Apple has a tradition of producing some great Christmas-themed commercials. This year, they are running a commercial showing Santa Claus using Siri. I believe that the commercial started this past weekend (I first saw it on Sunday during the Saints football game) so perhaps you have seen it already, but if not, it is worth watching. Here it is:
Last year, Apple ran this ad with “Santa” using FaceTime:
The year before, in 2009, Apple ran an iPhone ad called The 12 Apps of Christmas:
One of my all-time favorite Apple Christmas commercials was this one that ran in 2007 as a part of its Mac vs. PC ads. I suppose that I’m a sucker for the Rankin/Bass-style during the holiday season:
The follow-up to commercials in 2008 were also cute:
And finally, here is an older Apple ad that ran during the holiday season. I think that this one was from 1994, and it is called The Nightmare Before Christmas:
It’s a short week on iPhone J.D. due to the holidays. Hopefully, you have Friday and Monday off like we do at my firm. Here are the iPhone and iPad news items of note from the past week:
Indiana attorney Bill Wilson considers TrialPad the best app of 2011 for lawyers.
Michael Rose of TUAW recommends iPad apps and accessories as gifts for business colleagues.
Click here for a funny Dilbert cartoon regarding Siri on the iPhone 4S.
Do you sometimes forget where you parked your car? Find My Car Smart is a $25 device that you leave in your car, and using the advanced Bluetooth Smart technology in the iPhone 4S, your iPhone can show you how to get back to your car, even in a crowded parking lot. This is a Kickstarter project, but it has already far surpassed the $10,000 goal so it looks like this one will be made.
Mike Schramm of TUAW reports that, if you are a Verizon customer, you’ll be able to watch the Super Bowl live on your iPhone or iPad.
And finally, I didn’t believe this video when I first saw it, but then I read Jim Dalrymple’s post at The Loop explaining how it is done. Some smart folks who work at Yamaha figured out how to use Siri to tell a Yamaha Disklavier player piano to play songs:
If you are looking to get some new apps for your iPhone (or iPad), it’s the most wonderful time of the year. You see, a whole bunch of people are going to be getting a new iPhone, iPod touch or iPad on December 25, and many will also receive iTunes gift cards to purchase apps for their existing or new devices. That means that a HUGE number of people are going to be purchasing apps starting in just a few days. If you are an app developer, you want your app to be high on the lists of the most popular apps. What’s a quick way to make a lot of sales this week and get higher on those lists of popular apps? Reduce the price of your app substantially, or even make it free.
As a result, you can currently load up your iPhone and iPad with lots and lots of apps — especially games — at a fraction of the normal price. For example:
1Password for iPhone ($9.99 -> $5.99)
1Password for iPad ($9.99 -> $5.99)
Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant for iPhone and iPad ($4.99 -> $2.99)
The Monster at the End of This Book ($3.99 -> $0.99)
Madden NFL 12 for iPhone ($4.99 -> $0.99)
Madden NFL 12 for iPad ($9.99 -> $0.99)
Scrabble for iPhone ($1.99 -> $0.99)
Scrabble for iPad ($9.99 -> $0.99)
Trivial Pursuit Master Edition for iPad ($4.99 -> $0.99)
Tapper World Tour HD ($1.99 -> $0.99)
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 for iPad ($4.99 -> $0.99)
Yahtzee HD for iPad ($4.99 -> $0.99)
Monopoly for iPad ($9.99 -> $0.99)
Mirror’s Edge HD for iPad ($9.99 -> $0.99)
Risk for iPhone ($2.99 -> $0.99)
Risk HD for iPad ($9.99 ->$0.99)
A few that I can personally recommend from that list: (1) if you are looking for something fun to do with your kids, my six-year-old son and my four-year-old daughter both love The Monster at the End of This Book; (2) Scrabble for for the iPad is fantastic if you love word games; (3) Tapper World Tour HD is a lot of fun if you have great memories of the Tapper arcade game when you were younger (as I do); and (4) Mirror’s Edge is a fun, fast-paced game.
[UPDATE 2/11/2013: This app is no longer available in the App Store, apparently because Apple didn’t like on-screen notifications being used this way.] Many of my favorite iPhone apps share a quality: they do one simple thing, and do it well. Dan Friedlander, an attorney in Irvine, CA, has produced many iPhone apps through his company LawOnMyPhone that aim to do just that. For example, his Court Days Pro app does a great job of calculating dates based on rules that you provide. He recently released a new app called Do Date that does one thing and does it well — it reminds you how many days are left until an event. How many days do you have before your next anniversary? Your spouse’s birthday? Your next trial? Your vacation? Do Date gives you a prompt with that number every day, using Apple’s Notification features in iOS 5.
Creating an event is simple. Tap the Add Date button at the bottom of the app, type in a name for the event, and then scroll the date wheels to assign a date. That’s it. If you tap on the first icon at the bottom, Do Dates, you’ll see a list of all of your upcoming events.
Every night at midnight, the app provides a new set of notifications with the number of days that you have until your next event. So if you have notifications on your lock screen turned on in the iPhone Settings, and assuming that you go to sleep before midnight, you’ll wake up every morning with notifications on the screen of your iPhone telling you which events are upcoming and how many days you have until the events occur:
You can also view the events in the Notification Center, a pop-up window that you access by swiping down from the top of your iPhone’s screen:
The app’s built-in Settings let you change just a few things, such as toggling the reminder on or off again and changing the date format.
The first thought that I had when I tried out this app is that it would be useful if the app let you set the time of day that the notifications occur. If you are night owl (like me) you are often up past midnight, and it would be better to have the notifications take place at a different time, such as 5am, so they are fresh when you wake up every morning. Friendlander told me that he received that suggestion from other users as well, and he has already submitted an update to Apple that adds this feature.
In the Settings app on the iPhone, you can allow any app to provide up to 10 notifications. The default is lower than that, so if you use this app you’ll probably want to increase the notification to the maximu of 10. That also serves as a limitation of the app; you can’t be shown more than 10 notifications at one time. Thus, you’ll want to save this app for just a few important events such as the date that a trial begins, as opposed to every pre-trial deadline. But this limitation is not a big problem because if you were to have dozens of events listed, you probably wouldn’t focus on all of them anyway. Limit use of this app to your major events, and then the daily reminders of how long you have until the event occurs will have more impact.
Do Date is a focused, nicely designed app that provides a useful reminder of the number of days until an event takes place. And at only $0.99, the price is right.
If you are an attorney, then I suspect that you already know that PACER is a service that provides online access to U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents for all federal courts in the U.S. If you have ever tried to access PACER while you are on-the-go on your iPhone, then you know that it is not a pleasant experience. You can access the PACER website, but the screen is not formatted for an iPhone screen so the text is tiny and thus hard to read. You can view the docket of a case, but then once you try to view a specific document you often only see the first few pages of the document, and it is impossible to move the document into another app.
I am having trouble finding a link right now, but I have seen in the past a reference to an upcoming version of the PACER website that will work with the iPhone. There is already a version of the PACER case locater that is formatted for mobile devices (you can access it here) and that helps when you are trying to find a case, but then once you find it and you want to get into the details of the case, you run into the same problems that I noted above.
Newton Oldfather, a recent graduate of UCLA Law School, decided to do something about this and thus, with the assistance of his father and another friend, he created the app FedCtRecords. The app usually sells for $19.99 but for a limited time during the holiday season, it is FREE so I encourage you to download it now. [UPDATE 12/31/11: The free promotion is over; the app is now priced at $9.99.] The app does a good job of providing an iPhone interface to the PACER service.
You start by entering your PACER login and password, which the app saves for future use (already an improvement on the website). Then yous select a court from a pop-up list and then enter your query, using any of the traditional PACER fields such as case number, party or attorney.
You wait a few seconds while the app sends the query to PACER, and then you see the PACER results, nicely organized into sections. For example, tap the Attorney section to see a list of attorneys involved in a case. If you tap on a name you get the full information such as the attorney’s address and the client represented.
But of course, you will often want to use this app to access the docket, and the app does this well. Tap on Docket Report to see a list every docket entry. Tap on an entry to see the transaction receipt, including information on how much it will cost (if anything) to view the document.
Tap the View button at the top right to view the PDF file. The file will appear on the screen, and you can read it. Unfortunately, the app doesn’t include the often-standard iPhone button to open the PDF in another app. (As I’ve noted in the past, the best apps for reading an a PDF on the iPhone are iBooks and the Adobe Acrobat app.) However, you can tap the EMail button at the top right, and then send the PDF file to yourself as an e-mail attachment, and then once you receive that e-mail you can open up the attached PDF file in whatever app you want.
The app also give you the option to save a case that you located via a query in a My Cases area. That way, in the future, insted of typing the case number you can just tap the case name from a list to quickly pull the PACER information.
Because the iPad can run iPhone apps, you can use this app on an iPad, but the app is not formatted for the iPad screen. Of course, once you find a document and e-mail the PDF to yourself, you may prefer using an iPad so that you can use the larger screen to view the PDF file. Oldfather tells me that if there is sufficient interest in the iPhone app, he would consider creating an iPad version.
[UPDATE: As several have pointed out in the comments, note that this app currently does not access Bankruptcy files.]
Not surprisingly, you cannot use this app to file documents in federal court. For that, you need to use a computer. But if you just want to receive information about a case on PACER, this app works great.
The interface of the FedCtRecords app is not as polished as some other iPhone apps, but that is not really a problem. The app is very functional, and infinitely better than accessing the current PACER website from an iPhone.
If you practice law in federal courts, this is a useful app to have. As noted above, it typically costs $19.99, but during this introductory period during the holiday season it is free, so I encourage you to download it so that you are ready to access PACER the next time that you are away from the office and need to do so on your iPhone.
This late in the year, there isn’t much in the way of iPhone and iPad news. If you are looking for something else to do after reading the stories I list below, please remember that the voting booths are open in the ABA Journal’s Fifth Annual Blawg 100, which you can access by going to this page. After taking about 10 seconds to register, you can vote for up to 12 of your favorite blogs. If you enjoy reading iPhone J.D., I would certainly appreciate your vote in the legal technology category. And now, a look at the (minimal) iPhone and iPad news of note from the past week:
Massachusetts attorney Robert Ambrogi relates the story of Jamie Daigle, a Portland attorney who has an idea for a better iPad case that he is trying to fund through Kickstarter.
St. Louis attorney Spencer Farris writes about the TrialPad app on the iPad to present evidence during trial.
Louisville, KY attorney Finis Price writes about ExhibitView, another trial presentation app for the iPad.
The Law Firm Mobile website reports that of the 200 firms on the AmLaw 200 list, 37 of them have versions of their websites optimized for a mobile device like the iPhone. My own firm, Adams and Reese, is one such firm; here is a direct link to our mobile website, but it comes up automatically if you access the main website address from an iPhone.
Matthew Berg, the director of IT at the Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks law firm, writes about integrating iPads into a law firm in an article on the TechnoLawyer Blog.
Monica Bay, the editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, reports on a recent survey about lawyers’ use of mobile devices.
Are you a frequent traveler? Mark Sullivan of PCWorld reports on the the 20 best U.S. airports for tech-savvy travelers (Dallas-Ft. Worth International is #1) and the most tech-friendly airlines (Delta is #1).
John Mello of PCWorld reports that adults spend more time with mobile devices than with print media. That’s certainly true for me. (via Niki Black)
Dr. Iltifat Husain provides three reasons that doctors love Apple products: simplicity, solid build quality and uniformity. (via Brett Burney)
And finally, David Pogue of the New York Times has some interesting tech-related gift suggestions, such as $300 light bulbs that are also speakers and the Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter, a $300 four-propeller craft that you control from your iPhone.
Most iPhone J.D. readers access this site from a computer, but I have something really neat to show you on your iPhone or iPad. Go to this page on your iOS device:
That’s the page for the brand new Apple Store in Grand Central Station in New York. On that page, on the left, click on “View More Photos.” You will see a list of photos on the right. Click on the bottom right photo, this one that I have a yellow circle around:
The picture that comes up is a 360º picture. Using the gyroscope in your iPhone or your iPad, you can move your device, and as you do so, the picture adjusts too just as if you were standing there in the middle of Grand Central Station and your iPhone or iPad was your view to the world. You can even point your device all the way up to look at the ceiling. Very cool stuff. According to Matthew Panzarino at The Next Web, this works with an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2 or iPod touch 4G.
By the way, you can also see this picture in some browsers on a computer, such as Safari on a Mac. On a computer, you can click and drag to manually move the photo around. But that is not nearly as cool as tilting or moving your iPhone or iPad and feeling … almost … as if you are actually there.
When you are in a long trial, it is helpful to make arrangements for daily transcripts so that you can refer back to what was said by a witness, the court, or your opponent in a prior day. In a trial of any length, you will want to have access to prior deposition transcripts and prior hearings. Court reporters typically provide those transcripts in several forms — paper, ASCII and .ptx format. You can (and probably should) have paper transcripts with you in the court in a box just in case you need to show something in paper format to the judge, but I find it helpful to have an electronic version of the transcripts on an iPad. This makes it easy to search the transcripts to find what was said, plus makes it easy to highlight important things in the transcript. And when you need to argue to the judge, you can easily take your iPad up to the bench during a sidebar and read from the relevant portion of the transcript. Here are the tools that I find useful for doing this.
I find it most useful to start with the .ptx format and then create a PDF file. The .ptx format, called the E-Transcript format, was created by RealLegal, which was acquired by LiveNote and is now owned by Thompson West. Unfortunately, you need a PC to work with these files; there has not been an E-Transcript viewer on the Mac since before Mac OS X. I open the .ptx file on a PC and “Print” the full-page version of the transcript, but instead of printing to a printer, I print to a PDF file. There are many programs that let you do this on a PC. For example, the full version of Adobe Acrobat can print to PDF, as can other software such as PDF Converter from Nuance. As an alternative, you can make arrangements for the court reporter to give you a PDF version, but make sure it is a searchable version (not just a scan of the transcript pages).
You also want to make sure your PDF is a full page version, which you can create using the software I described above, or if you are getting your PDF file directly from the court reporter you can request that. Miniature transcripts, with four transcript pages on each side of each page, are nice to reduce the amount of paper you have to carry when you are working with paper transcripts, but when you are dealing with an electronic file on your iPad you won’t care how long the document is — your iPad doesn’t weigh more or take up more space in your briefcase when your documents are longer — and it is more flexible to have full page transcripts for when you want to highlight.
Now that you have a searchable, full-page PDF file of the transcript, you’ll want to get that transcript on your iPad. My favorite tool for viewing and annotating PDF files is GoodReader, the best $5 an attorney can spend on an iPad app. The easiest way to get the transcripts to GoodReader on your iPad is to use DropBox, a free service that allows you to create a folder on your computer, and any file you put in the DropBox is synced to a private space in the cloud. You can set GoodReader to sync with your DropBox folders. Thus, you can create a folder called “Smith v Jones Transcripts” in your DropBox, drag your searchable, full-page PDF files into that folder, and then in seconds the file will be in your DropBox. In the GoodReader app, you can tap the sync button to quickly download all new files from your DropBox to the iPad. I know that some attorneys have concerns about storing confidential documents in DropBox because of the (very slight) risk of third-party access, but transcripts are public documents anyway (unless it is under seal), so DropBox should be fine for virtually all transcripts.
With the transcripts on your iPad, you can easily read through the transcript, page by page. To maximize the size of the transcript on your screen, top once in the middle of the screen to bring up the toolbars and then tap the button at the bottom middle of the screen. You can then use the standard iPad pinch-to-zoom to make the document just a little larger, cutting off the space around the box around each page. It is a minor change, but I find that the slightly larger text is even easier to read in court.
As you read through your transcript and find something important, you can highlight the text just by holding your finger on a word for a second and then expanding the selection.
After you have highlighted key parts of a transcript, you can use the view annotations feature (tap the icon at the bottom of the screen that looks like an open book) to see every place in a document that you have highlighted.
And of course, it is often incredibly useful to search the transcript to see when something was said in the past and exactly what was said. GoodReader does a good job of searching transcripts and allowing you to jump through every hit on your search terms. Keep in mind that you often will not remember exactly when something was said in trial. Thus, in addition to having every individual trial transcript on my iPad, every night in trial I have someone simply combine all of the PDFs to date into one big file and I drop that into the DropBox folder too. This makes it easy to search through an entire trial. I do the same with prior depositions so that I can quickly search through them during a trial.
Note that the search feature in GoodReader is simple, and doesn’t include features such as word 1 within a certain number of words of word 2. Having said that, I’ve always found that the simple searches work fine. Also keep in mind that it is best if you can just search for one word, because in a transcript if one word is at the end of a line and the next word is at the start of the next line, the trasncript will read the line number at the start of the next line as information between the words, so a search for the phase won’t always work.
Obviously, you can do much of what I am describing using a laptop computer instead of an iPad. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, there are lots of things you can do with an iPad that you can’t do with a laptop. An iPad battery will last all day; a laptop lasts just a few hours unless you plug it in, and plugs can be limited in a courtroom. You can take the iPad with you when you speak from a podium or at a sidebar; that is awkward to do with a computer. When the iPad is with you during your argument, if your opponent claims that witness X said Y a few days ago, you can quickly do a search and find exactly what witness X really said.
There are countless reasons that an iPad can be useful in trial, but even if the iPad just did this one thing — provide excellent access to trial transcripts and deposition transcripts — that would be reason enough to use an iPad in trial. I’ve previously mentioned using an iPad to do legal research with WestlawNext during trial, and in the future I’ll provide more tips on making the most of your iPad in trial.
ABA TECHSHOW, held in Chicago every Spring, is the premier technology conference for lawyers. There are tons of informative sessions (typically six tracks are going on at the same time) so you have lots of great seminars to choose from. The conference has a great exhibit hall where you can see and try the latest legal technology. And there are tons of opportunities to socialize with old friends or meet new people who share an interest in technology. Next year, it takes place March 29-31, 2012 at the Chicago Hilton on Michigan Avenue.
I’ve participated in the conference for several years. Back in 2008, I spoke about disaster preparation and recovery, a topic near and dear to New Orleans attorneys like me who dealt with Hurricane Katrina. For the last two years I’ve talked about iPhones, and I’ll do so again in 2012.
Every year that I have attended, the focus on smartphones and tablets has increased, and 2012 looks to be the best year yet. For example, on the first day of the conference, there is an all-day “Mobile and Smartphone” track. I’m speaking in the first session which is titled “Shartphone Wars.” I’ll be talking about the iPhone, Pennsylvania attorney/consultant Jennifer Ellis will talk about Android, and Toronto attorney and risk management specialist Dan Pinnington will talk about BlackBerry. Readers of this website are likely to be iPhone users, and it will be interesting for us to compare and contrast the other devices that are popular for attorneys.
The three other sessions in this track the first day of the conference also look great. Josh Barrett of Tablet Legal and Nerino Petro of Compujurist will compare and contrast the iPad and Android tablets in a session called “Tablet Wars.” Then Dennis Kennedy and Sharon Nelson will talk about the ethics of mobile computing in the cloud. Finally, Victor Medina and Ben Schorr will talk about keeping your documents synchronized across multiple devices. And as good as those last two sessions sound, I will be tempted to also sit in on iOS-related sessions going on at the same time in the other tracks, such as the track “iWin: iPads for Litigators” by Tom Mighell and Paul Unger.
And that’s just the first day. Friday, March 30th is full of other interesting sessions, such as an all-day track devoted to cloud computing. And then on Saturday morning, I’m teaming up with Josh Barrett and Brett Burney for the third year of 60 iOS Apps for Lawyers in 60 Minutes, a session that is always a lot of fun and very informative — even for me because I always learn about great new apps from my co-presenters.
One of my favorite parts of TECHSHOW are the Taste of TECHSHOW dinners. I’m sure I’ll once again host one for iPhone and iPad users. It’s a good excuse to meet up with some like-minded folks. Sure, we’ll talk about iOS devices, but mostly we’ll just trade stories and have some great discussions over good food and drink.
The keynote speaker for the conference will be attorney / economist / actor Ben Stein — sure to be a very interesting, and amusing, presentation.
If you have never attended TECHSHOW before, you really should check it out. It is by far my favorite CLE every year, and it will give you all of your CLE hours for the year. I’ve met a ton of iPhone J.D. readers at prior TECHSHOWs and I look forward to meeting more of you in a few months.
Amazon announced this week that the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is the top-selling book of the year for 2011, according to a report in Forbes. I recently finished the book, and really enjoyed it. The unprecedented access that Jobs gave to Isaacson resulted in lots of great stories that I had never heard before and revealed fascinating insights and opinions of Steve Jobs. I highly recommend it. And now, on for the other iPhone and iPad news of the week:
I find the iPad so much more enjoyable to use than a computer, and I am constantly finding new ways to use it instead of a computer. Along these same lines, Harry McCracken of Technologizer wrote a great article about how he has started using an iPad instead of a computer.
If you have an iPhone 4S, you probably already know how useful Siri can be. Lex Friedman of Macworld has some great tips for getting more out of Siri.
If you live in New York City, a cool new Apple Store opens today at Grand Central Station. Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune wrote a good overview of the store, including a video walk-through.
Eli Milchman of Cult of Mac reports that if you are a customer of Chase bank, you can now use its free iPhone app to transfer money from your bank account to any other U.S. bank account (it doesn’t need to be a Chase account). The Chase app has long allowed you to deposit a check just using your iPhone, thus saving you a trip to the bank. Now, the app saves you a trip to the ATM when you need to pay someone. Neat.
David Pogue of the New York Times reviews the Epson Megaplex, a projector for the iPhone that can turn your iPhone into a home theater.
Oklahoma attorney Jeffrey Taylor writes about using an Android tablet in court on his site The Droid Lawyer. Everything in his post applies to an iPad as well, except that instead of the Android app RepliGo Reader, on the iPad you should use the excellent GoodReader app.
What happens when you cross The Three Stooges with an iPhone? Watch this trailer for the new Farrelly Brothers movie, around the 30 second mark. (via TiPb)
And finally, here is a story about an ill-fated iPad sale that, I’m embarrassed to admit, occurred in a town not too far from New Orleans, where I live. Chealsea Gaudin of WWL, the local CBS affiliate, reports that a man was at a gas station in Slidell, LA when two other men approached him and asked if he wanted to buy an iPad for $120. Our shopper tried to show some smarts by asking to asking to to see the iPad to check that it was real. They showed him an iPad, and then our shopper went to the ATM machine to get money, at which point our mobile retailers swapped out the iPad for “a stripped Dell laptop with an Apple logo taped to it.” I’ll put the picture below. This led to a skirmish when the shopper realized what happened, and the sale went downhill from there … guns were involved, as was a pursuit by the police, and finally capture, at which point the police found in the vehicle “several fake laptops and fake Apple iPads.” As you do your holiday shopping this year, I recommend that all iPhone J.D. readers consider shopping at the Apple Store, Amazon, or other fine establishments instead of your local neighborhood gas station. As for that picture I promised you, I think it is a stretch to even call this a “fake Apple iPad”:
