time.  But then iPad sales started to increase again.  The increase wasn’t very much each quarter, and thus if you look at the last four green bars in this chart, you can only see a slight increase.  But it does increase.  For four quarters in a row, the four-quarter average of iPad sales has increased every single quarter.  I don’t know if we will ever see the record iPad sales that we saw a few years ago, but as long as iPad sales continue to increase, Apple will (hopefully) be encouraged to continue to put resources into iPad development.  And hopefully that will translate into better iPads for us to use.

Other

• This was Apple’s best-ever quarter for services, including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, etc.  Because much of this is subscription revenue, these should continue to be profitable areas for Apple in the future.
• Cook noted that more transit systems are accepting Apple Pay, which has increased Apple Pay use by commuters.
• Apple never reveals specific numbers for the Apple Watch, but Cook did say that 2018 Q2 Apple Watch sales were higher than any prior Q2, adding:  “Millions of customers are using Apple Watch to help them stay active, healthy, and connected, and they have made it the top selling watch in the world.”
• Apple also doesn’t release specific numbers for the AirPods, but Cook said that the product is a “runaway hit.”
• Of course Tim Cook was not going to reveal any new products coming in the future, but Cook did show his excitement for the future, noting:  “We have the best pipeline of products and services we’ve ever had.  We have a huge installed base of active devices that is growing across all products, and we have the highest customer loyalty and satisfaction in the industry.”
• One analyst asked Tim Cook whether Apple’s emphasis on user privacy was a focus because it could help Apple’s revenue.  Cook pushed back and said that Apple doesn’t see it that way.  “In terms of benefit, we don’t really view it like that.  We view that privacy is a fundamental human right and that it’s an extremely complex situation, if you’re a user, to understand a lot of the user agreements and so forth.  And we’ve always viewed that part of our role was to sort of make things as simple as possible for the user and provide them a level of privacy and security.”

Yesterday, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they will merge.  If the government approves, then we will have only three major wireless companies in the United States.  In the communications that I have seen from the two companies, including a joint website that went live yesterday, one of the main themes was that this merger would promote 5G, the next generation of wireless technology.  This makes me wonder, what will 5G bring us, and when can we start to use it on the iPhone?

100x faster

It won’t surprise you that the primary advantage of 5G is faster Internet for mobile devices.  Indeed, wireless speed has increased dramatically since the iPhone was originally introduced in 2007, so we all expect this to continue in the future.

The original iPhone only supported 2G Edge wireless, and the addition of 3G support a year later was such an improvement that the second generation of iPhone mentions it in its name:  it was called the iPhone 3G.  Edge on the original iPhone provided download speeds of around 100 Kbps — about twice as fast as a 56K modem.  With 3G, the iPhone 3G in 2008 increased download speeds to around 500 Kbps.  Carriers improved 3G technology over time, and manufacturers improved devices to take advantage of that.  For example, in early 2009, I reported that AT&T was planning to double 3G speed, and by 2011, I was using an iPhone 4 with better 3G technology and I saw average download speeds of around 3 Mbps.

The iPhone 5 was introduced in the Fall of 2012, and one of the marquee features was support for 4G LTE.  It provided a major increase in wireless speed.  Here in New Orleans, in 2012-2013, I would typically see 4G LTE download speeds in the 30-40 Mbps range.  Those speeds increased over time as technology improved.  With my iPhone X in 2018, I typically see 4G LTE speeds of 75-100 Mbps, and I often see speeds well in excess 0f 100 Mbps.

 

While 4G has gotten faster over the years, just like 3G did, as I look back over the past decade, the major speed advantages have been when there was a new generation.  5G is being advertised as being the next major speed bump.  The CTIA, a trade organization for the wireless industry, says that 5G can be 100 times faster than 4G, and a chart on its website predicts a transition from 100 Mbps download speeds to 10 Gbps.  5G will also feature low latency that can make the internet five times more responsive when you initiate each request.

With this dramatic increase in speed, I imagine that we will see an increase in high quality video on demand, a vast increase in augmented reality, and even more services living in the cloud.  And of course, I’m sure that the faster speeds will prompt new innovations that many of us have not thought about yet.  The CTIA website says that with 5G, “[s]ensors will monitor the health and safety of critical infrastructure like buildings, roads, and bridges, while connected trash cans, bus stops, light poles and more will help cities operate more efficiently” and says that 5G will help self-driving cars.

A different kind of infrastructure

To date, wireless cell technology has been based on huge towers with antennas 125 feet in the air which would provide service for several miles.  But it turns out that 5G will be different.  5G is much faster, but the signal doesn’t go nearly as far.  So instead of a smaller number of tall towers, 5G will work with a large number of microcells placed around 500 feet apart, often on streetlights or utility poles.

But it won’t just be that microcell on a utility pole.  As reported by Allan Homes earlier this year in the New York Times, “[m]uch of the equipment will be on streetlights or utility poles,” but it will often be “accompanied by containers the size of refrigerators on the ground.”  That New York Times article includes pictures showing how these containers can be made to look like mailboxes so that they don’t seem too out-of-place.  Because this equipment on the ground is a potential eyesore, some local governments are looking to regulate 5G implementation, which has led the wireless companies to lobby at the state and federal level to try to block local regulators from slowing down the transition to 5G.  Katherine Shaver of the Washington Post reports:  “Industry-backed legislative proposals introduced this year in 18 states, including Maryland and Virginia, would preempt most local zoning laws for small cell poles up to 50 feet tall.  They would limit residents’ input on applications for small cell facilities and restrict local governments’ ability to reject them.”

In an editorial, the USA Today suggests this compromise:  “A smarter approach would bar localities from turning the permitting process into a cash cow, but would give them input on where 5G boxes go and what they should look like.  This kind of buy-in might seem burdensome.  But it is necessary to prevent a grass-roots rebellion of property owners and community activists.”

The future is close

It will be interesting to see how these implementation details get worked out, but I presume that somehow, they will.  5G (and someday 6G, 7G, etc.) seems inevitable.  As noted above, T-Mobile and Sprint are seeking government approval of their merger so that they can be a leader in 5G technology.  AT&T announced a few months ago that “2018 will be the year you can experience mobile 5G from AT&T” with preliminary service “in a dozen cities, including parts of Dallas, Atlanta and Waco, Texas, by the end of this year.”  Verizon announced a few days ago that it would launch 5G “in 3-5 markets later this year and take the same aggressive approach to the deployment of 5G mobility when devices become available.”

As that quote from Verizon indicates, the initial rollout of 5G won’t mean that you can start using it on your current iPhone.  When 5G first comes out, you’ll need to have a dedicated hardware device to receive the 5G signal, which I presume you can then connect to a mobile phone via Wi-Fi.  3G was available in 2007 when the original iPhone was introduced, but Apple didn’t take advantage of it for the first year of the iPhone because some of the initial 3G chips for mobile devices consumed too much power.  Apple waited for the technology to mature a little before adding 3G a year later in 2008 — and even then, just for AT&T.  (The first Verizon iPhone didn’t come out until 2011.)

Complicating things further, I understand that there isn’t yet any agreement in the industry on how 5G is going to work.  Thus, the technology that lets an iPhone talk to AT&T 5G may not also allow for communication with T-Mobile/Sprint 5G.

Nevertheless, I expect that it won’t be long before 5G will start to have enough availability that you will want to have the opportunity to take advantage of it.  I don’t expect a 5G iPhone or iPad in 2018, and I suspect that the technology will still be too new in 2019, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see 5G in Apple mobile devices in the year 2020.

As someone who started trying out iPhone apps in 2008, I eventually got to the point where I had hundreds of apps on my iPhone.  Last summer, as I was troubleshooting a problem, I ended up starting with a fresh install of iOS.  Since then, I’ve been more conservative about adding new apps … but even so, I still have four screens full of apps on my iPhone, and many of those screens have lots of folders.  California attorney David Sparks apparently has more self-control than I do, because as he shows off in a post on his MacSparky website, he has only a single screen of apps and only four folders on that screen, with a system so that every app goes in a special place.  I’m not sure that I can ever see myself with just a single screen of apps, but I can see the logic to his approach.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• On the latest edition of the Apps in Law podcast, Brett Burney interviews Massachusetts attorney Howard Lenow, who discusses the Timeline 3D app.  Lenow does a good job of describing how this app is simple to use but very effective.
• California attorney Jeffrey Allen and Texas attorney Ashley Hallene recommend some of their favorite apps in an article for the ABA’s GPSolo eReport.
• New York attorney Nicole Black discusses time-tracking software for lawyers, including apps that you can use on an iPhone.  One of the apps that she discusses is iTimeKeep, a new sponsor of iPhone J.D. and the app that I use in my law practice almost every day.
• In early 2015, I noted that upgraded the Wi-Fi in my house by purchasing two AirPort Extreme wireless base stations, putting them at opposite ends of my house, and connecting them with a Cat 6 cable.  I’ve always liked Apple’s AirPort base stations because they were so much easier to use and manage than routers made by other companies.  But Apple stopped updating their devices about five years ago, and never embraced the mesh networking technology that you see in many modern routers.  As reported by Rene Richie of iMore, yesterday Apple announced that it was officially out of the Wi-Fi router business that it entered in 1999 when Wi-Fi was in its infancy. 
• If you are looking to upgrade the Wi-Fi in your home or office, Apple has some advice for selecting a Wi-Fi router that works well with Apple devices.
• When I think of smart home and air conditioning, I think of smart thermostats.  But Mike Wuerthele of AppleInsider notes that GE is now shipping the first HomeKit-compatible window air conditioning unit.  And Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac notes that GE has some other units that work with HomeKit.
• Jason Cross of Macworld recommends the best calculators for the iPhone and iPad.  His overall favorite is PCalc, and that’s the one that I use too.
• J.D. Biersdorfer of the New York Times explains how to add fonts to an iPad.
• If you use Windows 10, Jim Tamous of The Mac Observer notes that iTunes is now available in the Microsoft Store.
• Bradley Chambers of The Sweet Setup explains how you can change the title of memories in the Photos app.
• And finally, in this 15 second video, Apple shows visually why the App Store on the iPhone is safer than other app stores on other smartphones:

Apple’s built-in Notes app on the iPhone and iPad is a powerful and well-designed app.  It works great as a quick place to jot down a note that you may only refer to once in the future, but it also works well as a place to store important information that you need to refer to from time to time.  For example, I have a note with the file numbers for all of the cases that I’m working on, a note of the items that I frequently pack when I take a trip (so that I can review the list and make sure I’m not forgetting anything whenever I prepare to travel), a note listing the team members on my daughter’s soccer team, a note to keep track of the James Bond movies I’m watching with my kids (next on our list is Goldeneye from 1995), and many more.  Here are two tips which make it faster and easier to bring up specific notes that you want to access the most often.

Pinned Notes

In the Settings app, you can choose to sort notes by the date edited, date created, or title.  I have mine set to the date edited, which usually makes the most sense for me.  Chose whatever method you think will make it easiest for you to find your notes.

 

Sorting by date is often helpful for me, but there are some notes that I don’t edit very often (so they are not near the top) but which I am most likely to want to view.  Apple has a solution for this called Pinned Notes.  When you are looking at your list of notes, if you swipe from left to right on a note, you will see a pin icon.  Keep dragging to the right to turn on the pin.  That will move the note to the very top of your list of Notes.

 

The same left-to-right swipe can be used to remove a pin.  Pinning notes is a useful way to keep your most important notes at the top of your list, regardless of the sort order that you selected in Settings.

Jump directly to a note

If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you can use one of the iPhone apps that have an automation feature to create a shortcut to jump to a specific note, no matter where it is in your list.  I briefly mentioned this tip on April 13, 2018 when I linked to an article by Federico Viticci of MacStories, and today I’m providing more details on how it works.  In this example, I’m using the Launch Center Pro app, a $4.99 app which I last reviewed back in 2012.  (The app has improved a lot since then, but that old post will still give you a general idea of what the app does.)

First, you need to get an iCloud URL for your specific note.  To get that, look at a note and tap the share button at the top right of the screen — the icon with a circle around a generic person with a plus sign.

The next screen says Add People.  Tap on the icon near the bottom that says Copy Link.  Then on the next screen, tap Copy Link at the top right, and then you can tap Cancel because you are not going to actually email that link to anyone.

 

Open the Launch Center Pro app, tap the pencil at the top right to enter Edit mode, and then tap the plus sign in any empty location and create a new Action.  In the next screen, type whatever title you want in the Name field, and then paste into the URL field the contents of your clipboard, which will be the iCloud.com URL for your specific note.  The default icon is the Safari icon, but feel free to change it to something more meaningful to you if you want.

That’s it.  Now, whenever you want to access your specific note, you can open the Launch Center Pro app and tap the icon for your note.  That will cause the Notes app to open, and then your specific note will come up, no matter where it is located in your list of notes.

If you want an even faster way to launch your specific note, use Quick Actions.  In the Launch Center Pro app, tap the gear at the top left to open up the app settings.  Then tap Quick Actions and add the shortcut you just created to the QUICK ACTION WIDGET setting.  As long as it is in the first row of icons, in the future, you can 3D Touch on the Launch Center Pro icon on your home screen, and then select the icon for your note.  This will jump you directly to your note without even having to fully open the Launch Center Pro app.

The Notes app is a useful place to store tons of different notes.  With these two tips, you can directly access your most important notes quickly and easily.

Earlier this week, I discussed the new GrayKey device which can supposedly unlock an iPhone even without the password, given enough time.  In an article for Motherboard, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Joseph Cox note that Apple has a feature in beta which frustrates GrayKey because a police officer must plug in an iPhone to the GrayKey device within one week of the iPhone last being unlocked.  Of course, it would be easier for law enforcement if they could just compel a suspect to unlock his iPhone.  In an article for The Volokh Conspiracy, USC Law Professor Orin Kerr discusses two recent opinions on this topic from federal magistrate judges.  Additionally, Former FBI Director James Comey has a new book out this week, in case you have been living under a rock and haven’t heard yet.  Obviously, the parts concerning President Trump are getting the most attention, but Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac notes that the book also offers Comey’s perspective on the FBI’s efforts to force Apple to unlock iPhones.  iPhone security and privacy is a big issue that is going to remain in the news for a long time.  And now, the other news of note from the past week:

• The Drafts app was updated to version 5 this week.  California attorney David Sparks is a big fan, and he explains why in this article and even includes some videos showing how to use the app.  Tim Nahumck of MacStories also wrote a comprehensive review of Drafts 5.  Given the enthusiasm that many have for this app, I downloaded it and I’m starting to try it out.  So far, I’m not really seeing how this app fits into my life, but I’ll keep trying it and I haven’t given up on it yet.
• Cult of Mac has started a series of articles to recommend 50 essential iOS apps.  The first two apps recommended — Deliveries (my reviews:  1, 2) and Dark Sky Weather are excellent, so I look forward to the future installments in this series.
• Andrew Orr of the Mac Observer offers some good advice for what to do if your iPhone is stolen.  Read the article now while you are calm and collected, and hopefully you will remember these steps should misfortune shine upon you.
• In an article in Macworld, security expert Glenn Fleishman offers advice for how to recover your iCloud account if you have two-factor authentication turned on (which I recommend) and one of your authentication methods goes missing.  Read this article now while you are calm and collected … you know the rest.
• Andrew O’Hara of AppleInsider reviews the CordDock iPhone dock by ElevationLab, and he notes that it is different from most other docks.
• Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac notes that the Dropbox app has been updated to work better on the iPad.
• If you find yourself at a McDonald’s today (or next Friday), you can pay with Apple Pay and get a free medium order of fries.  Mitchel Broussard of MacRumors has the details; for example, you have to order using the McDonald’s app.
• To make up for eating at McDonald’s today, on Sunday you can do a 30 minute workout with your Apple Watch and earn the Earth Day Challenge badge.  Once again, Mitchel Broussard of MacRumors has the details.  And then, after all of that working out, you can relax on Sunday night by doing what I will be doing:  watching the new season of Westworld on HBO, which Lee Hutchinson of Ars Technica writes about in this spoiler-free review of Season 2.
• And finally, Serenity Caldwell of iMore prepared a review of the 2018 version of the 9.7" iPad.  But instead of preparing a written review like I would do, or preparing a traditional video review, she decided to show off what this iPad can do by filming the screen while she walked through various tasks.  She even created the soundtrack in Garage Band on the iPad, and managed to incorporate a few seconds of video of her as a young girl using a Mac.  Combine all of this work with the fact that she is a talented artist, and the final product is impressive.  Here is her video:

When Apple released iOS 9 in 2015, it changed the default length of the passcode needed to unlock the device from 4 to 6 digits for all devices with a Touch ID sensor.  This increased the odds of guessing a passcode from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 1,000,000.  And while some folks groaned at having to remember two additional numbers, hopefully most attorneys using iPhones realized that if you are going to keep confidential and privileged information on an iPhone, you need to take reasonable steps to keep that device secure.

This week I saw a link by John Gruber of Daring Fireball to an article posted last month by Thomas Reed of the security firm Malwarebytes Labs.  The article describes a device called GrayKey, a small box with two lightning cables coming out of the front of it which can supposedly crack the passcode of an iOS device.  Apparently, the box is only sold to law enforcement.  If someone tries to hack your passcode on an iPhone itself, there is a delay after the wrong passcode is entered.  You have probably encountered this delay yourself at some point.  But it seems that GrayKey has a way around this and can quickly try multiple passcodes.  And according to an article by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Motherboard, the only thing slowing down the hack is the length of your passcode.  He quotes statistics from Matthew Green, an assistant professor and cryptographer at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute.  Green says that a 4 digit passcode can be cracked in 13 minutes or less, a 6 digit passcode can be cracked in 22.2 hours or less, an 8 digit passcode can be cracked in 92.5 days or less, and a 10 digit passcode can be cracked in 9,259 days or less.

Obviously, then, you can improve the security of your passcode by using more digits.  You can also improve the security of your passcode by making the characters more complicated by using letters and/or symbols in addition to numbers.  Open the Settings app, go to Touch ID & Passcode or Face ID & Passcode (depending upon what device you are using), tap Change Passcode, and then on the next screen tap Passcode Options.  Here, you have the option to change to a custom numeric passcode (more than 6 digits) or a custom alphanumeric code (letters, symbols, and/or digits).

Second, it is harder to remember a longer passcode, especially because the strongest passcodes are long and don’t use words that are in a dictionary.  There are some tricks you can use to help you remember more secure passcodes.  For example, you can remove the vowels from words to create something that you can remember but which would be hard to guess.  “Drew Brees #9 Saints” becomes DrwBrs#9Snts, a 12-character passcode lacking words found in a dictionary, and which would take a ridiculously long time to crack using current technology.  Or you can use the first letters from the words of a memorable line from a song or poem or other saying.  “The hills are alive with the Sound of Music” becomes ThaawtSoM, a nine-character passcode lacking dictionary words.

Hopefully, it won’t be a problem for you that some police officers now have the ability to use a device like the GrayKey.  But what worries me is that if the police have it, perhaps certain bad actors have access to similar devices — criminals who might have a reason to try to access the confidential information that you have on your device about your clients.

Apple is constantly improving the security of its devices, and that’s why I encourage all attorneys to update their iPhones and iPads when Apple comes out.  A GrayKey-type device that works today may not work after the next iOS update.  But Apple has been improving iPhone security ever since the first iPhone was released in 2007, and for over a decade now, clever folks have found new ways to circumvent security measures.

Do you need to change your six digit passcode to something stronger?  Well, that’s up to you.  Hopefully, the chance that your device will ever be connected to something like GrayKey is extremely remote.  But for what it’s worth, I’m currently using 12-character passcodes on my iPhone and iPad.  After about a week, I got used to the longer passcodes.  And while I am entering the passcode, I think to myself “take that you evil hackers!” which, if nothing else, helps to fill up some of that extra time that it takes to type 12 characters instead of 6 numbers.

It’s always nice when you have an opportunity to talk to someone who has great suggestions on a topic that you are interested in.  You are about to travel to Paris?  Here’s someone who lived there for the past year and who has fabulous recommendations on all of the things that you should do and see.  You are looking for some great new TV shows to watch?  Here is someone who has excellent recommendations for binge-worthy shows on HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.  I have an interest in the iPhone (I know — big surprise to you, right?) so I always love talking to other folks about how they are using their iPhones.  With millions of apps in the App Store, and countless hardware accessories sold by Apple and third parties, I enjoy learning about the things that I haven’t heard of before, or learning about how others are using apps or accessories in different ways. 

I first met California attorney David Sparks a number of years ago at an ABA TECHSHOW conference, but I have been following him for much longer than that through his MacSparky website and the Mac Power Users podcast he does with Florida attorney Katie Floyd.  David has deep knowledge of the iPhone and the iPad, and I always love talking to him about all things iOS for his perspective on how to get more out of these devices.  And because he often writes posts about these topics on his website, I find myself linking to an article on MacSparky almost every Friday when I write my In the news roundup.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could ask that friend who knows about Paris, or TV shows, or the iPhone, to just write down everything that they know and share it with you?  That is the idea behind the latest electronic book by David Sparks called the iPhone Field Guide.  David has taken just about everything in his brain concerning how you can get more out of an iPhone and poured it into this book, which you can read on the iPad and the iPhone.  And because the iBooks system makes it possible to embed video into a page, this book also includes over two hours of videos in which David shows off how he uses his iPhone.  It’s almost like David was sitting next to you and showing you his iPhone, saying “let me show you what this cool app can do.”

David sent me a promotional code so that I could download a free copy to review it for iPhone J.D., and I enjoyed reading all 452 pages of it this past weekend.  This is a great book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who owns an iPhone and is interested in doing more with it — which should cover just about every person who reads iPhone J.D., except perhaps for the occasional Android owner who ends up here by accident.

The book contains 45 chapters and covers just about all of the topics that relate to using an iPhone.  (One notable exception — although David is an attorney, this book doesn’t include recommendations of apps that are specific to lawyers or other types of professionals.)  Chapters include, just to pick a few examples, Photography, Calendar Apps, Security, Habit Trackers, Travel, Document Scanners, Mind Mapping, Outlining, Creating Video, and there is even a chapter on the Apple Watch because it is such a perfect iPhone companion.

For each topic, David gives you his recommendations.  This is not an in-depth guide on how to use every little part of every app, and thus there is no chapter that exhaustively goes through every sub-menu of the Settings app.  Instead, he picks a topic and tells you his top recommendations on that topic. 

As an example, here is a page from the chapter on Mind Mapping in which David recommends MindNode for folks just getting started.  As you can see, the page includes a description of the app, a two minute video in which David explains why he recommends this app and shows off how the app works, and a link to download the app in the App Store.  This is page 308, but if you flip to page 309 where David finishes his discussion of the app, he includes a link to a series of videos he did for the developer of MindNode in which he spends about an hour explaining in detail how to use the app.

For another example, in the Creating Video chapter, David starts with a few pages giving you some general tips on shooting video with an iPhone.  Next, he discusses apps, limiting himself to his best recommendations.  He explains why the built-in Camera app is great for taking video because most features are automatic, but then explains why you should consider the FiLMic Pro app if you want manual controls for everything.  Then he discusses editing video, starting with an overview of Apple’s free iMovie app, and then he recommends a single third-party app for more powerful editing called LumaFusion.  When describing that app, he states:  “I tried just about every video editing app available while doing research for this book, and LumaFusion stands about them all.  If you want more than the basic iPhone video editing tools, buy LumaFusion.”

Those two sentences really sum up what this book is all about.  There are lots of websites that have posts with titles like “the best time management apps” but then when you read the article, it is just a list of ten apps in the category with virtually no explanation on why one is better than the other.  This book is the opposite of that.  If you were to bump into David and say that you were interested in topic X and what would he recommend for that, he would say something like what I quoted above — this first app is the one most folks would want to use for that task, and here is a second app which is the best one to get if you want something more powerful.

There is something in this book for everyone who uses an iPhone.  Even though I consider myself a power user and I know about a lot of different apps, I learned a bunch reading this book and I downloaded quite a few apps this past weekend while reading the book.  I also learned some new things.  For example, there is a chapter on Siri commands that is more comprehensive than anything that I have ever seen on the subject.  Many times as I was reading through that chapter, I stopped myself to say “can Siri really do that?” and then I tried the command and saw that it worked.

I think that the best way to read this book is on an iPad.  That’s how the book is laid out.  But David also takes advantage of the way that iBooks works so that you can also enter a scrolling view on the iPhone, a view in which you can scroll through the text, pictures, and videos (much like you might scroll through a web page in Safari) and you can change the font size to whatever you prefer.  So if you want to start reading this book on the iPad, but then a read a chapter or two on your iPhone while you find yourself with a little down time, you can definitely do that.  Here is an example of how a page looks on my iPad Pro, and then how the same page looks on the iPhone both before and after I turn on scrolling view.

 

For a limited time during the introductory period of this new book, David is offering this book for $20.  At some point in the future, the price will go up.  The book is packed with useful information and recommendations, and perhaps thanks to his long career as a lawyer, David is a very good writer and this book is enjoyable to read.  I enthusiastically recommend the iPhone Field Guide to all iPhone J.D. readers.

Click here to get the iPhone Field Guide by David Sparks ($19.99): 

Federico Viticci of MacStories has a good list of tips for getting work done on an iPad.  The first tip, creating a launcher for a specific note, works on the iPhone too, and it is very useful if you use the Notes app because this tip gives you a way to open a specific note, which I prefer to opening up the Notes app and then finding the note and then opening that note.  For example, I have a note containing the file numbers for my most frequent matters, and it is nice to have a quick way to launch that specific note when I need a file number.  To accomplish this tip, you need to use a launcher app such as Launch Center Pro.  I see that I haven’t reviewed that app since 2012, but it has been updated many times since then and it remains on my first iPhone home screen because I use it every day.  And indeed, after a recent update to Launch Center Pro, you can now hold down the app icon and the pop-up menu can give you six Quick Actions instead of four, a neat trick that I haven’t seen any other app do yet.  Click here to get Launch Center Pro ($4.99):    I’ll admit that apps like Launch Center Pro and Workflows which can be configured to accomplish complicated tasks are not for everyone.  The apps let you be more productive, but they come with a learning curve.  However, if you consider yourself a power user of the iPhone and iPad, these types of apps are great.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• California attorney David Sparks discusses the new 2018 version of the 9.7" iPad.  He says that for most users, it is a fine choice
• In the latest episode of the Apps in Law podcast, Brett Burney interviews South Carolina attorney Michael Polk to discuss Focus Keeper and HabitBull apps which he uses to stay n task throughout the day using the Pomodoro Technique.
• Jason Snell of Six Colors reviews the new iPad.
• Ryan Christoffel of MacStories explains that after a recent update to the Microsoft Word app, it now works better with the built-in Files app.
• Mark Sullivan of Fast Company wrote an interesting story explaining how Apple now runs on 100% green energy, such as solar. 
• Jonny Evans of Computerworld has a good list of useful iPhone tips.  Here’s one that I didn’t know that you could do:  “Hey Siri, call [contact] on speakerphone.”
• Leif Johnson of Macworld wrote a good article on his favorite note-taking apps for the iPad and Apple Pencil.  I really like GoodNotes 4, which is one of his picks.  Johnson points out that one advantage of Notability is that it can record audio as you take notes.  For my law practice I don’t consider that an avantage; I virtually never take notes in an environment in which it would be wise to create an audio recording (and for the times that I take note in court, I’m quite sure that an audio recording would be prohibited).  But it is nice to have quite a few strong apps in this field.
• Glenn Fleishmann of Macworld reviews Apple’s latest version of the Numbers app for iOS.  It has a few new features, including a much improved interface for importing data.
• Michael Potuck explains how to clean AirPods and the AirPods charging case in an article for 9to5Mac.
• If you use an iPhone X, because of its OLED screen, it uses less battery life to display black instead of other colors.  AppleInsider did a test and found that YouTube’s new dark theme can save you battery life on an iPhone X.  I think that this mode would look even better on the OLED screen if it were a pure black theme instead of a dark grey.
• And finally, this week Apple came out with a (PRODUCT)RED version of the iPhone 8.  It is otherwise identical to the iPhone 7 released last year, but the new color does look nice, and a portion of the proceeds go to support HIV/AIDS programs.  You can see some nice pictures of the new red iPhone on Apple’s website, where Apple notes that it has raised over $160 million for (RED) over the past 11 years.  If you want to see a short video of what the new red iPhone 8 looks like, Rene Ritchie of iMore prepared this video for his Vector podcast: