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): 

Yesterday, Apple announced its 2009 Fiscal Fourth Quarter results.  If you want to replay it, you can download it from iTunes or you can read the transcript provided by Seeking Alpha.  Here is
the significant iPhone news from the conference call, which came from Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer, and Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook.

• This was one of Apple’s best quarters ever.  The company reported revenue of $9.87 billion, its second highest quarter ever.  And this wasn’t even the first fiscal quarter, the quarter which contains Christmas and is always Apple’s best quarter.  The company is doing very, very well.
• Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones this past quarter, the most that Apple has ever sold in any quarter.  The previous record had been held by last year’s fiscal fourth quarter, which was the quarter following the introduction of the iPhone 3G and the huge increase in the number of countries selling iPhones.  As Tim Cook said, “the popularity of the iPhone 3GS has been phenomenal.  We were very surprised by the demand.” 
• Apple probably could have sold even more iPhones because demand exceeded supply.  Oppenheimer said that around the world, there were not enough iPhone 3GS units available for sale, so Apple ramped up supply in September and started to meet the demand in October.  One analyst asked Apple to predict how many iPhones Apple would
  
  have shipped if it had kept up with demand.  Tim Cook
  
  responded that there is really no way to answer that.  “You know,
  
  that’s a very tough question to answer because unfortunately
  
  we can’t run the experiment both ways. What I know is that for almost
  
  the entire quarter, until we got into September, the iPhone 3GS was
  
  short virtually everywhere. What I don’t know is how many people waited
  
  until it was available versus bought a competitive phone and there’s
  
  just—there is not a good way to tell that.”  In total, Apple sold
  
  almost 21 million iPhones in its 2009 fiscal year.
• Another analyst asked how iPhones are selling in the corporate market versus the consumer market.  Cook responded that there is a strong demand for iPhones by employees, so Apple has been upgrading the iPhone to add features that the technology departments at corporations are requiring to allow their employees to get iPhones.  Indeed, this is a reason for several of the features added in the iPhone 3GS.  As a result, over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies now deploy the iPhone or, at least, have test pilot programs in place.  Cook also noted that a number of government agencies are using the iPhone.  Similarly, in Europe, about 50% of the Financial Times 100 companies are using iPhones.
• Apple continues to say that there are over 85,000 apps in the App Store, a number that Apple first announced back in mid-September.  I was a little surprised that Apple didn’t update that number as I’m sure that the number is over 90,000 by now.  Perhaps Apple is just waiting for the number to top 100,000 before making its next announcement on the number of apps available, which I expect will happen in November.  Similarly, Oppenheimer said that there have been over 2 billion apps downloaded, the same number announced back in September.
• On October 30th, Apple will begin selling the iPhone in China, which presents the opportunity for a huge increase in international sales.  Oppenheimer wouldn’t predict how many iPhones will be sold in China, but he did say that Apple noticed that many of the older models of the iPhones have ended up in China so there is clearly demand, plus China is “a huge market, the largest market in the world in terms of total phones.”
• The iPhone 3G already sells in over 80 countries, and by the end of 2009 the iPhone 3GS will also sell in over 80 countries.  The iPhone 3GS was shipping in 64 countries as of the end of September, 2009.

[For my updated review of the Gogo service, click here.]

Last week, I took a cross-country Delta flight on a Boeing 757 that was equipped with Gogo In-flight Wi-Fi Internet.  Gogo and Delta are running a promotion through December 31, 2009 whereby first-time users can try the service for free.  I thought that this would be a good opportunity to test the service on my iPhone 3GS, so I followed the simple instructions on the card in my seatback pocket, entered “deltatrygogo” in the promo code blank when I got to the payment page, and within a minute I was on the Internet, which I used throughout my four hour flight.  The service worked great and I strongly recommend using Gogo if you want to have Internet access on your iPhone while you are flying.

The Gogo service is currently available on select domestic flights on Delta, United and American Airlines.  AirTran and Virgin America offer the service on all of their flights.  US Airways announced that it will add the service in 2010.

Access is easy.  Once your plane reaches 10,000 feet and you are told that you can use electronic devices, go to Settings and keep your iPhone in Airplane Mode but turn on Wi-Fi.  You will see gogoinflight as an available network.  Select it, and in just a few moments a screen will pop up for you to log on.  (If it doesn’t, just go to Safari and try to access any website.)  Follow the prompts to sign up, choose a plan (or use the promotional code noted above), and then you will see this screen telling you that you are connected:

 

At that point, you can use your iPhone to access the Internet to do just about anything you want.  Of course, you will want to read and send e-mails, and that works great.  Using Safari to access websites was also very fast.  Twitter and Facebook worked great, as did my RSS reader app, NetNewsWire.

The terms of service prohibit you from using VOIP to make phone calls using the Gogo service.  I briefly contemplated launching the Skype app just to see if it worked notwithstanding the terms of service, but then quickly decided against it.  The last thing I want is to be surrounded by people yakking on the phone on an airplane, so I certainly didn’t want to start any trends.  But you can easily interact with people on the ground by sending e-mail back and forth or by using instant messaging.  If your company supports VPN for extra security, VPN does work fine with Gogo.

One concern that I had was speed.  After all, we are talking about using the Internet at 30,000 feet.  But to my surprise, the speed was quite reasonable.  Gogo says that the speed varies depending on the number of people on the flight using the service.  I ran two speed test apps, at different points on the flight, and both of them consistently showed the speed as around 800 to 900 Kbps for download and almost 200 Kbps upload.  For example, here is the results screen from one of those apps:

That is not even close to the Wi-Fi speeds that I normally get on my iPhone (I get around 7000 Kbps down and about 800 Kpbs up on my home Wi-Fi), but it is very similar to what I typically see on AT&T’s 3G network.  Indeed, my subjective opinion of the Gogo service was that it felt as fast as a good 3G connection, which is plenty fast for most of what you want to do with an iPhone on a plane.

For example, I was able to download an app from the App Store quickly and easily.  I could download music and podcasts from iTunes, but it took a while to do so, depending upon the length (for example, around 10 minutes for one podcast).  YouTube worked fine.

Both as a test, and as a source of entertainment, I decided to access the NBC mobile website and watch some sitcoms I had missed last Thursday night (30 Rock, The Office and Parks and Recreation).  To do this, you go to m.nbc.com on your iPhone.  Click on the “video” tab and choose “full episodes.”  There are plenty of choices, around 17 shows that are currently on the air, and 11 classic shows (currently:  The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Battlestar Galactica (the original series), Buck Rogers, Charles in Charge, Emergency, Knight Rider (the original series), Magnum P.I., Miami Vice, Quantum Leap and Simon & Simon).  Each show is broken into a few segments of up to around ten minutes.  When one segment ends the next segment starts to load.

By default, the iPhone waits until it has loaded enough of the segment so that it can play the video through to the end without pausing before it starts to play.  Sometimes I found that the segment would start in just a few seconds.  Other times, it would take a few minutes to buffer enough video, so I used that time to browse a magazine.  Either way, before long, I was watching the episode and the quality was excellent.  I had loaded my iPhone with video content before my flight, but it was so nice to watch something new that had aired so recently that I didn’t even bother with most of what I had loaded on my iPhone.  And as an added bonus, no commercials—although I’m sure NBC will include them at some point.

I have seen reports that Gogo uses traffic shaping to share the bandwidth on the plane, so if you are trying to do something that doesn’t use a lot of bandwidth, like check e-mail or even load web pages, your service will be given priority.  For high bandwidth uses like streaming video, you will be given a lower priority so that you don’t hog all of the bandwidth that your neighbors are trying to use.  This seems fair to me and probably explains some of the reasons that I had some delays when I was streaming television episodes.

So how much does Wi-Fi on your plane cost?  If you haven’t tried Gogo before and you fly Delta, you can use it once for free by using the promotional information I noted above.  [UPDATE 10/21/09:  Google and Virgin America are also offering free Wi-Fi on every Virgin America flight from November 10, 2009 through January 15, 2010.]  Otherwise, there are several cost plans.  For a short flight of 90 minutes or less, the cost is $5.95.  For any flight of more than 90 minutes, it costs $7.95 for a mobile device like an iPhone.  The iPhone price is cheaper than what you would pay on a laptop:  $9.95 for a flight of 90 minutes to three hours and $12.95 for a flight of more than three hours.  You can also pay $12.95 for 24-hour access on multiple flights or $49.99 for a month of access.

Is the service worth it?  I think so.  On a short flight of 90 minutes or less, I probably won’t have enough need for the Internet to spend $6 for it, but it is nice to know that it is there.  For a longer flight, $8 seems reasonable to be able to keep up with your office and be productive, and may also be worthwhile just to entertain yourself on the Internet.  Indeed, airports have already conditioned us to paying crazy high prices for food and bottled water, and you’ll probably get more out of the Gogo service than you did from the pre-flight Starbucks coffee that wasn’t much less than $8.

Apple made a major announcement to its app developers yesterday that should result in a major change to iPhone apps.  Until now, there was no way to try an app before you bought it.  Apple’s policy was that free apps should remain free, so you either had to pay full price to buy an app, or the developer could offer a free “lite” version of the app but it had to be a separate app that would always retain all of its features for free.  For the past few months, Apple has allowed developers to include in-app purchases, but developers could only include this feature in a paid app, not a free app.  As Daring Fireball, Macworld, and many other websites have reported, Apple has now changed its policy, and now free apps can now include the ability to purchase additional features within the app.  This means that a developer can let you download a free version of the full app that has some limitation but which also includes the ability to pay to add more features to the app, such as upgrading to the “full” version of the app.  Hopefully, many app developers will use this feature, and this could mean the end of separate, “lite” versions of apps.  I look forward to seeing what developers do with this.  Other notable iPhone news from the past week:

• For those of you who subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe, the service was updated on October 9, 2009.  All of the updates are minor and only two directly pertain to the iPhone, both of which are improvements to the Find My iPhone feature.  First, there is now an icon for Find My iPhone in the toolbar at me.com, which makes it easier to find the feautre.  Second, there is now a URL to go directly to this feature:  http://www.me.com/findmyiphone   Click here for Apple’s full release notes for this update.  By the way, the MobileMe service costs $99 a year, but you can get a discounted price of $72.99 through Amazon by clicking here

  

  , and if you use that link, Amazon provides a tiny amount of money back to iPhone J.D. to help pay for this website.
• This is a little “Inside Baseball,” but Daniel Eran Dilger provides a fascinating story at AppleInsider about the “Pink” project at Microsoft, an attempt to develop a competitor to the iPhone.  The article gets most interesting about halfway through when it starts to quote an anonymous former employee.  Apple may not be perfect, but it does seem to have a consistent vision for the iPhone and iPod touch, something which Dilger says is lacking at Microsoft.
• For a while, all we heard about were iPhone app developers becoming rich overnight and quitting their day jobs.  But according to this Newsweek story, many app developers struggle to make a profit.  This is an interesting contrast to another Newsweek story from last year, and also reminds me of what Cliff Maier, who develops apps for lawyers, told me in this interview last year:  “The other advice is this: don’t think you’re going
  
  to get rich.  The economics of the app store right now are that you
  
  have a tiny chance of making a lot of money, and a huge chance of
  
  making hardly any at all.   Do it because you need something you can’t
  
  get from someplace else, do it for the technical challenge or the
  
  personal satisfaction, or do it to help society.  Don’t do it for the
  
  money.  For me, the law is why I leave my house every day, but engineering is my passion.”
• John Brandon writes an interesting article for Computerworld on how the different hardware features of the iPhone work.
• JD Supra launched a free iPhone app called Legal Edge which allows you to view recent law-related articles, news, shared work product, blog posts and court filings.
• USA Today reports on an app that can be used instead of a key to unlock and start your car.
• Your iPhone can help you make a great cocktail.  Earlier this year I reviewed the excellent Cockatils+ app.  Macworld recently reviewed some similar apps, although that article indicates that Cockatils+ is still probably the best of these apps.
• It is technically possible to share your iPhone’s 3G internet connection with your computer, a feature called tethering, but AT&T has not enabled the feature.  9to5Mac reports that based on a recent statement from AT&T, we might not see this enabled before 2010.
• And finally, iPhone Alley reports on another use for the versatile iPhone:  saving your life by distracting a bear.

The Law Pod, a company started by law student Fitz Collings, is one of a few companies that sells legal reference materials for the iPhone.  The Law Pod sells the U.S. Constition for $0.99, and five other sets of rules for $1.99 each:  the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Appellate Procedure and Bankruptcy Procedure.  I reviewed the app sold by The Law Pod back in February of 2009, and at the time I noted that there were design differences between the Law Pod apps and the similar apps developed by Cliff Maier that might lead some to prefer one over the other, but also noted that The Law Pod apps were missing many features that were offered by the Cliff Maier apps.  Earlier this week, the Law Pod apps were updated to version 2.0, and there are some great improvements.  I’ll focus this post on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure app, but these same improvements appear in many of the Law Pod apps and I presume that all of them will eventually receive updates to 2.0.

One design difference that has always existed between The Law Pod and legal reference apps sold by others is the way that the rules are set forth when you start the app.  In Cliff Maier’s apps, for example, you see a list of titles, which you then must tap to see a list of rules under each title.  The Law Pod has always instead given you a list of the rules.  One of the recent changes is that the list now includes the title of the rule, not just the number.  Here are the main screens of The Law Pod app (left) and the Cliff Maier app (right) to show you the difference:

    

Cliff Maier’s apps have long included a helpful JUMP button to allow you to go to a specific rule.  The Law Pod apps now include a similar GoTo button.  There seems to be a slight bug if you want to go to rules with a decimal point.  Notice how the below screen says “Example: 1.1"?  While there is no Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 1.1, there is a Rule 4.1, but you cant jump to it because the keypad lacks a period/decimal point.  You have to go to Rule 4 and then tap the NEXT button at the bottom to go to Rule 4.1.  I presume this minor bug will be fixed, and putting aside that bug, the GoTo feature works quite well.

 

A third new feature is the ability to change the font size and font
(the default Helvitica, Times or Courier).  For anyone whose eyes are
not as good as they used to be, this is a great feature.

    

    

There are other small improvements as well.  The app now saves your location in the app when you exit, so you can quickly return to the last rule you were reviewing.  Search features are improved so that the results are filtered as you type, and the search terms are highlighted in the rules.  Finally, you can view Advisory Committee Notes for each rule.

There are now several companies selling legal reference apps, but with these improvements, the apps sold by The Law Pod are excellent choices.

Click here for Fed. R. Civ. Pro. ($1.99): 

Click here for Fed. R. Crim. Pro. ($1.99): 

Click here for Fed. R. App. Pro. ($1.99): 

Click here for Fed. R. Evid. ($1.99): 

Click here for Fed. R. Bankruptcy Pro. ($1.99): 

Click here for U.S. Constitution ($0.99): 

How often has something like this happened to you.  It’s Friday and you think about how you have to do X on Monday morning.  The next thing you know, the weekend has passed, it’s the end of the day on Monday, and you realize that you forgot about X.  If only someone had poked you on Monday morning to say “psst, don’t forget about X.”  NotifyMe from PoweryBase is a fantastic $3.99 app that solves this problem.

PoweryBase is an iPhone software development company that was recently started by two guys in Europe.  Dominik Balogh has a design and marketing background and has worked with companies such as Heineken, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Mastercard.  Pavel Serbajlo is a programmer who has worked mostly on financial/accounting software for the last eight years.  The two guys started PoweryBase in June of 2009 to work on iPhone apps, and NotifyMe was one of their first ideas.  Dominik tells me that the primary goal for NotifyMe was simplicity so that the app would be fast and easy to use.

Here is how the app works.  Simply pick a date and time and tell the app what message to send.  The process only takes a few seconds.  If you want to, you can also choose a category for the reminder.  Also, if you want to, you can choose to have the message repeat daily, weekly, every two weeks, monthly or yearly.  Then click save and your request is uploaded to the NotifyMe server.  When the time comes, no matter what you are doing on your iPhone, the message you previously typed will appear on your screen using the iPhone’s push notification capabilities.  (Indeed, NotifyMe was one of the very first iPhone apps to use push notifications, a feature added in iPhone Software 3.0.)  Note that because the alerts are pushed to your iPhone by a server, you have to have an Internet connection to get your reminder.  If you are in airplane mode, you won’t get your reminders.

The main screen of the app allows you to set a new reminder or see upcoming or past reminders.  If you choose to use categories, you can also see your upcoming and past reminders by category.

What makes the app even more useful are the various settings.  For example, you can select what happens when you start the app.  For me, every time I start the app I am doing so to set a new reminder, so I have the app automatically open to that screen upon launch.  You can also choose from nine different sounds that will be played when a notification arrives.  Or if you don’t want any sound to play when a reminder pops up, go to the main Settings app on your iPhone and choose Notifications –> NotifyMe, where you can disable the alert sound completely.

In addition to viewing your upcoming and past reminders from within the iPhone app, you can access the PoweryBase website and view all of  your reminders online.  You can modify reminders on the website just like you can on the iPhone, so if you want, you can create all of the reminders on the website using your computer and just receive reminders on your iPhone.  But for me, it is the ability to enter reminders on the iPhone that makes this app so great.  I can be anywhere, away from my computer, and when I think about my need to remember something in a few days I can jot it down right away on the iPhone app.

Even though NotifyMe’s calling card is its simplicity, additional features are planned for future upgrades.  These include custom repeating modes, custom categories, sharing reminders with others, having an alert sound in advance of a time, and alert sound looping.  I would love to see the ability to create a custom alert sound so that I could have one that is incredibly short, just a fraction of a second long.  I want something that catches my attention but is in no way annoying to anyone who may be around me.  Although the default sounds are not that obnoxious, I still opted to just turn off sounds completely rather than use one of the built-in sounds.

Of course, you don’t need to buy the NotifyMe app to have your iPhone remind you to do things.  You can instead create a calendar entry and set an alarm for that calendar entry.  But when you do that, you fill up your calendar with personal items like “get drycleaning” and “pick up milk” that are really to do items and not calendar events, items that do not really need to have a start and end time on your calendar.  Moreover, creating a reminder in NotifyMe is incredibly fast, much quicker than setting up a calendar entry and turning on an alarm.

It is always nice when developers create a free version of an app so that you can try before you buy, and the developers of NotifyMe have done just that.  NotifyMe Free includes all of the features of the full app except that (1) there is a 20 second “nag” screen very time you start it up and (2) you can only have 3 reminders at one time.  But that is enough for you to get a feel for how the app works and decide if you want to use it.  If you later upgrade to the full version of NotifyMe, the reminders you create in the free version will carry over to the paid version.

NotifyMe is a wonderful app.  It solves a specific problem and does so with a quick and easy to use interface, but also includes sophisticated features like categories and repeating items if you choose to use them.  The developers gave me a free copy of the full app so that I could
review it here, but I definitely think that it is worth $3.99 even if
it only stops you from forgetting something important once or twice.

Click here to get NotifyMe ($3.99): 

Click here to get NotifyMe Free (free):