Bing is the search engine provided by Microsoft, that company's answer to Google and Yahoo.  Microsoft has updated the website to optomize it for the iPhone, and so far it looks like the company did a nice job.

Go to www.bing.com on your iPhone and you will be redirected to m.bing.com and given a very clean and simple home screen on which you can type your search:

 

You can tell Bing your location (by address, zip code, etc.) and store multiple different locations as defaults, such as work and home.  With this information provided, Bing will run a local search but also provide you with other tabs to easily run your search on the web, videos, images or news.

    

    

When you search the web and click on a link, you will of course see the website, but Bing also offers the option of optimizing the website for the iPhone screen and automatically focusing on the part of the page that you are most likely to want to view.  Bing skews some of the images to make them fit on the screen and the result isn't always pretty, but if you are just interested in reading text, this gets the job done.  You can also click on the page map icon to see a version of the website divided into sections, and you can tap on a section to change the focus of the optimized view of the website.

    

Most of the time, I would rather just view a website normally in Safari and then zoom in on the part that I want.  But for some troublesome websites that don't format well on the iPhone screen, the option to optimize web pages for the phone might be useful.

Google is a great search engine that works great on the iPhone and is built-in to Safari, and I'm sure that I will still use Google most of the time.  But it is nice to see Microsoft taking the time to format Bing for smartphones such as the iPhone.  They did a good job, and I can see myself using Bing on the iPhone from time to time.

As we get closer to the end of the year, you are probably concentrating on your CLE hours for 2009, not 2010, but I recommend that you mark your calendar now for next year’s ABA TECHSHOW which will be held March 25 through 27, 2010, in Chicago.  This is the premier conference for lawyers interested in technology, sponsored every year by the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA.  The panels for 2010 are still being finalized, but I understand that there will be tracks (with multiple sessions each) focused on areas including trial skills, mobility, smart phones, e-discovery, solo and small firms, large firms and corporate counsel, Macintosh, marketing and social networking, finance, and advanced IT.  I’m especially thrilled to announce that I will be co-presenting two sessions geared to attorneys using iPhones, a session with Reid Trautz on iPhone apps on Thursday, March 25th that I suspect we will call “60 Apps in 60 Minutes,” and a session with Ben Stevens on using an iPhone in your law practice on Saturday morning, March 27th. 

I encourage all of you to think very seriously about going.  I had never attended TECHSHOW or any other major legal technology conference before I attended the 2008 TECHSHOW, where I spoke on disaster preparation and recovery (a topic near and dear to all of us attorneys in New Orleans) and also on using a Mac at home when your law firm uses PCs.  I also took the time to attend numerous other sessions in 2008, and I learned so much.  TECHSHOW is set up so that there are multiple sessions going on at one time, so for each block of time during the day you can choose the topic that most interests you—and with so many compelling sessions, it is often tough to choose, as you can see here.  TECHSHOW also features the famous “60 Sites in 60 Minutes” session that is always informative and entertaining.  (Click here for some of the previous sites featured in that presentation.)

Besides the content, the other thing that I loved about TECHSHOW was that I met so many great people who I still keep in touch with, including a number of well-known legal bloggers.  (I wasn’t blogging myself back in March of 2008; iPhone J.D. started in November of 2008.) 

I might not have ever attended in the first place had I not been asked to speak, and I had no idea what I had been missing over the years.  So even if you have never attended TECHSHOW or a similar legal technology conference, do yourself a favor and make plans to attend next year.  Any lawyer who has enough interest in technology to read iPhone J.D. will love this conference because of the amazing content and the numerous fun opportunities to meet new people.  And, because there will be two full sessions on the iPhone, plus I’m sure we will plan a dinner and other opportunities to socialize at TECHSHOW with other iPhone users, it will especially fun for all of us who use an iPhone.

I’ll post more details on TECHSHOW as we get closer, but in the meantime I encourage you to keep up with the TECHSHOW Blog, not just because information about the conference will be posted there, but also because conference speakers contribute content so there will be a lot of substantive information in that blog as we get closer to next March.  Indeed, this year some of the best content from previous TECHSHOWs that is still relevant today will be posted to that blog.  For those of you who know Quebec attorney Dominic Jaar, who is currently the CEO of Ledjit and who used to be a commercial litigator at Bell Canada’s legal department, Dominic is in charge of the blog this year and I know he will do a great job.  If you use an RSS reader, add it to your subscriptions.  Additionally, you can follow ABA TECHSHOW on Twitter.

I had to miss the 2009 TECHSHOW because of a schedule conflict, but I am really looking forward to the 2010 conference, especially now that I know that there will be two iPhone sessions.  I hope that all of the attorneys who read iPhone J.D. make plans to join me there.

Does anyone else find it hard to believe that October is basically over?  This year has certainly gone by fast.  But back to the topic at hand, it’s Friday, so here is some of the interesting iPhone-related news from this past week.

• Yesterday I talked about Google potentially bringing improvements to the Maps app on the iPhone.  Yesterday was also the day that Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times wrote an excellent comparison of the current options for turn-by-turn GPS navigation on the iPhone.  His favorite was actually one of the cheapest:  MotionX-GPS Drive, which costs only $2.99 and includes a month of Live Voice Guidance.  After the first month, the voice service costs another $2.99 a month, but apparently you can cancel at any time.  That can add up over a year, but is far less than the $99 you would pay for the TomTom app.  Ihnatko’s review has inspired me to check out MotionX-GPS, and I’ll let you know what I think.  If you want to try it out too, click here to get MotionX-GPS Drive ($2.99): 

  

• Traveling to a foreign country?  There are lots of apps that allow you to type something in one language and have it translated into another language, but if you don’t want to type, Lex Friedman of Macworld reviews a $2 app called Bableshot.  Take a picture of some text with your iPhone and the app will scan the picture to find all of the text, and then translate that text into English.  I haven’t tried it yet, but this sounds very useful.
• If you prefer to talk instead of taking a picture, your iPhone can still translate for you.  Friedman reviews another app for Macworld called Jibbigo.  With this $25 app, just say something in English to your iPhone, and it translates it into Spanish and then says it over the iPhone speaker.  It’s like having a translator inside of your iPhone.
• Everyone can recall Apple’s memorable “There’s an app for that” and “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ads, and it probably comes as no surprise that Apple spent around $500 million on advertising in 2009.  But Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes that it is surprising that Apple spent less than other companies like Microsoft and Dell, even though their ads are less memorable.
• Speaking of ads, Advertising Age writes that when Volkswagen launched one of its cars, the GTI, in 2006 it spent $60 million on television ads.  But to launch the 2010 model, it is spending just $500,000 and putting all of that money into one thing:  an iPhone app.  Volkswagen teamed up with the makers of the $6.99 Real Racing app, an iPhone game that has received good reviews, and produced an app called Real Racing GTI that anyone can download for free.  You get to race around a track in a virtual version of the GTI.  It will be interesting to see if this advertising strategy works for Volkswagen.  The game itself has very nice graphics and is worth checking out since it is free, although given the number of times I have crashed in this game I don’t think I could afford the insurance premiums were I to get a GTI and race it around town at top speed.  Click here to get Real Racing GTI (free): 

  

• Good news:  you can get an iPhone for only $20.  Bad news:  it’s just a movie prop.  MobileCrunch has all the details.
• I don’t take taxis very often, but if you do, you’ll want to check out Terry White’s review of an app called Taxi Magic that lets you call a taxi and even have it charged to your credit card.  Thanks to Ernie Svenson for the link.
• Mashable and AppAdvice report that LawFirms.com came up with an “ad” for a fake iPhone app called iCoyote that purported to help you smuggle illegal aliens across the border but was actually an advertisement for immigration lawyers.  The ad didn’t stay up long as public backlash forced its removal, replaced by this page, but if you click on the Mashble and AppAdvice links you can see the original ad.
• And finally, Jerry Brito’s wife must really love him to have agreed to this iPhone wedding cake.  Click here for a slideshow with several pictures on Brito’s website, and here are a few samples.  (via AppAdvice.)

 

Yesterday, Google showed off the new Google Maps application for phones running the Android 2.0 operating system (such as the new Droid phones that Verizon is starting to advertise), and it is mighty impressive.  It includes free, built-in navigation services, so you can get turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps without having to buy a GPS unit such as the ones sold by Garmin, TomTom, etc.  The application can be controlled by your voice and even incorporates Google’s satellite view and street view.  This Google video describes seven unique features of the Google maps application on Android:

1. Use plain English terms to search instead of an address, so you can simply make your destination a business name or description.
2. Search by voice.  This looks similar to what you can already do on the iPhone with the Google app that allows you to search Google by saying your search terms.
   
3. Live traffic data so you can see where the roads will be slower and even choose an alternate route to avoid traffic.
   
4. Search along route, to find nearby gas stations, restaurants, etc.
   
5. Satellite view.
6. Street view.  Street level photographs show you exactly what your
   
   next turn will look like and the actual street view of your destination.
7. A special car dock mode when the phone is in a car dock.
   

Engadget also has this nice video from a demonstration that the site was given yesterday.  This Macworld report has additional information. 

There appear to be a few downsides.  For example, you need a network connection to get the maps, so if you are on the open road where there is no cell signal (and no Wi-Fi) you are out of luck.  But considering how well the service appears to work when you do have a network connection, and considering the low price of free, it is no surprise that, as reported by the New York Times:  “Shares of both TomTom and Garmin plummeted Wednesday after Google’s announcement.”

Well that’s great for all of our Android 2.o-using brethren, but what about us iPhone users?   Vic Gundotra, the Vice-President of Engineering at Google who is responsible for mobile phone applications, may have said that the technology is coming to the iPhone, it just depends on which report you read.  CNet reporter Tom Krazit says definitively that “Google is working with Apple on bringing it to the iPhone,” and the hold up is simply that Google needs to work closely with Apple because Maps is a built-in iPhone application.  Similarly, Quentin Hardy writes for Forbes that Google is “‘eagerly working’ with Apple to provide the app for the popular iPhone.”

A report from Reuters, however, gives a less certain spin on what Gundotra said:

Google Engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra said the
company hoped to eventually make versions of the navigation
product for non-Android smartphones, but noted that the
software has “stringent” hardware requirements.

He would not comment on whether Apple’s iPhone, which
offers Google mapping software as part of its standard menu of
built-in applications, would offer the new navigation features.
He said, in response to a question, that the latest version of
the iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, has the horsepower to support the
navigation product.

Hopefully Google is just honoring Apple’s confidentiality requirements and is indeed saying, just without really saying, that Google is working with Apple to bring this to the iPhone.

Apple may have even more in store for the Maps app.  As I reported a few weeks ago, it was recently discovered that Apple purchased a company called Placebase this past July which was a competitor to Google Maps.  Placebase specialized in adding layers with helpful information to maps, and if Apple is bringing some of those same ideas to the iPhone, then perhaps we’ll soon see have a version of Maps that is even more impressive than what Google is showing off for Android.

I try to stay away from rumors on iPhone J.D., but because this technology is so exciting and because Gundotra’s comment provides some degree of confirmation (depending upon which story you read) I thought that this story was worthy of mention here.  Whether the improvements come from Google or Placebase or both, I am very excited to see the next version of the Maps app on the iPhone.

Just yesterday, I got the call that I have gotten countless times before.  This time it was a law partner of mine, other times it has been a friend or a relative, but the question is always along these lines:  “Jeff, I just got an iPhone.  What should I do next?”  Thanks to the folks at No Starch Press who sent me a review copy of one of their new books, I now have a great answer:  read the book My New iPhone by Wallace Wang.

I wasn’t familiar with Wallace Wang before I read this book.  Not only does he write computer books, but he is also a stand up comedian who has performed in Las Vegas and appeared on A&E’s Evening at the Improv.  His comedy doesn’t carry over into this book, however; the writing style is clear and helpful, without, for example, the zaniness that you find in books written by Andy Ihnatko.

The approach to this book is really quite brilliant.  The book is organized almost like a cookbook, but instead of recipes, in here you find 52 projects organized in to 10 parts.  Each project is set up the same way:  an introduction, the project goal, a list of what you will be using such as a list of apps or sometimes a program on the computer, step-by-step instructions with tons of pictures from the iPhone, and then finally some additional ideas for taking the skills learned to the next level and a sidebar that shows a related project, third party app or idea.  Much like a cookbook, you can really read the book in any order that you want, so you can start with the projects that interest you the most and then make your way through the book.  By the time you are finished, you will go from being an iPhone novice to an iPhone power user.

Note that while the book is up to date as of iPhone Software 3.0, it doesn’t discuss the unique features of the iPhone 3GS.  That doesn’t detract much from the projects, but just keep in mind that this book doesn’t include advice for taking videos or using the compass.

I won’t list all 52 projects, but here are some examples:

#5 Searching Your iPhone

#18 Creating Ringtones

#21 Customizing Your iPod Settings

#25 Listening to Audiobooks and Podcasts

#29 Personalizing the Safari Browser

#37 Storing Contact Information

#44 Watching the Stock Market

#47 Making an iPhone Kid Friendly

#50 Traveling with Your iPhone

If you want to get a feel for a sample project, click here to go to the publisher’s website (No Starch Press) where you can download a free copy of Project #22 Turning Your iPhone into a Radio.  That will give you a good sense of what the book as a whole is like.

In the past, I have always recommended that beginning iPhone users looking for a book to read check out David Pogue’s iPhone:  The Missing Manual book.  As great as Pogue’s book is, Wang’s book offers a nice alternative.  If you want a soup-to-nuts manual, you’ll love the Pogue book, but if you want to just tackle one project at a time, going in your own order and at your own pace like you would do with a cookbook, you’ll love Wang’s book.

The retail price of the book is $29.95, but if you click here you can get it on Amazon for only $19.77, and a tiny percentage of each sale helps to defray the cost of running iPhone J.D.  If you or someone you know is new to the iPhone, this book is a great resource.

Are you getting ready for Halloween and trying to decide what your costume will be this year?  Reko Rivera and John Savio of Tampa, Florida are ready with their costumes, and they are each dressing up as an iPhone 3GS, or as they call it, GuyPhones.  Each costume consists of a 42″ flat screen television, three batteries including a car battery that has to be held between their legs, a jailbroken iPhone with a live output of an iPhone screen to the television, and a lot of fancy artwork on a plastic shell to create the front and back of the iPhone.  The result is a costume that weighs 85 pounds but is essentially a working iPhone 3GS that can run for 4.5 hours before needing to be recharged.  The costumes cost around $2,000, but the pair hopes to make that money back by participating in some costume contests.

Here are some of the pictures that Savio posted to a MacRumors forum (click on the post to see even more pictures) and a video that the pair posted to YouTube.  Thanks to TUAW for the post that brought this to my attention.

 

    

    

For over 100 years, the pharmaceutical company Merck has published The Merck Manuals, a series of books providing information on the diagnosis and treatment of disease.  There are editions for both medical professionals and consumers.  Doctors often pay $65 to purchase the hard cover book, now in its 18th Edition.   A version of this book geared at consumers sells for $40.  Additionally, Merck provides a free online version of many of its books.  You can see all of the books and links to the online versions here.

Two of the more popular texts are the (professional) Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy and the (consumer) Merck Manual—Home Edition.  While you can access free versions of these texts online, Merck is now selling versions for the iPhone developed by Agile Partners that are formatted for the iPhone screen and don’t require an Internet connection.  The professional version is $29.99 and the home version is $9.99.  Agile Partners gave me free copies of both to evaluate, and they are very nice apps.

In the professional version, you can browse through entries by section, explore an index of terms, or find an entry by browsing a list of symptoms.  You can also do a full text search for a word, view a history of the entries you recently viewed, view a list of entries that you have marked as your favorites or even jump to a random entry.

Each entry has a wealth of information about a disease or condition.  The entries are as long as a substantive Wikipedia entry, but unlike Wikipedia where anyone can add information, the Merck Manual entries are written by over 300 medical experts so the information is trustworthy.  There are three buttons at the bottom of each entry, one which brings you back to the home, one which brings up options and star which adds an entry to your list of Favorites.  There are currently two options.  You can change the font size to large, or you can e-mail an entry.  When you e-mail, the app doesn’t send the text, but instead sends a link to the same entry in free online version of the Merck Manual.

The home version of the Merck Manual is written for consumers.  There is less content, and it is geared towards what you would need to know in the home.  For example, instead of a section called “Find by Symptom,” the similar section in the home version is called “Emergencies & Injuries.”

The Emergencies & Injuries section contains a list of common ailments:

There are a few areas in both apps where I could see improvement.  I wish you could tap at the top of the screen to scroll the top of an entry, as you can in most other iPhone apps, because many of the entries are quite long.  There are also a few pages that are not formatted for the iPhone screen and which require scrolling left and right to read them.  I understand why it was done this way for large tables, but there are a few other pages that could have been better formatted.  But these are just minor nits; for the most part that apps work very well.

Perhaps the largest downside to these apps is the price, considering that you can get the online versions with essentially the same content for free.  The apps are better formatted for the iPhone screen and a lot easier to use, but the web pages do a decent job of displaying on the iPhone, assuming that you have a network connection.

I suspect that many lawyers have, like me, found the need to look up medical terms, such as during a break in a deposition.  And many of us will at some point find ourselves looking for the remedy for a bee sting, snake bite, etc.  You can always just fire up Safari and do a Google search on your iPhone and, with enough digging, you’ll probably find the information that you need.  But the Merck Manual apps are excellent sources of medical information and it is very useful to have all of this information at your fingertips on the iPhone for quick and easy access.

Click here for The Merck Manual – Professional Edition ($29.99): 

Click here for The Merck Manual – Home Edition ($9.99): 

The day after Apple’s 2009 fiscal fourth quarter conference call, Apple announced a number of updated products including new iMacs and Macbooks.  For the most part, those product announcements had nothing to do with the iPhone, but those two days of Apple announcements did result in some follow up news that I wanted to mention today.

• First, one of the new products announced by Apple this week does have some connection to the iPhone.  Apple sells the Airport Extreme base station, a Wi-Fi router that you attach to your broadband cable or
  
  DSL modem to create a wireless network throughout your home or office.  I last discussed
  
  the Airport Extreme this past March, and this week Apple improved the
  
  Airport Extreme to provide better performance and range.  AppleInsider
  
  provides more details on the update.  I use an older version of the Airport Extreme to provide Wi-Fi in my house that I use with my iPhone.
• And speaking of Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter conference call, one issue that I did
  
  not discuss in my post earlier this week was the talk on the call about
  
  the way that Apple handles accounting for iPhone revenue and how that
  
  may change in the future.  I’m glad that I didn’t try to tackle this
  
  complicated subject because Daniel Eran Dilger does a better job than I could have done
  
  explaining all of this in this post on his RouglyDrafted Magazine website.
• Apple wasn’t the only one to announce quarterly results this week.  Yesterday, AT&T provided its quarterly report and, according to Electronista,
  
  revealed that it activated 3.2 million iPhones during that same
  
  quarter, a new record for AT&T.  We know from Apple’s announcement that it sold 7.4 million iPhones this past quarter, so that tells us that Apple
  
  sells more iPhones outside of the U.S. (4.2 million) than in the U.S.
  
  (3.2 million).  Or to look at these numbers another way, as Macworld’s Dan Moren did,
  
  AT&T is “the largest single carrier of iPhones in the world.”  It
  
  was also announced during the AT&T call that 40% of AT&T’s
  
  iPhone activations were for customers new to
  
  AT&T, so the iPhone remains a powerful incentive for people to
  
  switch to AT&T.
• Attorney Jonathan Frieden describes a dozen useful iPhone apps for lawyers on his blog E-Commerce Law.
• Law firm PR specialist Rich Klein suggests 10 iPhone apps that lawyers might like.
• If you don’t already receive the useful TechnoLawyer newsletters, you should sign up today.  I particularly like the Monday BlawgWorld
  
  newsletter which identifies the most interesting blawg posts from
  
  the last week, especially now that the newsletter features a “Legal
  
  Technology on the Go…” section that always has links to useful
  
  iPhone-related posts, such as the last two items that I just described.  Adriana Linares (who runs the great site I Heart Tech) and Liz Kurtz do a fabulous job editing the BlawgWorld newsletter every week.
• 
  
  There are several options for using your iPhone to provide turn-by-turn
  
  GPS directions.  TomTom sells a $99 iPhone app that provides this
  
  service, and you can now supplement that app with the $120 TomTom Car Kit. 
  
  The kit gives you a place to mount your iPhone in your car, charges the
  
  iPhone, improves the GPS signal (by using its own internal GPS) and
  
  adds other enhancements.  Click here for the TomTom app ($99.00): 

  

• TechCrunch selects some interesting slides
  
  from a presentation by Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker
  
  showing that (1) Internet adoption on the iPhone has been faster than
  
  any other device and (2) the iPhone (and iPod touch) is the
  
  fastest-growing consumer electronics product of all time.
• MobileCrunch reports
  
  that the U.S. Postal Service now has a mobile version of its website
  
  that is tailored for the iPhone.  The USPS website has always been a
  
  useful way to find zip codes and track packages, and now it works even
  
  better on the iPhone.  To access it, go to m.usps.com.
• And finally, according to an article in Advertising Age, magazine publisher Condé Nast plans to start selling iPhone apps for $2.99, each of which contains a full issue of magazine such as GQ.  The articles notes:  “Users will be able to see every page as it appears in print as well as
  
  renderings of all the content tailored for display on the small screen.
  
  They will also be able to watch related videos, hear audio and visit
  
  advertisers’ sites without leaving the app.”  The goal is for the app to become available for sale the same day that each new issue hits the newsstands.  I haven’t seen a full list of which magazines will be included, but in addition to GQ, Condé Nast’s portfolio includes Vogue, Details, Architectural Digest, Golf Digest, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Wired and the New Yorker among many others.  It will be interesting to see how these magazines translate to the iPhone’s small screen and how eager customers are to read magazines this way.  Getting a digital copy is a way to save some trees, but reading a magazine on an iPhone will be a very different experience.  Whether it works out or not, I’d like to thank Condé Nast for giving me an excuse to publish a picture of the beautiful and talented January Jones from the cover of the current issue of GQ.  I love the character she plays on Mad Men, and based on her interview in GQ, she sounds like quite a character in real life.

Matt Miller is a new Louisiana attorney who graduated from Tulane Law School this past May and just found out earlier this month that he passed the Louisiana Bar.  (Congrats, Matt!)  Matt has a degree in computer science from Duke and worked as a software engineer before law school, so he decided that as a “break” from his law studies he would write some iPhone apps.  Seeing that nobody else was selling Louisiana law for the iPhone, Matt took it upon himself to create apps containing the Louisiana Civil Code, the Code of Civil Procedure and the Code of Evidence.  All three apps are now available in the App Store.  Matt gave me some free copies for review purposes on the day that he found out that he passed the bar (I wonder if he would have charged me for them if he had failed?) and I’ve been checking them out for the last few weeks.  They work great and if you practice law in Louisiana, you’ll find them to be valuable additions to your iPhone.

All three apps look and work the same way, so for this review I’ll just focus on the Louisiana Civil Code app.  Upon starting the app, you see the different Books of the Civil Code.  Tap on a Book to see the Titles, then tap a Title to see the Articles.  While this is a nice way to see the different articles in context, you can also just browse a list of articles.  Tap the “All Articles” button at the bottom and you will see a full list of articles, with an index on the side that allows you to jump through the long list.

 

Tap on an article to view the text.  There are PREV and NEXT buttons at the top that allow you to browse through the articles.  When you come across an article that you will want to see again in the future, there is a button at the top right that says “Bookmark.”  Just tap it to add the article to your list of bookmarks.  (If an article is already bookmarked, then the bookmark button at the top right will be hidden.)

You can also search the full text of the Civil Code.  Just tap the search button at the bottom and start to type your term.  As you are typing, articles that contain the term instantly appear.  Tap on a search result to see the full text, and when looking at an article you can tap the button at the top left to return to your list of search results.  The search feature is very simple; no “AND” or “OR” searches, just terms.  Also, the search results do not highlight your search term, so you’ll have to find it yourself in the article.

 

Unlike some other legal reference apps, there is no option in these apps to e-mail the text of an article.  However, you can use the standard copy and paste functions to select text and copy it, and Matt is thinking about adding an e-mail button in the future.  Other features that Matt may add in the future include the ability to adjust the text size, the ability to use gestures to go to the next or previous articles, and perhaps also a “cross reference” of articles.

Matt (pictured at the right) is now studying for the Patent Bar, after which he will become an associate in the IP group of Carver Darden.  I know that one of Matt’s passions (besides his daughter) is playing with his dogs—for almost five years he has run the website Urban Pug—but I hope that he finds the time to add new features to these apps and bring us more great iPhone apps.

Click here to get La. Civil Code ($6.99): 

Click here to get La. Code of Civil Procedure ($9.99): 

Click here to get La. Code of Evidence ($4.99): 

There are a few different companies selling iPhone apps containing the text of statutes, rules, etc., and the usual practice is to sell a different app for each set of laws.  For example, four different iPhone developers are currently selling apps containing the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  But Nicholas Zeltzer has a different approach: a single iPhone app that contains all of the legal reference texts in one place, with the ability to purchase additional texts from within the app.  Zeltzer, who is currently working as a judicial law clerk in Santa Clara, California, calls his app LawBox.

Upon launching the app, you see a list of legal reference texts.  The app comes with the U.S. Constitution, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence.  And you get all of this for free, which makes this the least expensive way to get an iPhone app containing that law.  (More on the free nature of the app is below.)

Tap on a source to see the law.  For example, if you tap on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, you get a list of Articles.  Tap on an Article and you get a list of the rules.  Tap on a rule to see the text of the rule.  You can select a portion of the text to copy it, or you can tap the button at the top right to e-mail the full text of the rule (or a portion of the rule if you select part of the text and copy it before tapping the e-mail button).

After you tap on a source, you can also tap the search button at the top right of the screen.  The search feature is different other legal reference text apps because you can tap a button below the search field to search either the content, the number or the title.  Search results appear quickly, as you are typing, with a list of excerpts showing the search term in all caps.  When you view a rule that you found through a search, the search terms are highlighted in the rule.

 

You can only search for one term at a time (either a word or a phrase) so the app doesn’t let you find rules that contain two different words.  The app doesn’t include an option to jump to an other specific rule, but you can use search and tap the number restriction to search for a specific rule by its number, which is almost the same thing.

The app also contains a store from which you can purchase additional legal texts from right within the app.  Right now, the app only offers the Arizona Landlord Tenant Act for $0.99, but Zeltzer plans to add more.

 

There is currently no way to bookmark a frequently used rule, but Zeltzer says that he plans to add this in the future.  He also hopes to add notes and rule comments.

If that was all the LawBox did, it would be an impressive app.  But additionally, the app lets you browse legal news.  Tap the news button at the bottom of the screen and you will see news items from the RSS feeds of numerous legal blogs and other sources of news.  You have to first select those sources by tapping the Index button at the bottom right of the screen.  News items are displayed as a title and a few lines of text.  Tap on the item to read the full story.  Read items are collapsed so that you only see the title in grey.

You can only select from the legal news sources listed in the app, but many dozens of sources are listed.  In the future, Zeltzer plans to allow you to add your own feeds in the app and also plans to have a website where users can contribute worthy feeds to a common pool.

Although LawBox is still in its infancy, it is already a great app, and will only get better as Zeltzer continues to improve the app and add more content that can be purchased.  I like the idea of having a single app containing all of the law that I need, although of course Zeltzer will need to add many other sources of law to the app’s built-in store to satisfy everyone.  But even now, with the app being free, there is no cheaper way to get the text of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the Federal Rules of Evidence on your iPhone, let alone both.

Before last week, the app actually cost $0.99 because that was the least that an iPhone developer could charge for an app that included in-app purchases.  But as I wrote this past Friday, Apple just changed that policy so that now free apps can include in-app purchases.  Ziltzer tells me that he changed the price of LawBox to free within minutes of Apple changing its policy.  As Zeltzer wrote in a comment on iPhone J.D. this past Friday:

Apple’s
new policy was a cause for celebration over here at TheLawBox. When we
developed our software, we assumed we’d be able to give it away. But
because our app included downloadable content, we were forced to list
it at 0.99. I can’t tell you how excited we were to be able to cut the
price tag off our software entirely.

Zelter hopes that people will download the app for free and then, as people get used to using the app, they will want to pay to download additional collections of statutes and rules.  It is an intriguing business model and I hope it works well.  Even if this was a paid app I would recommend it, but now that it is free, you really have no reason not to get LawBox to check it out.

Click here to get LawBox (free):