I love my iPhone 4, and perhaps my favorite new feature is the high pixel density, a feature that Apple calls the Retina display. It vastly improves the iPhone experience whether you are reading text, looking at a picture, surfing the Internet or playing a game. Apple unveiled a new commercial for the iPhone 4 this week which touts the benefits of the display. Here it is:
As I think back to all of the fun things that my father and I did together when I was a kid, numerous Cub Scout activities come to mind such as the Pinewood Derby, but one particular favorite was launching model rockets. I remember wishing that there was a way that my rocket could go all the way up into space.
Fast forward about 30 years and Luke Geissbühler of Brooklyn, NY, who works by day as a Director of Photography on films, worked with his seven year old son Max — and other friends in a group he founded called the Brooklyn Space Program — to launch a homemade spacecraft all the way into the upper stratosphere. The contraption he built would need to be able to survive 100 mph winds, extreme cold temperatures, and a drop from 19 miles high at over 150 mph. It took eight months to design, but less than $500 to build. And it worked. I realize that this is the little boy in me talking, but oh-my-goodness what an an amazing father-son project!
How did he build it? He used a weather balloon to lift his 1.5 lb. spacecraft and a parachute to help it fall back to Earth. The spacecraft carried a GoPro Hero HD camera to record the flight. To keep track of the flight, he put inside the spacecraft an old iPhone 3G (that already had a cracked screen, donated by a friend) running the GPS Tracker app. [Click here for GPS Tracker (free): 
] The GPS Tracker app sends information such as latitude, longitude, speed, and a timestamp every five seconds to the free InstaMapper website. Thus, during the flight, Geissbühler just had to view a page on the InstaMapper website to continuously monitor the iPhone as it ascended and descended and to locate the iPhone after it landed (in a tree). (Actually, the GPS could only pick up satellites below 50,000 feet, so for the second half of the flight he had to do some complex modeling to estimate the coordinates).
If it looks like something you might want to try, click here to learn of Geissbühler’s plans to put together a how-to book. Click here for a New York Daily News story with quotes from Geissbühler. And best of all, here is the video:
In June of this year, 16 years after I graduated from law school and took the Louisiana bar exam, I decided to take the Florida bar exam to help a client with some cases in the Sunshine State. I wanted to take a bar review course, but I wasn’t going to be able to attend live lectures in Florida, so I decided to enroll in BARBRI and use the BARBRI iPhone app. The BARBRI course is $3,245, and for an extra $295 you can purchase BARBRI Mobile. (If you don’t own an iOS device, the company will loan you an iPod touch in exchange for a $200 refundable deposit.) Note that the app itself is a free download from the App Store, but except for one feature noted below, you can’t use the app unless you have paid for the BARBRI Mobile option as a part of your BARBRI course.
I found the app to be very useful, and I thought it would be interesting to write about the experience here, not only for anyone out there who is contemplating taking a bar exam (I know that a lot of law students read iPhone J.D.), but also for any attorneys who have been out of law school for a while and are curious about how technology has changed the way that people can study for a bar exam.
1. Lectures
BARBRI is known for having good lecturers, and for the most part I was very happy with the people who taught the course, especially people who taught the six multistate bar exam (MBE) subjects. To watch a lecture on your iPhone, you select the lectures button at the bottom and you will see the available courses. Each lecture is broken up into one hour segments, so for example to learn Constitutional Law there are 3 one-hour segments for Con Law I and 3 one-hour segments for Con Law II.
The lectures are not located in the app itself; you download each lecture from within the app, either in video or audio format. I downloaded all of mine in video format, even though sometimes I would not pay attention to the screen and just listen using my headphones. After you have heard a lecture, it makes sense to delete it from your iPhone to save space, but you can keep it there if you think that you may want to listen to part of it again, or you can redownload a lecture that you have already heard. Here is Prof. David Epstein of S.M.U. (an excellent lecturer) teaching Contracts and Sales on my iPhone:
Watching the video on the iPhone works exactly like watching any other video. I found it useful that you could watch a lecture but easily pause if you need to take a break or easily go back if you want to listen to something again — things that you could not do if you were sitting in a classroom. And obviously, unlike a classroom lecture, you can watch these lectures at your own pace, at whatever time or place that you want.
Listening to the BARBRI lectures on my iPhone worked great. I would typically prop up my iPhone on a table and plug it in to my external speakers (I have a Bose SoundDock Portable) and sit at the table with the handouts and follow along with a lecture, but sometimes I would slip the iPhone into my shirt pocket and just listen to a lecture on my iPhone. Only rarely was it necessary to see the teachers — very few used a board or other visuals — but I usually found it more engaging to watch a person while they spoke.
2. Practice Questions
When you enroll in BARBRI, you receive well over a dozen books, many of which contain practice questions and practice tests. Because the actual MBE is a written test, it makes sense to take many of your practice exams using paper just to get into the habit of using a pencil, but I found it very useful to also do practice questions on the iPhone. You choose to answer questions by subject either with or without a timer, or you can take a 30 minute practice exam with questions in a mixed order from all three subjects.
When you are taking test questions the iPhone displays the question in the top half of the screen (you often need to scroll to see all of the question) and the four possible answers in the bottom half of the screen, and you simply tap the one that you think is correct. Instantly, you will see whether you got the question right or wrong, the right answer has an explanation of why it is right, and every wrong answer has an explanation of why it is wrong. (If you take a 30 minute practice exam, you wait until the end to see the answers.) When you are reviewing an answer that you know you are going to want to look at again, tap the “Review” switch at the top right to on. That way, over time, you can build up a set of questions that you have previously indicated you want to revisit, a good way to re-test yourself on the topics that you difficulty with on first pass. For me, this system worked really well. It was a fast-paced way to do practice questions, immediatley learn the right answer, and then, later on, go back to the questions that gave me trouble the first time.
The explanations of why answers are right or wrong include hyperlinks (the letters CMR) to an outline of the entire subject (the Conviser condensed outline). I found this very helpful because you can quickly see the correct answer and then remind yourself of the principle of law and how it fits in to the body of law as a whole.
The app keeps track of how many you got right or wrong for all of the questions that you tried within each subject matter. If you are doing well enough to pass the MBE, you see a green indicator for a subject. If not, you see red. Here is what my statistics looked like early on in my studying, at a time when you can see that I had much more studying to do, especially in Property. (Rule Against Perpetuities — arrggh!!!)
The statistics go even deeper. In addition to telling you your overall percentage in a subject, the app can also show you how you are doing on the sub-topics within each major subject to help point you to the parts of the outline that require more attention. Additionally, if you are feeling competitive, you can even see how you are doing compared to all of the other people doing the practice questions, with results updated every night.
3. Mini Reviews
I mentioned before that within answers to questions you can see links to outlines of each subject area. You can also tap the Mini Reviews button at the bottom of the screen at any time to review the Conviser condensed outline for each of the MBE subjects.
4. BARBRI Challenge
Finally, the app includes a “game” called the BARBRI Challenge. Anyone can download the BARBRI app for free and play the game, even people not enrolled in BARBRI. You register and tell the app which law school you attend (or attended), and then the app gives you 10 random questions across all subject matters and gives you 15 minutes to answer. Read the question and tap an answer, and the app plays a buzzer sound if you got the answer wrong or a ding if you got the answer right and then brings you to the next question. (Unlike the main test questions within the app, in this game the app does not tell you why an answer is right or wrong.) Once you answer all of the questions you see your score. You can take as many tests as you want and over time you can see how you rank against other players, how your school ranks against other schools, and leaderboards with the top usernames from your law school and the top usernames from all law schools.
I think it is nice that BARBRI tried to take the gruelling task of studying for the bar exam and turn it into something competitive and, arguably, fun.
[UPDATE 10/7/10: BARBRI updated this app to support iPhone 4 multitasking.]
Conclusion
There is nothing enjoyable about studying for a bar exam, but if you have to do it, the BARBRI iPhone app is very useful. It makes it easy to attend classes on your own schedule, it provides you with a way to do practice questions no matter where you go, and it includes other useful features such as an electronic version of the Conviser mini-outlines and the BARBRI Challenge game. The app doesn’t take the place of the books — for example, the test questions in the app are just for the MBE so you still need the books for state-specific topics — but it is a useful supplement.
Considering how expensive BARBRI costs, it is a shame that they don’t just give you the iPhone app for free. BARBRI also has a computer program called StudySmart that is similar to the iPhone app and I am fairly certain that it does not cost extra; I didn’t use it so I cannot say much about it.
I suppose that the proof is in the pudding, and in my case, using this app helped me to get scores on the MBE and Florida-specific portions of the bar exam that were well in excess of what was necessary to pass the bar. Would I have done as well without the iPhone app? Who knows … and I never want to have to find out!
Click here for BARBRI (free):
Maryland attorney Charles Jannace passed along to me an intersting tip that I wanted to share here. If you use DropBox, Amit Agarwal explained on his Digital Inspiration blog that you can configure a DropBox folder on your computer so that whenever a file appears in that folder, the computer prints the file. Thus, on your iPhone, you can simply save a file to a DropBox folder (which a huge number of apps can do) and your computer will instantly print the file. Neat trick.
Next month, Apple will release iOS 4.2, and it will give iPhones (and iPads and iPod touch devices) a built-in ability to print. AppleInsider provides a sneak peak of this function, but note that the AppleInsider article is based on a beta version of iOS 4.2 so this feature could change before the final version is released in a few weeks.
Apple started shipping the new version of the Apple TV this week. The reveiws have been very positive, although people want more conent; right now, you can only rent TV shows from Fox, ABC, and the BBC. I mention the Apple TV here because once iOS 4.2 comes out next month with the new AirPlay feature, the door will be opened to taking content on your iPhone and sending it to a large screen TV with an Apple TV attached. As third party developers start to use AirPlay, I think that the Apple TV has the potential to be an awesome iPhone accessory, and at only $99 the price is right. If you want more information, I recommend that you read the reviews by Macworld, Engadget, PC Magazine and iLounge.
The title of this post is misleading. I don’t really do game reviews on iPhone J.D., in part because I don’t play a lot of iPhone games so I can’t fairly rate which are better than others, and in part because sites like Touch Arcade and Macworld do a better job than I could ever do. But I will make rare exceptions, such as when one of my favorite arcade games of my youth comes to the iPhone.
Angry Birds is such a great game that also deserves to be an exception. This $0.99 game involves physics (setting up the correct angle when you shoot a bird to hit the targets) and puzzles (on each level, you need to figure out the best way to aim your shots to cause different reactions to clear the level). The game is very simple to learn; my four year old son learned how to play the game in about a minute, so I promise you can figure it out too. It is a great casual game because there is no time pressure and you can play it in small increments in time, but each level is different so the game can keep you occupied for hours and hours.
As noted yesterday by Jeremy Sikora of TiPb, the game was just updated to support Game Center, to add Retina Display support, and to add 15 new levels.
Angry Birds is the best selling game on the App Store, so there is a good chance that you have at least heard about it. If you enjoy puzzles and casual games, just go ahead and spend the buck on this one. The game is great fun, and you won’t regret the purchase.
Click here for Angry Birds ($0.99):
I’ve looked at a lot of apps from a lot of different companies that provide state statutes — sometimes a subset of the statutes on a particular topic, and sometimes comprehensive apps that include all of the provisions of a state’s statutes, laws, codes, or whatever it is called in each state. I’ve found my new favorite: the apps by Tekk Innovations.
I’ve written about Tekk Innovations before, a small technology firm in Mountain View, California. One of the guys there, Kasim Te, worked as an aviation consultant and helicopter instructor which required him to constantly refer to a few titles of the Code of Federal Regulations. At the time, there were no iPhone apps containing the text of the CFR, so Te decided to make some of his own. The result was a series of CFR apps (a different app for each Title of the CFR) which I reviewed about a year ago. Tekk also makes LawStack, an app that I reviewed earlier this year which contains federal rules and statutes in a single app. Te recently sent me free copies of two of his state statute apps, one containing the entire Louisiana Revised Statutes (Titles 1 to 56) and one containing the complete Florida Statutes (Titles 1 to 48). Tekk Innovations sells similar apps (which I did not try) for the laws of California, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Washington. These apps work great and I recommend them to any attorney who wants to carry the full set of statutes for a state on an iPhone.
The app contains a standard browse feature. The main page of the app lists all of the titles. Tap a title to see a list of chapters within that title, tap a chapter to see a list of sections within the chapter, and tap the title of the section to see the text of the section.
The app works in either portrait or landscape view. When you are looking at a section, you can double-tap to remove the menu items and devote your full screen to the text of the statute.
When you are looking at a section, you can tap the e-mail button at the top right to e-mail the full text of the section.
Tap the arrows at the bottom left and right of each statute to browse through each section in order. Tap the plus sign to add a specific statute to a list of bookmarks. You can also add a chapter to your bookmarks if you want easy access to a set of statutes within the chapter. Tap the information button at the top of most of the screens to adjust settings such as font size.
The app also has a very helpful search feature. There is a search box at the top of every screen that has an information button (every screen except for a screen containing the text of a statute). If you type multiple search terms, the app will look for every section containing all of the terms. If you put a phrase in quotes, the app will find every statute containing the exact phrase. You can use “OR” to find statutes containing either one term or another term. You can choose to search either the full text of the statutes or just the headers. The app shows you a list of the matches underneath the title and chapter (so that you have the full context of where the match was found), and when you tap one you will see the text of the statute with your search terms highlighted in yellow. If there is only one match, the list appears only for a fraction of a second and then the app brings you directly to the match.
There are two other things that I like about the search function. First, if you want a search history, just tap the blue bookmark icon located at the far right of the search bar. You can tap an old search and you can quickly repeat it without having to type it in again. Second, the app has a useful ability to search a subset of statutes. By default, you search the entire set of statutes, in all titles. However, in the settings you can turn on a feature called “Contextual Search.” With that on, you can limit your search. If you are on the screen with all of the chapters listed within a title, you will only search within that title. If you are on a screen with all of the sections listed within a chapter, you will only search within that chapter. This makes it much faster to find something when you have a vague sense of where it is and don’t want to get a lot of false hits.
The two apps I tried, Louisiana and Florida, were very fast on my iPhone 4, even when doing searches with lots of hit results. I didn’t encounter any crashes or other errors, although I like the fact that the app has a built-in ability to report any error that you find in a statute. (It appears when you tap the button to e-mail a statute, as shown in the picture above.) One missing feature is that there is no way to jump directly to a statute if you know the number; you need to either browse to find it or do a search to find it. I also wish that there was a quick way to jump back to the home screen instead of having to page back several times to get there. It would be nice to see these features added in the future.
These apps are a little more expensive than similar apps sold by others. For example, last week I reviewed an app called Pocket Legal Florida which contains all of the Florida statutes for only $6.99. The similar app from Tekk Innovations costs $19.99. But as noted in my review of version 1.2 of Pocket Legal Florida, I had some problems with that app (it was slow, there is no way to e-mail the text of a statute, etc.) I’m sure that Pocket Legal will be improved, but at this point, version 1.5 of the Tekk Innovations Florida app is the better product.
Click here for Florida Statutes (48 Titles) ($19.99):
Click here for Louisiana Laws (Titles 1-56 of LA Revised Statutes) ($19.99):
And here are links to the versions for other states. I didn’t test these versions, but they appear to have the same interface as the two versions that I did test. Note that Illinois and New York are $5 more expensive than the rest. You can also click here to see all of the Tekk Innovations apps on the App Store.
California ($19.99):
Delaware ($19.99):
Illinois ($24.99):
Michigan ($19.99):
Missouri ($19.99):
New York ($24.99):
North Carolina ($19.99):
Oregon ($19.99):
Texas ($19.99):
Virginia ($19.99):
Washington ($19.99):
I received an interesting item in my mailbox today, a 16 page magazine called “AT&T Magazine: Special iPhone Edition!” I’ve scanned some of the pages below. (Click to see larger versions.) The advertisement is aimed at current iPhone owners; the inside cover says (emphasis added by me): “Read on for the 10 reasons AT&T and your iPhone are such a prefect fit.” You can see below that a similar statement is on the cover (bottom, right) of the magazine. Thus, AT&T has decided to spend money to send out a slick magazine to current AT&T iPhone customers to try to convince them that they should use an iPhone on the AT&T network. Considering that U.S. customers can only use an iPhone on the AT&T network right now, this entire expensive campaign seems about as necessary as telling people that they should only buy an iPhone that is made by Apple — unless, of course, AT&T thinks that the iPhone is about to come to Verizon. People often ask me whether the iPhone will soon be available on Verizon, and the existance of this magazine in my mailbox tells me that AT&T thinks it might happen soon.
In case you did not (yet) get one of these yourself, here is a summary of the 10 reasons mentioned in the advertisement.
1. Our innovative network. AT&T stresses that it has the “best combination of mobile broadband performance and available services” including “an expansive Wi-Fi network and the ability to let you simultaneously talk and surf the web.”
2. Fastest network. AT&T has already upgraded cell sites and plans to spend another $18 to $19 billion.
3. Expansive network. 360 U.S. cities, 230 million people, 75% of Americans.
4. Talk & surf. Didn’t they just mention this one in #1? Of course, I can undestand why they mentioned it twice if they are worried about Verizon. One of the largest advantages of AT&T’s GSM network is that voice and data transmissions can take place at the same time. Verizon’s CDMA network can only handle one or the other at a time.
5. The Wi-Fi advantage. Didn’t they just mention this one also in #1? This repeats that AT&T has a lot of Wi-Fi Hot Spots around the country that you can use for free with an iPhone.
6. iPhone 4. AT&T touts the advantages of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4. If the point of this is to respond to a potential iPhone on Verizon, I’m not sure how this is relevant.
7. Global coverage. “With more phones that work in more places, it’s no surpise that AT&T received the award for Best Mobile Phone Coverage in the World from Business Traveler magazine.” This is another advantage of using GSM (which is popular throughout the world) versus CDMA (which is rare outside of the U.S.). So once again, this is really just a comparison to Verizon.
8. Family-friendly services. Here, AT&T touts three of its apps and four services. (1) AT&T Navigator, a GPS app for when “you’re lost on the way to a soccer game across town”; (2) AT&T FamilyMap, an app that works in conjunction with the $9.99/month AT&T service that lets you locate two family members with an AT&T phone (or $14.99/month for up to five family members) so you can “stay connected to your newly independent teens”; (3) MyWireless Mobile to manage your wireless account, (4) the ability to add lines to your plan for when “your daughter is ready for her first cell phone”; (5) rollover minutes; (6) unlimited text messages for $30/month; and (7) Smart Limits for Wireless which lets you set limtis on your kids’ web browsing and purchasing on their smartphone.
9. Forward thinking. “With 100 years of innovations, eight Nobel prizes and more than 7,000 pending and issued patents, you know you can count on AT&T to stay on the cutting edge.”
10. Sustainable solutions. Touts some of the envonmental initiatives of AT&T such as recycling and power saving.
I get the feeling that AT&T came up with the number “ten” first and then figured out later how to match up its services with that number, even at the risk of repeating itself, although to be fair many of the listed features are true advantages of AT&T over Verizon. Again, however, what I really got from this advertisement is the feeling that AT&T believes that we are close to a day when Apple offers a Verizon iPhone. The fact that I received this advertisement today doesn’t necessary mean that a Verizon iPhone will happen in the next month, next year, or even next decade. But I can’t imagine why AT&T would send this out unless the possibility was real and on the short-term horizon.
If I am listening to something in my car, it is virtually always music or podcasts on my iPhone. My current automobile solution works pretty well, but I would love to see better iPhone-car integration. Apparently, Apple feels the same way because one of the features of iOS 4 is a technology called iPod out. This is an interface for controlling the iPod app on the iPhone that is generated by the iPhone itself. You connect your iPhone to your car and you see a menu on your car’s display that looks much like a traditional iPhone interface, including album art. TUAW discussed this feature this past April.
One of the nice things about iPod out is that it is controlled by the iPhone itself. Thus, if Apple updates the iOS to support some new iPod feature, that new feature can show up your car’s display without you needing to update the car’s navigation system. Plus, the interface has the advantage of being familiar to anyone who knows how to use an iPhone.
In July of this year, BMW announced that it would support iPod out on some of its cars. According to a report from Kyle Thibuat of CrunchGear, BMW recently showed off the feature at the Paris Motor Show. I hope that we see more car manufacturers taking advantage of this very soon.
Here is a video that BMW posted this past July in which it talks about the technology:
If you are one of the hundreds of people in town for the 2010 Federal Bar Association convention, welcome to New Orleans! Please join me and Ernie Svenson at 10:50 this morning for our session “Social Media, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs: I am a Lawyer—Why Do I Care?” And afterwards, please introduce yourself. I’d love to hear about how you are using your iPhone in the practice of law. And now, the iPhone news items of interest from this past week:
