Most of the Apple-related news this week consisted of speculation about next week’s big announcement, but there were a few other stories, including one about an iPhone saving a person’s life. MSNBC and iPhone Savior tell the story of Dan Wooley, who was in Haiti earlier this month working for a mission organization and making a film about Haitian poverty. When the earthquake hit on January 12, he was in hotel and soon found himself trapped under tons of wreckage in the hotel lobby. Thanks in part to the American Heart Association’s Pocket First Aid & CPR iPhone app, he was able to stay alive until help arrived. The MSNBC article explains: “[T]hanks to the iPhone first-aid app he’d downloaded, he knew how to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound. The app also warned him not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cell phone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes.” 65 hours after the earthquake, a French rescue team arrived and Wooley was returned to safety. Wow. I feel like we all need to download some First Aid apps now. Click here for the American Heart Association’s Pocket First Aid & CPR ($3.99): . Also, I’ve previously reviewed the Merck Manual, and Art of the iPhone lists some other first aid app selections. Other, less dramatic, iPhone stories of the past week:
According to a report by Zusha Elinson of The Recorder on Law.com, Apple’s top corporate lawyer, Charles Charnas, left the company this month. Apple’s current General Counsel is Bruce Sewell, who I wrote about back in September of 2009. Charnas was hired by Sewell’s predecessor, Daniel Cooperman, back in April of 2008 and Charnas oversaw several acquisitions by Apple such as its purchase of streaming music site Lala in late 2009. Before Charnas, the top corporate law position at Apple had been vacant for several years, so we’ll see if and when Sewell hires a replacement.
California attorney Rachel Lamkin posts on her blog TheGeekTrifecta a video of an iPhone app called iTrust that you can use to find out if your spouse is snooping on your iPhone behind your back. Funny idea for an app, and I hope that you never, never, ever need to use it.
Some people (especially those who don’t own an iPhone) complain that the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is slow to type on. But in this test by Phil Gyford, the iPhone was only slightly slower than a full size keyboard and faster than other mobile devices. Interesting. (Link via Daring Fireball)
Quickoffice is, along with Dataviz’s Documents to Go, one of the two best document viewer and editors on the iPhone. The list price of Quickoffice is $19.99 but it has been “on sale” for $9.99 for as long as I can remember. It is currently even more on sale, only $7.99 for a limited time. I’ve discussed Quickoffice many times here, so if you click on the iPhone J.D. Index on the right you will see links to a lot of posts on the app. Click here for Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite ($7.99 for a limited time):
Thinking about getting a Bluetooth headset for your iPhone? Art of the iPhone has a list of their top 10. Their favorite is the Aliph Jawbone Prime, which I also really liked when I reviewed it a few months ago. Keep in mind, though, that Aliph recently came out with the new Jawbone ICON, and the initial reviews that I have seen have been excellent. For example, here is a glowing review from Jim Dalrymple.
If your office uses Lotus Notes, eWeek reports that IBM recently announced iPhone apps that work with Notes.
New York attorney Nicole Black lists some good iPhone apps for lawyers on her blog Sui Generis.
Ars Technica reports that, according to a report from market research firm Gartner, Apple was responsible for 99.4% of all mobile phone app sales in 2009. Gulp!
And finally, the often amusing fan of all-things-Apple iJustine released an iPhone-themed video that spoofs the song Tik Tok by Ke$ha. (And no, I had no idea who Ke$ha was before I saw the iJustine spoof.)
President Obama is well known to be a Blackberry user, but yesterday his administration released the official The White House app and you will only find it in the iTunes App Store. The app essentially takes the content from the (very nice) official white house website and formats it for the iPhone.
The app includes content from the somewhat informal White House Blog, official statements from the Newsroom such as transcripts of the President’s speeches and archived photos and videos.
My initial reaction to an iPhone app that repackages the content from a website is usually lukewarm. For any news or blog format website that has an RSS feed, I find it far more efficient to use a single news reader app to collect all of the RSS feeds in one place. (I currently use NetNewsWire, which works with Google Reader.) But the White House website has a ton of content and it is nice to have it all nicely organized in a single app, especially since the website is so packed that it doesn’t display as well on the iPhone as some other sites do. Plus, the video on the website requires Adobe Flash and thus does not play on the iPhone, whereas the video in the iPhone app plays quite well.
The iPhone app also includes an interesting Live button that will let you stream selected events as they happen. Right now there are two events scheduled, a town hall address tomorrow afternoon and the State of the Union speech on January 27, 2010.
Politicians are always looking for ways to reach out to their constituents, and this is clearly a good thing. We ought to have easy opportunities to keep in touch with our elected officials. Many iPhone owners will download this app just because it is free and we always love to try out the latest apps, but I hope that a lot of people keep this one on their iPhone and fire it up from time to time as another way to check the pulse of what is going on in Washington. Informed readers will also want to get their news from trusted journalists, but this is a nice supplement. Indeed, I’ve been very impressed with this administration’s use of technology to keep in touch with Americans, from the nice website to an active Twitter feed to the gorgeous and fascinating photographs displayed on the White House photostream on Flickr (which, by the way, I encourage you to check out immediately if you haven’t seen it before; I’m not sure if these were all taken by the official White House photographer Pete Souza, who also took pictures for President Reagan, but they are amazing pictures).
Future lawyers preparing for the California bar frequently spend thousands of dollars to take a preparation course such as BarBri. Now there is an iPhone alternative called BarMax CA. The BarMax app costs less than BarBri, but at $999.99, it is now the most expensive app in the App Store. MG Siegler writes an extensive and interesting article on the app in TechCrunch. It seems like a great idea for an app for any iPhone-using lawyer-to-be in The Golden State.
The app was the brainchild of Mike Ghaffary, a 2006 Harvard Law/MBA graduate who was just admitted to the California bar himself in December of 2009. Yesterday, the Above the Law website named Ghaffary its Lawyer of the Day for all of the publicity he has received for this app.
The app is quite large, a full gigabyte. Right now, the largest app on my iPhone is Dragon’s Lair, which weighs in at 215 MB thanks to all of the high quality video. Black’s Law Dictionary is also large at 152 MB. I believe that the game Myst is over 500 MB and some of the GPS navigation apps with built-in apps are even larger than BarMax. Suffice it to say that you won’t be downloading BarMax over a 3G connection.
The large size seems to be worth it, though. You get thousands of pages of materials, hundreds of hours of audio lectures, over a thousand flashcards, 1,371 MBE questions from previous exams categorized by subject, and California practice examples with sample answers. The app also includes exam taking tips and a calendar to plan your exam preparation. And apparently you can make use of the app outside of the app because the website says that you also get a “Welcome packet with all the materials in MS Word format and hard copy printout option.”
According to Gizmodo, “there are plans to roll out versions for New York and five other
popular states by the end of the year.” That site also notes that the developers are working on a $500
version that features only the multiple choice questions.
Not being a California lawyer and not wanting to relive the experience of studying for the bar exam, I decided not to ask for a review copy of this app. However, if you want to try before you buy, the description page on iTunes says that you can send an e-mail to info@getbarmax.com to get a free trial version. I would love to hear from anyone who uses this app to prepare for the bar.
On Friday, Verizon announced that it was reducing the cost of its unlimited calls plan, and AT&T quickly responded with similar discounts. Thus, you can now get an unlimited voice and data plan for the iPhone for $100, which is $30 cheaper than it was before Friday. If you have a Family Talk plan, you can have unlimited voice and data on two iPhones for $180 a month.
From what I am reading, you can go online to www.att.com/wireless and change your current plan to take advantage of the lower prices without any penalty or contract extension. If you have success doing so, I’d love to hear about it. I don’t use an unlimited plan myself; while the Phone feature of the iPhone is essential for me, my wife and I rarely use more than a few hundred minutes a month so we have the smallest Family Talk plan.
If you don’t need unlimited voice calls, the other monthly choices for iPhone users (including unlimited data) are 900 minutes for $90 or 450 minutes for $70. If you have a Family Talk plan with two iPhones, your choices are 2100 minutes for $170, 1400 minutes for $150, 700 minutes for $130, or 550 minutes for $120.
For all of these plans, you still need to pay extra for text messages, and that price remains
$20 a month for unlimited texts ($30 for two phones on a family plan). Cheaper text plans are 1500 texts for $15, 200 texts for $5, or pay-as-you-go texts for no monthly fee and a charge of $0.20 per Text/Instant Message and $0.30 per Picture/Video Message.
Apple just announced that on Wednesday, January 27, at 10am Pacific, it will unveil “our latest creation.” The picture at the top comes from the invitation sent to select journalists, as shown at Engadget. The rumors are that Apple will announce a new tablet computer, but I am just as interested in rumors that Apple will also preview version 4.0 of the iPhone operating system. We haven’t seen an iPhone update since September of 2009, which is a long stretch for Apple not to update the OS. Many have speculated that Apple has been waiting to release an update to the iPhone OS to version 4.0 until it was also ready to preview a new tablet computer because the iPhone and tablet operating system will share system code.
All of this is speculation for now, but my hope is that we will have some major iPhone news next week.
New apps from Apple, updates to Facebook, comparisons of the iPhone with other smartphones, and new celebrity iPhone apps were all part of the interesting iPhone-related stories that I came across this week.
Yesterday the app was updated to 3.1.2 to address some syncing bugs.
The app is a great way to keep track of your Facebook friends But
sometimes, friends can become unfriendly. Indeed, the New Oxford
American Dictionary selected “unfriend” as the word of the year in 2009. Normally, Facebook doesn’t notify you when a friend leaves you, but App Advice writes
about a $1 iPhone app called Defriended that lets you know when one of
your Facebook friends decides to defriend you. Sounds like a useful
app, unless of course you would rather enjoy the ignorant bliss that
comes with not thinking about when someone defriends you. [UPDATE: It looks like Facebook itself isn’t feeling very friendly about the Defriended app. An article today on App Advice says that Facebook pulled the plug on the Defriended app because the Facebook developer agreement forbids this type of usage.]
The latest version of the Facebook app can provide pictures for
contacts by finding their pictures on Facebook, even if you are not a
Facebook friend with a person. This means that you should think
carefully about your Facebook picture. If your Facebook picture is you
in a bikini, and your boss has your name in his contacts and uses an
iPhone, then your boss might get that bikini picture associated with
your contact entry even if you are not Facebook friends with your
boss. Something to think about, and yet another reason that I try to minimize online use of pictures of me in a bikini.
Yesterday Apple added one more benefit to being a MobileMe subscriber; you get to use the new MobileMe Gallery app. Safari on the iPhone has always done a nice job of formatting MobileMe Gallery webpages, but this app displays pictures and videos that you share on MobileMe even faster. It also lets you easily view friends’ MobileMe pages and lets you configure Safari so that the MobileMe Gallery app launches any time you click a link to a MobileMe gallery. It’s a slick app. The app is free, but you must be a MobileMe subscriber, which normally costs $99 a year but is only $69.48 from Amazon. (By clicking that link, Amazon gives a tiny percentage of each sale to iPhone J.D., which helps cover expenses around here.) Click here to get MobileMe Gallery (free):
An interesting post on the AppAdvice website shows that the iPhone has the most accurate touch screen among popular smart phones.
because it is poorly formatted and doesn’t contain the current law.
There may not be a large number of British family law lawyers reading
iPhone J.D., but her conclusion raises an interesting point:
“Beware of this app – or of any lawyer you see relying on an iPhone app
for legal research!” I frequently use iPhone apps to read the text of
the law and I don’t consider that cause for alarm, but it is worth remembering that a large number of iPhone apps containing legal statutes were released in 2009. As the laws start to change in 2010, you need to make
sure that your app is still up to date. I can see some iPhone
developers losing interest in their apps over time, so make sure that this doesn’t happen to an app that you use.
Attorney Enrico Schaefer writes on his blog The Greatest American Lawyer that he recently switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone and he is amazed how much more productive he is on an iPhone. He writes: “While I made the move because of my superficial
understanding of iPhone apps, I really had no idea how amazing those
apps would be. … For those of you still on the
Blackberry platform, check your service contracts and find out when
they expire. Then, ignore that date, eat whatever penalty you have to
pay by getting out of the contract now and switch anyway. Your ROI may
take a week or two longer, but you will see productivity gains so
quickly, you will soon agree it was the best money you ever spent.”
The always thoughtful MG Siegler writes for TechCrunch about the Nexus One, the new phone from Google that uses the Android operating system. While explaining why he likes the iPhone better, he explains the key advantages of the iPhone. I love this passage: “Android is like a very nice painting done entirely with broad strokes.
The iPhone is more like a masterpiece in which every little detail has
been meticulously defined. Just as people have different tastes in art,
people will have different tastes when it comes to the iPhone versus
the Nexus One. But that doesn’t change the fact that some pieces of
artwork are considered to be masterpieces, while some are considered to
be merely very good.”
GigaOM has a neat graphic on the App Store economy. Click here to see it.
which provides information on the 2010 New Orleans Mayoral and City
Council races. The current version of the app will appeal to those
with an interest in New Orleans politics, but it looks like an
interesting app that could be used for any race in any city.
AppAdvice reports that mice-maker Logitech released a free app that lets your iPhone act as a wireless mouse. Many other apps already do this, but AppAdvice notes that this one is both full featured and free. If this type of app is of interest to you, check it out.
And finally, for all of you who love the distinct voice and antics of actor Samuel L. Jackson, you can now get the iPhone app iSamJackson for all of your Samuel L. Jackson needs. There is a funny, free online preview of the app that gives you a sense of what it does, and for $2.99 you’ll have Samuel L. Jackson in your, ahem, pocket, either in a clean version or an explicit version, both of which include a magic eight ball-type feature so that Samuel L. Jackson can help you make your most critical decisions. You can even follow the app on Twitter. This picture is from when I “met” Mr. Jackson at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in New York. I’m the one on the right. Click here for iSamJackson ($2.99) Clean: and Explicit:
I am always interested to learn about attorneys who write apps for the iPhone — especially apps that are designed for other lawyers — and I try to feature those stories on iPhone J.D. when I can. If you know your way around a computer and have always been interested in writing the next great iPhone app, you’ll want to take a look at iTunes U, a collection of over 200,000 free educational materials on iTunes. The prestigious Stanford University has a large collection of programs on iTunes U, including CS 193P, a course on developing iPhone apps taught by both Stanford professors and an Apple employee.
Ars Technica has a short article on the course, noting that there will be ten lectures in the course this semester (the first two of which are already on iTunes), and there is no cost for watching the videos of the classes and downloading the slides via iTunes.
I watched a little of the first class, and it quickly went over my head. I last took a computer science class as a college sophomore in 1988, and suffice it to say that things have advanced a little since then. But the professors seem very energetic and I’m sure it is an amazing class. I sometimes hear about people with very little computer knowledge picking up some books and learning to program an iPhone app, and whether you are a computer programming guru or new to the field, I suspect that this Stanford course can play an important role in teaching yourself to program for the iPhone. You should also read the excellent iPhone development blog Mobile Orchid.
By the way, there is both quantity and quality over on iTunes U and you can quickly lose yourself there browsing through all of the selections. For example, I see that Emory University Law School (I went to college at Emory) offers a five-part “Mini Law School” including “Introduction to Torts” by Dean David Partlett and “Constitutional Law” by Prof. Robert Schaprio.
Click here for iPhone Application Development (Winter 2010) (free):
If you are like me, then you have a lot of entries in the Contacts on your iPhone. Attorneys and other professionals are always meeting people, be they clients, co-counsel, opposing counsel, consultants, witnesses, etc. and over time the number of entries in your Contacts database can really add up. Groups is an iPhone app that gives you sophisticated tools for managing your these contacts.
When the developer, Guided Ways Technologies, sent me a review copy of this $4.99 app, I thought it would be good for one thing: making lists of contacts so that I could easily send an e-mail to a group of people at one time. Groups adds that ability, and does it very well, using drop and drag. Just hold down your finger on a contact for a second and a picture of a card will pop up, which you can drag to any distribution list that you created in the app. Once the group is populated with members, you can easily send an e-mail to all recipients of that group, and the app even lets you selectively turn on or off members of that group before it creates the e-mail. It is a slick implementation that works great.
Little did I know that this one feature, useful though it may be, is just one of the many features of the sophisticated Groups app. First, this app makes it very easy to get at the information that you have associated with each of your contacts. Just tap on a contact and a card pops up that gives you a beautiful interface to all of the information that you have for a particular contact.
Second, the app has a powerful smart group feature. Much like a smart playlist in iTunes, you can create a smart group of contacts that matches certain characteristics. For example, the domain for my law firm is arlaw.com, so I made a smart group that contains all contacts with “arlaw” in their e-mail address. Instantly, I had a group containing all of my contacts who are my co-workers:
The app also comes with some useful built-in smart groups that you can use, modify, or delete. For example, one smart group lists everyone who has a birthday as a part of their contacts data, and next to each name it shows you the person’s current age. One smart group called Company shows you everyone who has data in the Company field of their contact. You could just as easily make your own smart group called No Company which lists everyone who does not have a company in their contact data, which is a quick way to see who in your Contacts list needs to have company info added.
And that last point demonstrates one of the most powerful features of this app. By using smart groups, this app allows you to easily explore your contacts to get a sense of what is missing and to see relationships between your contacts. A smart group can show you all of your contacts who live in a city, useful when you are planning a trip. A smart group can show you all of your contacts who don’t have a photo, so you can then go in and add a photo. Just as usefully, it can show you all of the contacts that have a photo. As I noted in my recent review of the latest version of the Facebook app, that app can now go through all of your contacts and add photos for anyone that it finds on Facebook, even if that person is not one of your Facebook friends. When I used this feature the other day, it added dozens of correct pictures to my iPhone contacts. But for a few people, it either got the picture wrong, or it correctly displayed the person’s current Facebook picture but that picture is not something that I want to associate with the person, such as a picture of the person’s pet. By looking at a smart group of every contact with a photo, I could quickly find those photos that I don’t want to keep and quickly remove those photos from my contact information. There is really no way to accomplish this task with the built-in Contacts app.
Indeed, it is much easier to do many tasks like this using the Groups app then using Outlook on my PC. Thus, Groups is an example of an app that is so powerful and easy to use that I actually prefer to accomplish the task on my iPhone rather than use a computer. That is a sign of a great iPhone app.
And Groups has a bunch of other features as well, many of which I am just starting to discover. For example, it has a keypad that you can use to dial as an alternative to the regular iPhone Phone app, but as you start to type a number it starts to show the matches in your Contacts to save you the time of typing the rest of the number. Additionally, it lets you type a name on a keypad using the T9 method, for those of you who enjoyed doing this on a traditional cell phone (press 2 for ABC, press 3 for DEF, etc.) If you want to bring up Adam, you can just type 2 3 2 and as you are typing the app will bring up all of the matches for those letters such as Adam, Beatrice, Becky, etc.
Note that if you do a search on the Internet for reviews of the Groups app, you will see that most of them are from early 2009 when the app was still missing a lot of features, such as the ability to edit contact information. The 1.1 version of the app, which came out September 23, 2009, addressed these shortcomings and added several new features.
[UPDATE 1/18/2010: Philippe Radley notes in a comment that Groups doesn’t work with custom ringtones. I don’t use custom ringtones so I haven’t noticed this, but if you do you might want to take heed of Philippe’s warning. For example, the 148 Apps website says this on this topic: “According to the Guided Ways Technologies website, this problem wasn’t a mistake on their part, simply the SDK currently doesn’t allow it, but I will mention it anyway. Groups doesn’t seem to recognize any ringtones other than the preloaded ones on the iPhone, this isn’t a big deal considering you can just go to the ‘Contacts’ app to change it. But my goal was to completely replace ‘Contacts’ with this app.”]
Groups is an amazingly useful app. The groups and smart groups features not only make it easy to create lists of contacts, they also make it easier for you to understand what is in your contacts and see relationships between your contacts that you otherwise might not see. The design of the app is beautiful, and obviously a lot of thought and care went into this. The app is easily worth $5 for anyone with a large number of contacts on their iPhone.
This site is aimed at lawyers who use iPhones, but you might be amazed how often people find me through this site and tell me that they are ready to make the switch and want to know which iPhone to get. Just yesterday I got one of these requests from Blake LeBlanc, an attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last week I got it from one of my law partners, the week before that … etc. I’ve answered this question enough that I figured I should post my answer here.
You have three options right now: $99 for the iPhone 3G, $199 for a 16 GB iPhone 3GS and $299 for a 32 GB iPhone 3GS. It isn’t any cheaper to get it at an Apple Store, an AT&T Store, on the Apple website, Walmart, or anyplace else, so just go someplace convenient for you.
I recommend that attorneys avoid the cheapest, $99 model. Here is why. First, the 3G is the 2008 version of the iPhone, so you are getting a much older model. Second, it is slower than the 3GS. Why should you care, especially if any iPhone is going to be a big improvement over what you are using now? Because the increased speed on the 3GS makes the iPhone much more responsive and more enjoyable to use. It makes a difference.
Third, the 3GS has a much better camera than the 3G. “But Jeff,” you insist, “I don’t take pictures with my cell phone.” Well, you don’t take pictures now, but trust me, it is nice to have that option, and the camera is so easy to use on the iPhone that you’ll probably find yourself wanting to use it when you see something interesting and the iPhone is the camera that you have closest to you. Fourth, that nicer camera can also take video. Do you have kids? Do they ever do anything funny? Then you want the video camera.
Finally, there are other nice touches in the 3GS, none of which on its own is worth the extra $100, but added to the above list they further tip the scale in favor of the 3GS. For example, the 3GS has a nice coating on the screen that makes it resistant to finger prints and makes it easier to wipe of the finger prints when they occur. And you will touch this thing a lot, so that matters. It also has a built-in compass, which makes it easier to use the great built-in Maps app. There are a few other differences, all of which I listed here, but the ones I just listed are the most important.
So now you know you are going to get the 3GS version. Should you get the 16 GB version for $199 or the 32 GB version for $299? For most people, I recommend the 16 GB version. This often leads people to ask me, “Jeff, I hear about these 100,000 apps available for the iPhone. Shouldn’t I get more memory to get more apps?” No. It doesn’t matter. Apps on the iPhone just don’t take up that much space. The advantage of the extra capacity is not the ability to hold more apps, but the ability to hold more media: pictures, songs and video.
And let’s be even more specific — you would have to have an insane number of pictures on your iPhone to need more than 16 GB. So ask yourself, do you currently have an iPod or other MP3 player? If so, how much music do you have on there? If it is over 16 GB, then maybe you would like the larger model. If not, or if you don’t even currently use an iPod or other MP3 player, than the 16 GB should be fine. And finally, do you plan to put a lot of video on your iPhone, such as TV shows or movies to watch while you travel, or even just portable versions of your home movies? Videos do take up a lot of space, so that might be a good reason to get the 32 GB version. I often download TV shows, and sometimes movies, to watch on the plane or at night in a hotel room when I travel. If that sounds like you, then you’ll probably appreciate the 32 GB version. If not, then stick with 16 GB. Even the 16 GB version can hold quite a few songs and videos.
That often leads to this final question: “Should I buy one now, or should I wait for the next model?” My answer: we’re talking about technology here. It changes every minute! You can wait forever and you’ll never find the perfect time to buy technology. But I can offer this advice: new iPhones typically come out, or at least are announced, in June. Take a look:
Original iPhone: Announced 1/9/07, available 6/29/07
iPhone 3G: Announced 6/9/08, available 7/11/08
iPhone 3GS: Announced 6/8/09, available 6/19/09
A year ago, in January of 2009, an important Apple executive (Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Marketing) mentioned to a leading technology columnist (David Pogue of the New York Times) that “Apple marches to certain product cycles” including “the iPhone cycle (June),” further confirmation that June is the date that Apple targets.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the next version of the iPhone will be announced or released in June of 2010. iPhone Alley reported yesterday that there was a rumor floating around France that the next iPhone will launch in May, not June, if you want to believe that one. If getting a new iPhone is not very urgent for you, maybe you want to wait another five or six months, but then you’ll miss out on all of the advantages of owning an iPhone. That would be a shame! Today, I’d say go ahead and get it. But come May of 2010, then it probably makes sense to wait a few more weeks.
So for most of you looking to get an iPhone right now, go ahead and get the $199 model. If you want to use a lot of music and/or video, get the $299 model. You’ll have to choose a color for the back of the iPhone (black or white), and I offer no advice on that cosmetic decision, except to say that my wife and I both have black, in case you are curious how the Richardson household voted.
Of course, once you get that shiny new iPhone, it won’t be long before you ask the next, inevitable question: “Hey, what apps should I check out?” To which, may answer is — that’s what iPhone J.D. is all about, so become a regular reader! My answer literally changes every week. Right now, I love and recommend Dragon Dictation, Documents to Go, Facebook (if you use Facebook), Twitterific (if you use Twitter), NetNewsWire (if you read RSS feeds from websites), The Weather Channel, LogMeIn Ignition, DirecTV, the Louisiana Civil Code and Code of Civil Procedure, FRCP and FRAP, Grocery iQ, and Scrabble. But next week that list will change. If you want a ton of great suggestions, make plans to attend the ABA TECHSHOW conference in Chicago this March. Reid Trautz are I are planning a session called “60 iPhone Apps in 60 Minutes” on Thursday, March 25th, and Ben Stevens and I are planning a session called “iPhone Tips for Lawyers” on Saturday, March 27th.
. Also, I’ve previously reviewed the Merck Manual, and Art of the iPhone lists some other first aid app selections. Other, less dramatic, iPhone stories of the past week:
President Obama is well known to be a Blackberry user, but yesterday his administration released the official The White House app and you will only find it in the iTunes App Store. The app essentially takes the content from the (very nice) official white house website and formats it for the iPhone.
Future lawyers preparing for the California bar frequently spend thousands of dollars to take a preparation course such as BarBri. Now there is an iPhone alternative called BarMax CA. The BarMax app costs less than BarBri, but at $999.99, it is now the most expensive app in the App Store. MG Siegler writes an extensive and interesting article on the app in TechCrunch. It seems like a great idea for an app for any iPhone-using lawyer-to-be in The Golden State.
If you are like me, then you have a lot of entries in the Contacts on your iPhone. Attorneys and other professionals are always meeting people, be they clients, co-counsel, opposing counsel, consultants, witnesses, etc. and over time the number of entries in your Contacts database can really add up. Groups is an iPhone app that gives you sophisticated tools for managing your these contacts.
And that last point demonstrates one of the most powerful features of this app. By using smart groups, this app allows you to easily explore your contacts to get a sense of what is missing and to see relationships between your contacts. A smart group can show you all of your contacts who live in a city, useful when you are planning a trip. A smart group can show you all of your contacts who don’t have a photo, so you can then go in and add a photo. Just as usefully, it can show you all of the contacts that have a photo. As I noted in my recent review of the latest version of the Facebook app, that app can now go through all of your contacts and add photos for anyone that it finds on Facebook, even if that person is not one of your Facebook friends. When I used this feature the other day, it added dozens of correct pictures to my iPhone contacts. But for a few people, it either got the picture wrong, or it correctly displayed the person’s current Facebook picture but that picture is not something that I want to associate with the person, such as a picture of the person’s pet. By looking at a smart group of every contact with a photo, I could quickly find those photos that I don’t want to keep and quickly remove those photos from my contact information. There is really no way to accomplish this task with the built-in Contacts app.
