Five apps that make life easier

Bay Area lawyer Morgan Smith recently wrote about four iOS apps that make his life easier, and the article got me thinking. (Hat tip to iPhone J.D.) In the past I’ve over-focused on law-related apps without really realizing that non-law-related apps can also make life easier for attorneys. Here are some I use regularly.

• Intellicast is the best weather app I’ve found. It’s usually the first app I open in the morning so I know what lies ahead for the day. Good data, well presented, and I don’t feel like I have to hunt to find a view I’m looking for (I’m talking to you, Weather Channel app). It’s free, which makes it even nicer. (iPhone version available)
• Clock Pro HD features all sorts of different clocks: world time zones, alarms, cooking timers, a chess clock, even a metronome and sunrise/sunset and tide times. It costs $2.99 and I use it in place of an alarm clock. (iPhone version available)
• Feedly with the demise of Google Reader I need something to manage and read my RSS feeds. This does a nice job, is free, and it looks great as well. (iPhone version available)
• RunKeeper is my exercise-tracking app of choice. Not only does it use the iPhone’s GPS capabilities, it lets me set up specific workouts, use training plans, and more. The fact that it (along with the companion web site) is free is just icing on the cake (that I won’t eat!). (iPhone only)
• Stativity integrates with RunKeeper (and a couple other exercise apps) to let you geek out about the statistics in your exercise. The people at Stativity were good enough to send me a code for a free copy (otherwise it’s $.99) that I’ve taken way too long to review. RunKeeper does a nice job of letting me see the big picture, but Stativity digs into the deep details to let me see more. I can’t imagine not using Stativity, but that’s because I enjoy looking at the stats (probably more than the exercise itself).

How do the last two make my life easier? The ability to look at my stats and accrued miles helps motivate me to get out and run. I can tell myself all the medical reasons I should do it, but it’s knowing that I’ll add to my numbers and I can look at the new data that gets me out the door. It’s bass ackwards, but it gets the job done.

What apps do you use regularly to make life a little easier? Leave a comment or write a blog post and link back to this one.

 

Comprehensive list of iPad apps for lawyers and paralegals

The Indiana Law Blog has noted that Indianapolis-based law librarian Cheryl Niemeier has written a wonderful article. It appears in the new issue of Res Gestae, the Indiana State Bar Association’s monthly publication. The ISBA has given ILB permission to make the article available as a PDF. Do check it out.

Lift up your productivity

A new app for the iPad and iPhone, Lift, may be just the mind hack to help your productivity—or any other number of things that you want to do each day, like exercise.

Lift is an app that helps implement Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” method. If you’re not familiar with it, the story goes something like this:

A fellow comedian asked Jerry Seinfeld how he could write better jokes. Seinfeld explained that to write better jokes, you have to write every day. Seinfeld said he gets a large monthly calendar and puts it on the wall. Every day he writes, he gets to put a big red X through that date on the calendar. After a while, according to Seinfeld, you have a chain of red Xs, and your brain likes to see it. All you have to do is not break the chain.

One of the problems with Seinfeld’s method is that it works for only one thing. Many of us have more than one thing that we want to do every day. While putting multiple calendars on the wall is one option, the Lift app lets you put in multiple goals. Each day you can “check in” to show you’ve done that item for the day.

Lift also lets you see your progress in a pseudo-calendar form, along with the length of your streak.

 When you consider that this app is free, it’s hard to pass up. Whether your goal is to exercise every day, return all client calls before leaving the office, or just remembering to say thank you to your staff, Lift can help you out. The app isn’t perfect (some feel it’s too “social,” but I just ignore that part of it), but it’s the best looking and most useful one I’ve found in this genre.

The app is designed for the iPhone (it’s not universal), so it may look a little jaggy if you use it on an iPad at full screen size. On my third gen iPad, it looks quite acceptable.

More data geekery

Earlier this week I wrote about a few of my favorite geeky apps that explore the way we tell time. Today, in honor of a sunny Friday (at least here in South Bend, Indiana), I want to introduce you to some more wonderful apps that will satisfy your inner geek.

The Wolfram|Alpha web site is a computational engine. Type in something you need to calculate or know about, and the engine parses your entry to figure out what you’re looking for. (For example, you could type in, “How many feet in a mile?” or “Number of feet in a mile,” and it will understand these two queries seek the same thing.) Wolfram|Alpha has been kind enough to create a whole series of mobile apps—available across most current platforms. In addition to front-end apps for the Wolfram|Alpha computational engine, there are apps for particular tasks or fields. For example, there are course assistant apps to help your kids with their chemistry or calculus. There are also reference apps with data on planets, tides, or gaming odds.

If you are a network administrator or an attorney, Wolfram|Alpha has an app for you as well. There are also personal interest apps like genealogy. Really, there are so many apps that it’s worth your while to review the offerings.

What I love about these apps is simple: the amount of information they bring (literally) to your fingertips. Type in the name of a spacecraft, and you’ll see its orbit path over the earth.

Click to enlarge

Need data on unemployment rates in particular cities? The app will get it without even breaking a sweat.

Click to make big

The apps range in price from $.99 to $4.99. For the money, you can’t find a better resource for, well, everything. You could spend hours and hours just asking questions of the app and watching what comes back. Download an app or two and make your inner geek happy. You’ll be glad you did.

Time geekery

Photo by Clem Rutter

Whether we like to admit it or not, all of us as lawyers keep track of our time (or at least we should—even those who do contingent fee cases ought to track time in case there’s ever a question about whether a fee is reasonable). We use a variety of tools for this purpose. Some of us use old fashioned pencil and paper, some of us plug the information into a simple spreadsheet, others use desktop or mobile apps to tie into our time and billing software. Time affects all lawyers, even as we move forward through it.

But what is time, really? A simple definition (as noted by Wikipedia) is that time is what clocks measure. But how did we end up with clocks measuring time? What did people use before clocks? What about days? How did we end up with 24 hours in a day? Sixty minutes in an hour? Sixty seconds in a minute?

The point of the preceding paragraphs is not to embark on some philosophical discussion of time or explore the history of it. Rather, the introduction is designed to see if you are at all fascinated by time and its measurement. If so, read on. (If not, read on anyway in case you know someone who might be interested in the apps I’m about to introduce to you.)

A couple of gents who are fascinated by time have created Emerald Sequoia, LLC. They have released some fascinating iPhone and iPad apps that will appeal to the time geek in all of us.

For the iPad, one of the most beautiful apps you will encounter is Emerald Observatory. Even though this app doesn’t have a lot to do with the practice of law, it’s one of my favorites. It’s eye candy for the most part, but it provides a ton information as well. For $.99, it’s hard to imagine a better way to spend your dollar. At it’s simplest, Emerald Observatory is a clock.

Click to knock your eyes out.

It is also a source of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, which some call Greenwich Mean Time), sidereal time, solar time, moon phases, when planets rise and set, and more. It even has an eclipse simulator you can play with, not to mention showing the parts of the earth that are in darkness and light with the earth’s revolutions and sunlight. Photographers will love the fact that this app also tells you when the “golden hours” are in a given day. Want to know when the sun hits its highest point on its path through the sky? This app will tell you. It can also tell you where to find the moon in the sky, using good old fashioned altitude and azimuth. The app’s web page could be used as a basic primer on time, the motion of the sun, moon, and planets, and more.

If there’s one app guaranteed to be running just so I don’t have to look at a black screen when using my iPad, it’s Emerald Observatory. It looks great when I have my iPad sitting in my stand on my desk. Get Emerald Observatory in the iTunes App Store. (Only for the iPad. I’ll bet it looks stunning on the Retina display!)

Another fabulous app from Emerald Sequoia is Emerald Chronometer. This app comes in both HD (for the iPad) and regular (for the iPhone and iPod touch) versions. I know this app looks great on the Retina display on my iPhone, so I’m sure it looks great on the iPad’s Retina display as well. The images below come from the HD version of the app. But I digress…

If you love wristwatches, Emerald Chronometer is for you. Rather than wearing just one watch, you can have sixteen beautiful watches in your pocket. The watches all have a variety of functions, and a number of them feature front and reverse faces that serve different purposes. The Olympia watch, for example, has a front face that looks similar to high end watches, and a reverse face that features a stop watch. (Click either picture to enlarge.)

If you’re traveling through various time zones, the Terra watch will appeal to you. (Click either picture to embiggenate.)

These are only two of the sixteen different watches, but you get the idea. These are beautiful in design, useful in function, and cheaper than the Rolex or Tag Heuer you’ve been eyeing. The HD version for your iPad is $4.99, while the regular one for your iPhone or iPod touch is $1.99. For a mere $.99, you can buy the single-watch Geneva version for your iPhone or iPod touch, but trust me: go ahead and spend the extra buck to get all of them.

Emerald Sequoia also makes a couple of utilities that may not be gorgeous like Observatory or Chronometer, but definitely have function. If you’ve ever wondered whether the clock in your iPad or iPhone is accurate, Emerald Time will tell you. This app goes out to pull the time from a handful of Internet time servers, averages them, and compares the result to your device’s internal clock. It can’t reset the internal clock for you, but you’ll at least know whether it’s off. (I believe that iPads with the cellular data option can connect to the cellular network—even without a data plan in place—and set the clock accordingly.) Emerald Time is free in the App Store.

Emerald Timestamp is a tool for…well…stamping time. Launch the app, hit the stamp button when a particular event occurs, and fill in the details. Voila, you have a log of events. (Love the Billy Joel reference in this photo, don’t you?) It’s sold for $.99 in the App Store.

As you can see, these are some great apps for anyone who has any interest at all in time, clocks, or related topics. The apps all work well, and I don’t think I’ve ever had one of them crash on me. If I have one complaint, it’s that the guys at Emerald Sequoia don’t put out cool apps like these more often. I can understand their plight, however. Both of them appear to have real day jobs, so coding these apps is more of a hobby for them. It would be nice if they could update their blog more regularly (but I’m hardly one to criticize on that point).

Do you have these apps already? What do you like about them? Leave a comment and let us know.

Cool app for iPhone photos

Disclosure: The maker of this app, FlashPowder, LLC, is a client of mine.

Normally I wouldn’t hawk or shill for a client’s product, but this is cool enough that I thought it worth bringing to your attention.

Many of us use the iPhone as a primary, everyday camera. With the iPhone 4S having an 8 megapixel camera, it’s hard not to pull it out when a photo moment arises. Still, having photos on a phone or even an iPad isn’t quite the same as having prints. You can print them out on your color printer, but they usually look like they came off of an ink jet printer.

Enter FlashPowder. This app lets you browse your photo library, find a shot you’d really like to have in a high quality print (to give as a gift, frame, etc.), and order that high quality print right from your phone. The company gets the order, prints it to your specs (4×6 to huge canvases are available), and ships it to you. The idea is brilliant, and I’m surprised no one had thought of it before.

The app is free, and the printing rates seem reasonable to me (but then I have limited knowledge in this area, so I defer to your judgment). Again, this is a client of mine so assume there’s some possible puffery here. I hope, however, you’ll check it out and decide for yourself.

New lawyer app: rulebook

Every year our office has a small, quiet ritual. Your office probably does as well. Books containing the rules of court we use in our practice are replaced with the new year’s editions. When my new set of books showed up this year, I became a little irritated. When I started practicing law back in 1991, the rules of court produced by Thomson West could fit into a single volume–both Indiana and federal rules.

Now, we have five volumes that take up close to a foot of shelf space:

When I saw all these books and thought about how much paper they consumed, I wished that I had learned to write code so I could create an app that would let me carry all this stuff in my iPad or iPhone.

One lawyer must have had similar thoughts. Greg Hoole is an attorney in Utah, and he created an app for attorneys that I highly recommend: rulebook. The app itself is free, and from within the app you can purchase certain rule sets or download the Federal Rules of Evidence for free. The cost of a rule set is $.99, so it’s wonderfully cost-effective.

What helps set rulebook apart from its competition is the fact that you can treat it like you would a paper version of the rules. You can highlight sections (there are a few different highlight colors to choose from), make notes on sections, and bookmark sections. (By sections I mean blocks of text—from a few words to as many paragraphs as you want.) You can also search for terms, and the app uses hyperlinks to let you jump from one rule to another when rules are cross-referenced. You can also browse by simply swiping the “page” forward or backward, which is a nice touch.

One nice feature of this app is that you only need an Internet connection when you are downloading a new rule set. Otherwise, your rules are on your device to use whenever you need them. The app works on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and looks great on all of the devices.

If I have one criticism of the app it is that right now its rule sets are limited to largely the usual states: California, New York, Texas, and the not-so-usual state of Utah. (The federal court local rules for these states are also available.) If your practice involves regular work in the federal courts, the app is handy—especially if you practice in one of those four states. Because I practice in Indiana, the app is useful only for its federal rules sets. Greg Hoole indicates that more rule sets are on the way, which is good news. At the same time, of course, lawyers in various states are going to have to wonder when their state will become available. Until then, we will have to be content with PDFs of our rules I suppose.

Rule books (and apps) are only as useful if they are current, and the app’s producers say that they will add updates in a timely fashion. Keeping up with rule changes in 50 states and 92 federal court districts could be a massive undertaking, but it is something that will be necessary to keep lawyers continually using the app.

In a nutshell, rulebook gets one thumb up from me. If Indiana and the other states were available now, I’d give it two thumbs up. I understand, though, that it takes time to put the rule sets in, and you have to launch the app at some point even if it seems incomplete. Otherwise, you’d never get it out the door.

I will anxiously await the Indiana rule sets (hint hint hint) and use it in the meantime for my federal practice.

iPad and iPhone apps for lawyers, yet another list

The people over at Attorney at Work have compiled their list of top apps for lawyers using iPhones and iPads. Many of them are familiar, but there are a few there I will need to go check out.

iPads in jury selection

It wasn’t too long after the iPad’s introduction that enterprising lawyers developed apps to use in jury selection. I have not purchased or used any of the apps that are out there, mostly because the information I could obtain about the apps didn’t tell me much about what they could really do for me.

Ken Broda-Bahm has a short piece and a 15-minute video review of two iPad apps for use in voir dire. The reviews are thorough, and he establishes criteria to use in measuring the apps in terms of usefulness.

At this point, I have my doubts about whether we will ever see an iPad app for jury selection that really works well. The reason for my doubts is simple: the approach to jury selection is almost unique to each lawyer. Some use the grid and Post-It note system discussed in the video. Some use simple legal pad note taking. I think it would be hard to develop an app that would allow attorneys to voir dire the potential jurors in their own way, and not force the attorneys to adapt to the app’s system. To cover all of the possible approaches and philosophies (not to mention personal habits) would be daunting.

Of course, no system is perfect, so I shouldn’t expect an iPad app to be perfect either. The secret to success in the app world so far seems to be to do one thing and do it really, really well. Maybe the secret for developers looking to create an app for jury selection is to take one part of the process (perhaps recording information gathered from questionnaires, Internet research, and the other tasks done in the days before trial) and to do that well.

iPad app Noteshelf gets major update

I wrote about Noteshelf back in October, and if there has been a reason to wait before trying this app, those reasons must be gone. Noteshelf is a note-taking app that lets you use a stylus (or your finger in a pinch) to take written notes. You organize your notes into notebooks, and the notebooks are organized on a shelf-like browser. Notebooks can be collected into groups as well.

Noteshelf has just hit version 5.0, and it has added a huge feature: typed text. If you prefer to take notes using a keyboard (or a particular situation calls for not using a stylus), Noteshelf has you covered. There are plenty of other new features, including another big one: the ability to use tags in your notebooks.

Notebook is still only $4 (US) in the App Store, and it is now even more useful for attorneys who want to dump the paper legal pad.