There are lots of great books about the iPhone available.  Want a great introductory guide?  David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual
is excellent.  Want to go to the next level and get expert advice on troubleshooting?  Then you’ll love Ted Landau’s Take Control of your iPhone.  But what if you really want to push your iPhone to the max?  There is no better choice than Andy Ihntako’s iPhone Fully Loaded (2d ed.). 

The theme of this book is simple — how much useful and amazing stuff can you get into your iPhone, even if you need to think a little outside of the box to do so.  He discusses innovative uses of smart playlists so that your iPhone always has fresh music and videos and you have the illusion of having much more space on your iPhone.  He devotes several chapters to getting video on your iPhone, whether that video is on TV, DVD, an online service like YouTube or even your old home movies on VHS.  Ihnatko loves comics, so there is a chapter on getting comics on your iPhone.  There are several chapters devoted to the best ways to get news and other information from the Internet on your iPhone.  Many attorneys will be interested in his discussion of different ways to get documents on your iPhone.  By the time you finish reading this book, you brain will be overflowing with ideas of neat new things that you can do with your iPhone, and you will forever feel just a little guilty when you see some free space on your iPhone because you will be thinking of something else that you can add.

Just based on the book’s content alone, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to move to the next level with their iPhone.  But what really makes this book a joy to read is Ihnatko’s writing style.  A writer of the Wikipedia entry on Ihnatko called it a boisterous writing style, seasoned with references to US pop culture, P. G. Wodehouse, comic books, cartoons, and science fiction.  He’s also been called a “comedian masquerading as a tech writer.”  I’ll just say that he is smart and funny, my two favorite characteristics in any writer.  If you are not already familiar with his writing style, then take a pause from this review and check out any of Ihnatko’s weekly technology columns in the Chicago Sun Times, or read any of the entries in his blog Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth, or listen to any of his weekly appearances on the MacBreak Weekly podcast.  I’ll wait.

[whistles, shuffles feet…]

Back?  Good.  See what I mean?  It is just good fun to read or listen to Ihnatko.  So even if he had written a book about the weather in northern Alaska, I’d still probably want to read it.  When you combine his great writing style with great content, you get the rare technology book that is actually a page turner.

Here’s one more reason I love this book:  it is very well produced.  Every page is full color, the book includes great iPhone screen shots and illustrations, the book is packed with sidebar “Tidbit” items that are often insightful, humorous, or both, and the book is well organized with a useful index that makes it easy to go back and find something. 

I only have one complaint about this book, and it is a complaint about any book that is on a printed page but especially books about cutting edge technology:  the book can get outdated.  For example, the book has great tips on using RSS feeds to listen to podcasts that you didn’t sync to your iPhone, but now you don’t need to worry about that tip because with software update 2.2, you can download podcasts directly to the iPhone.  Ihnatko has a chapter on reading books on the iPhone, but obviously it doesn’t discuss the Kindle for iPhone app that Amazon released last week.  Indeed, this is the second edition of this book, released December 3, 2008, and I suspect that Ihnatko finished writing it in October or early November of 2008.  Having said that, here we are in March of 2009 and I still find myself strongly recommending this book because virtually all of the content remains relevant and even the few dated parts are still informative and fun to read.

Because you are reading this website, I already know that you are someone who wants to learn how to get the most out of an iPhone, and that puts you in the target demographic for this book.  It is less than $14 on Amazon, which would be money well spent for either the content or the humor — it is a bargain to get both.  So give yourself a little gift and pick up a copy of the book today.  I’ll end with a few pictures of Andy Ihnatko from his Flickr page that seem to capture his spirit:

 

Click here to get Andy Ihnatko’s iPhone Fully Loaded from Amazon.

A few years ago, David Watanabe developed Inquisitor, a Safari web browser plug-in that starts to give you search results while you are still typing your search terms.  It was a neat idea to speed up search.  Yahoo! acquired the rights to Inquisitor in May of 2008, and the plug-in is now available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.  Last year, Watanabe started to work on an iPhone version of Inquisitor, and the free app was released by Yahoo! and finally approved by Apple on March 5, 2009.  

I’ve been playing around with Inquisitor for the last few days, and I’m impressed.  On my computer, I never considered Inquisitor to be anything more than a novelty.  Sure, it was fast, but it only showed a few search hits.  Plus, it doesn’t take my very long to type a few search terms, so I have always been happy to wait the very short period of time until after I type and enter my search terms before I see a full Google page with lots of matches.

On the iPhone, on the other hand, things are different.  First, I cannot type on the virtual iPhone keyboard as fast as I can type on a real computer keyboard, so an app that starts to give me results before I even finish typing is a great time-saver.  Moreover, Inquisitor search results are nicely formatted for the iPhone screen, so it can actually be easier to use than just running a search in the search bar of the iPhone’s Safari app.

Here is how the app works along with a few screen shots.  Start typing the letters of your search, and you will see a list of possible full search terms come up.  Tap as soon as you see the one that you are in the process of typing.  This will bring up a screen with news items matching your search term (if any) at the top of the screen, followed by possible web page hits on the rest of the screen:

   

If you tap on the news items at the top, you will be taken to a page that lists several news stories that relate to your search terms:

If you instead tap on one of the web hits, Inquisitor (which can act as a web browser) will show you the website.  But you don’t have to wait for the website to fully load to start to get information from that website.  While the website is still loading, a box will pop up at the bottom of the screen containing text relevant to your search terms taken from the website.  Once the website is fully loaded, the box at the bottom disappears and you will see the full website, just as you would see if you were using Safari:

  

Using the button at the bottom right of the screen, you can e-mail the website, or you can open the website in the Safari app.

You can adjust a few preferences for Inquisitor by going to the Preferences app on the iPhone.  Note that one of the choices is to turn on or off the “Shake to Clear” feature.  If you want to quickly erase what is typed in the search bar, just shake the iPhone (just as you might shake an Etch-A-Sketch to clear it) and the search field will clear.  It’s a cute feature that is actually useful.

Inquisitor works as advertised.  It definitely gives me search results faster than I can get using the Safari app.  Of course, it is not the only app to have this feature; the Google Mobile App also lets you get search results quickly.  While you are typing search terms in the Google Mobile App, boxes appear just below your search history that you can tap to quickly complete words:

Plus, the Google Mobile App includes its signature feature of letting you put your iPhone up to your face and say your search terms out loud, and the app will covert the speech to text and then run the search.  I find that speaking search terms with the Google Mobile App is the fastest way for me to run a search.  But of course, sometimes you are an environment where you cannot talk out loud to your iPhone, and if you are typing search terms using your fingers, Inquisitor is very fast — but so is Google Mobile App.  The two apps also differ in the layout of the search results.  The Google Mobile App shows you a smaller version of what you would get on the Google website, whereas the Inquisitor search results are bigger and look better on the iPhone screen.

Over time, I will be interested to see which app I use more to run searches — Inquisitor or Google Mobile App.  But it is nice to have the choice.  Both apps are great, and both are free, so you should download them both and try them out yourself.   Either will substantially reduce the time it takes to run a web search on your iPhone.

Click here to download Inquisitor (free): 

Click here to download Google Mobile App (free): 

The good iPhone website Apple iPhone Apps.com has an interesting article on Apple’s ability to reject an app from the app store without explicitly rejecting it — something that the site calls a “pocket rejection” (much like a pocket veto whereby the President can sometimes indirectly veto a bill).  The website developed an app that would notify the user when the price of other iPhone apps dropped — something that happens all the time and can be difficult to track.  They submitted the app to Apple several months ago, and even developed a video commercial for it … and then just waited.  After several months of waiting, it would appear that Apple is not approving the app, and yet Apple has failed to advise that it is rejecting the app.

Many other iPhone developers have posted similar stories.  Even if Apple has a good reason to not approve an app, it seems unfair to keep a developer in limbo for such a long period of time.

[UPDATE on 3/10/09:  Dan Moren of Macworld has an interesting editorial on the problems with Apple’s app approval process.]

[UPDATE on 3/13/09:  Today, Apple finally approved the BarginBin app submitted long ago by Apple iPhone Apps.com.  It’s a happy ending for this particular story, but the fact remains that many developers are pleading with Apple for more communication during the app review process.]

There is an interesting article by Alan Cohen in The American Lawyer about the increasing use of iPhones in law firms.  (The same article also appeared in the AmLaw Daily blog.)  The article notes that there are about 160 attorneys using iPhones at Chapman & Cutler, a few hundred users at Sonneschein Nath & Rosenthal, and about 100 users at Howrey.  All of these firms give attorneys the choice to use an iPhone or something else, like a Treo or a Blackberry.  I think that is the right approach.  At my law firm, where we have around 30 attorneys using iPhones right now, I am frequently asked by my partners whether they should get an iPhone or a Blackberry.  For those who are never going to use anything beyond e-mail, I think that the Blackberry Bold is a fine choice.  But quite often, once I start talking about everything that one can do with an iPhone, they decide that they want an iPhone. 

The article notes that Howrey does something that is pretty smart — they will loan an attorney an iPod Touch (which is just an iPhone without the phone) so that the attorney can get a feel for the interface and the virtual keyboard while deciding whether to get an iPhone.  I know several attorneys who first used an iPod Touch — often because their child or a relative had one — and then decided to get an iPhone.

The article also talks about how many law firms are making it easier for attorneys to access document management systems using the iPhone:

At Sonnenschein, iPhone users can securely access the firm’s network
and–via Safari, the iPhone’s browser–search and retrieve more than 6
million documents. “The nicest thing about the iPhone is that all the
formatting, indenting, and styles display on the screen,” says Jurczyk.
“[Apple] really nailed it on mobile browsing with Safari.” Chapman and
Cutler also provides remote access to its document management system.
“Because the browser works so well, attorneys can go into our private
Google search engine and pull any [file] they need,” says Nugent.

Check out the article.  It is a good read.

[UPDATE on 3/8/09:  Here is a short, similar article from The Industry Standard on lawyers moving from Blackberries to iPhones.]

[UPDATE on 3/9/09:  Boston attorney Martha Sperry shares an interesting perspective on the AmLaw article on her blog Advocate’s Studio.]

If you are an iPhone user looking to add or upgrade Wi-Fi in your home or office, Apple released two new products this week that will be of interest to you.  First, Apple updated its 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.  Before talking about what is new, let me start by discussing the prior version of this product.

The prior version of the AirPort Extreme offered two types of bands.  First, there was the slower 2.4 GHz band.  This band can be used with the older Wi-Fi standards of 802.11b or 802.11g.  The iPhone, for example, uses 802.11g.  However, on the 2.4 GHz band, you can get interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens, nearby industrial sites or wireless cameras.  Second, there was the faster 5 GHz band.  The newer 802.11n can use this band, and 802.11n on 5 Ghz can be five times or more faster than 802.11g on 2.4 GHz.  With the older AirPort Extreme (which is what I use for Wi-Fi at my house), you had to choose either the 2.4 GHz band or the 5 GHz band.  For anyone with an iPhone, this is no choice at all because the iPhone can only use 802.11g, which only works on 2.4 GHz.  Thus, even though I have other devices in my house that can take advantage of 802.11n and 5 GHz (specifically, other Apple computers and an Apple TV), I need to keep my AirPort Extreme in 2.4 GHz mode to maintain computability with both my iPhone and the Dell laptop provided to me by my law firm which only has 802.11g.

With the new version of the AirPort Extreme, you no longer need to choose because the new AirPort Extreme allows simultaneous dual-band support.  It does this by including two radios in the unit, one which provides a 2.4 GHz network that your iPhone and older computers can use, and one which provides a 5 GHz band network that your new computers and other devices such as an Apple TV can use.  The new AirPort Extreme also includes other new features, such as a guest networking feature that allows guests to use your Wi-Fi for the Internet but not have access to devices on your network such as hard drives, printers, etc.  The new AirPort Extreme costs $179.00, the same price as the prior version.

The second item that Apple updated this week is called the Time Capsule.  The Time Capsule is nothing more than an AirPort Extreme that also includes an internal hard drive (either 500 GB or 1 terabyte) which you can use to automatically backup your Apple computers using software that comes with every Mac called Time Machine.  The new version of the Time Capsule adds simultaneous dual-band support.  The price remains the same:  $299.00 for 500 GB or $499.00 for 1 TB.

The updates to the AirPort Extreme and the Time Capsule are great for people who own an iPhone, and frankly I’m a little envious.  I would love to have both 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network for my iPhone and Dell laptop and simultaneously have the faster 5 GHz network for my Macs and my Apple TV.  I recently switched from using DSL to a cable modem at my house because with DSL I was only getting speeds of around 4 Mbps whereas with a cable modem I now see speeds at my house of up to 20 Mbps — downloads now just zip, and I can use products like Citrix to access my work environment on my home computer at top speed.  But I can only get that top speed on the iMac in my study that I have connected via Ethernet cable to my AirPort Extreme.  The other computers and the Apple TV in my house use 802.11g Wi-Fi and don’t see much additional speed beyond what I was getting with DSL.

If you want to learn more about Apple’s new AirPort Extreme and what it means for your home or office network, I have two words for you:  Glenn Fleishman.  Fleishman, who runs the respected Wi-Fi Networking News site, is perhaps the preeminent expert on all things Wi-Fi.  Earlier this week, he posted a nice overview of the new features on the TidBITS website, followed by an expanded analysis on the Macworld website.  And if you want to learn more about Wi-Fi on Apple products, there is no better source than Fleishman’s Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, an e-book that you can download in PDF format instantly for only $15 and which covers everything that you might want to know in a very easy to read format.  It’s really a great book that taught me a lot and which I use as a resource whenever I want to do anything involving Wi-Fi.

Amazon has been getting a lot of press lately with the new version of the Kindle.  If you don’t mind reading books on your iPhone screen — which is much smaller, but has color, more contrast, a much brighter screen and is back-lit so you can read in a dark room —  Amazon has released Kindle for iPhone, a free app that allows you to read any of the hundreds of thousands of books available at the Amazon Kindle Store on your iPhone.  You can’t actually buy a book using the iPhone app, but you can use Safari on your iPhone to access the Amazon Kindle Store website (the app itself even gives you a link that opens up Safari).

   
 

There are lots of free public domain books for the Kindle if you want to download the free app and get a feel for what it is like.  Here is a a link to free books in the Kindle Store that can get you started.

Once you buy a book, when you start the Kindle for iPhone app any books you purchased are listed.  Just tap a book to start reading it. 

The books appear full screen, and you can swipe your finger left or right to go through the book page by page.  Or, you can tap once on the screen to pull up an overlay with buttons to do things like add a bookmark (the plus sign), go to a specific section of the book, or increase or decrease the font.

   

If you own a Kindle, you can use technology that Amazon
calls Whispersync to switch back and forth between your Kindle and your
iPhone.  Both devices remember your bookmarks and remember where you
stopped reading, so you can pick up reading again on either device.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I’ve always been intrigued by it.  The Kindle for iPhone app will be a nice way to get a feel for what it is like to read digital books.  I wonder whether reading a long book on my iPhone screen would start to strain my eyes after a while, but as you can see from the screenshots above, the font looks like it would be quite easy to read for an extended period of time.  We’ll see.

[UPDATE:  Good sources for more information on this app include articles posted today by Harry McCracken (Technologizer), Glenn Fleishman (TidBITS), Brad Stone (New York Times), Jeremy Horwitz (iLounge) and Nicole Lee (CNET).  I’ve seen conflicting reports on whether this app will eventually handle newspapers or other sources besides books; right now, the app just handles books.  I’ve also seen conflicting reports on whether the text in books can use hyphens to better fit the iPhone screen; McCracken says no but Fleishman says yes, and both use pictures to back up their positions.]

Click here to download Kindle for iPhone (free): 

If you are an attorney who likes to drink wine and you want to keep
track of what you like, or if you just want help picking out an
impressive bottle during your next dinner with a client, there are
quite a few wine-related apps for the iPhone.  Ben Boychuk reviews five
of them for Macworld, and his review is here.  His favorite for keeping track of wines that you like is Wine Pad 2, and his favorite for wine reviews and recommendations is Drync Wine.  I have also seem some good reviews of the similar Cor.kz Wine Info.  Both Drync Wine and Cor.kz are iPhone apps that require an Internet connection to access an online database — which for Drync Wine has over 800,000 wines, and for Cor.kz has over 530,000
wines.

Another option is to use the Hello Vino web app.  Just use Safari on your iPhone to go to http://i.hellovino.com and get some help picking out a wine.  This one is limited and aimed at novices, but it is free.

I haven’t spent enough time with these to make my own recommendation, but if you have any favorites, please let me know.

Click here to get Wine Pad 2 ($2.99): 

Click here to get Drync Wine ($3.99): 

Click here to get Cor.kz Wine Info ($4.99): 

My experiences with the camera on my iPhone are decidedly mixed.  If I am outside and have lots of light, and hold the iPhone very steady, I can sometimes get pretty good pictures.  Without those conditions, the picture quality varies from just okay to quite poor.  But despite this, I still take lots of pictures with my iPhone because first, it is always with me, and second, I like that it automatically geotags photos with longitude and latitude so that I can later find out where I was when I took a picture.  For example, my wife and I are anything but gamblers, but we were in Las Vegas with friends earlier this year and I was lucky enough to hit a jackpot — 4,345 times my bet!  Before you get too excited, I should disclose that I was only playing a penny slot machine (did I mention we are not big gamblers?), so we are only talking about $43.45.  But it was still a fun moment, and I was glad to be able to capture it with my iPhone:

I have been thinking about the iPhone as a camera because I ran across interesting pair of posts on Gizmodo.  First, one person was upset about the quality of the pictures that he took with an iPhone when he had the front row at a Bruce Springsteen concert.  But as the author points out, he wasn’t allowed to use a real camera at the concert, so in my mind the iPhone pictures still serve as nice memories that wouldn’t exist but for the iPhone, even though the quality is limited.

The second post on Gizmodo points out that, in the right conditions, you can actually get some good pictures on the iPhone.  And what I love about that post is this link to 100 amazing iPhone photos at the website Photocritic.  Quite a few of these pictures are stunning.

Flickr has an interesting search by camera feature that allows you to search for photographs based on the camera that was used to take the picture.  So you can click here to search pictures taken with an iPhone.  And some of them are rather interesting, such as this one, this one and this one with some colorful balls.  And thanks to geotags, I was able to learn that the picture with the balls was taken in Mandeville, Louisiana — which is not too far from where I live.

The iPhone will never compete with my Nikon D50, but a surprising number of photos on my computer were taken with my iPhone.  Because sometimes, you find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you are happy to have that iPhone camera to take pictures like this one.

Do you use Twitter?  Twitter is a free website that allows you to post short messages — no more than 140 characters.  Other people can follow what you post on Twitter, and you can select a group of people that you want to follow.  If this is all new to you, David Pogue of the New York Times recently explained it in this article.

A lot of lawyers use Twitter.  Here is a very incomplete list of hundreds of them.  And it seems that every day I am seeing yet another site talking about lawyers using Twitter.

Notwithstanding the buzz on Twitter being the hot tool for attorneys, I don’t consider it all that relevant to my practice.  On the other hand, it can be something to break up the monotony of a day — the digital equivalent of someone poking their head in my
office to share a thought, tell a quick story, ask a question, say something silly or pass along
breaking gossip or news.  I follow a small group of people on Twitter — a few lawyers, but mostly just people who often post interesting technology-related thoughts.  If I find that I have a minute or so of down time, I will sometimes take a quick look at recent Twitter posts.  I don’t post to my own Twitter account very often, but sometimes I will announce when I add a substantial post on this site.

You can access the Twitter website on your iPhone using Safari (and the site will give you a specially-formatted page for the iPhone screen) but Twitter works much better if you use one of the many dedicated Twitter apps.  And that is the primary reason for my post today:  iLounge recently reviewed all 23 of the iPhone Twitter clients, and they found both gems and stinkers.  I myself use TwitterFon — it works great, and it is free — but check out the iLounge article if you want to learn more about what is out there.

Is Twitter the next big thing for lawyers?  Probably not, but it is fun, and I love that it is so easy to use on the iPhone.

Apparently, Apple doesn’t have much of a sense of humor when it comes to what a developer can say about its iPhone app on iTunes.  Click here for more info from Mobile Orchid.