Electric Lawyer

Marking up books (in iBook, that is)

It's a big no-no to highlight and annotate a book, right? Wrong. Not when it's from iBook. Here are a couple of shots of The Federalist Papers (free) on my iPad, marked up to my heart's content.

Neat, huh? I love my iPad!

The iPad: a digital photo frame on acid

Michael Norris, a senior trade analyst at Simba Information, called the iPad "a digital photo frame on acid." It's the best description I've heard yet. I love my iPad, no matter what President Obama says, and one of the reasons I love it is because of its ability to allow my reading experience to be so rich and multidimensional.

Right now I'm reading Sue Roe's The Private Lives of the Impressionists on my iPad. It's a wonderful book, but it has no images. So I created a database, using Bento (about which I have written much) to collect images of paintings. Here are a couple of pics which I hope will illustrate what I've done.

The Private Lives of the Impressionists on iBooks, with highlights.

My Art database created using Bento.

As I read the book, I can switch to the database and study the image. I can also put in notes from the book into the database (though not through cut and paste).

Geotagging photos cheaply

Since getting iPhoto '09 with its incredibly cool Places feature I've been trying to geotag all my photos. I knew of three ways of doing it: 1) take all my pics with the iPhone, which is convenient but wouldn't do for quality shots; 2) invest in a DSLR with geotagging (expensive); or 3) use the Eye-Fi Explore, a $105 SD card that uses wi-fi triangulation. I opted for the third, but was not satisifed with the accuracy.

Along came Don McAllister's podcast (Screencasts Online) and he showcased a two-app solution that cost a total of $32.99 and does the trick very nicely. The first tool is Trails, a $2.99 iPhone app which allows recording and exporting of tracks using the iPhone. It's pretty neat all by itself, but used together with HoudahGeo, it allows geotagging of non-iPhoto pics.

Maybe this is a little hard to understand. Click on the hyperlinks above, especially the HoudahGeo one, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Showing off a Bento 2 Database

After about a week of learning Bento 2, I created a database (Library) to manage my cases. Caveat: I have a small true-solo practice, doing only criminal appeals. The same Bento database cannot be used by more than one person, so there are real limitations in my little example. Here are the shots of the three pages of the Clients Library. Page 1 holds the basic information, Page 2 more related records, and Page 3 expense information pulled from a related library.

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

iPhone Magic: Shazam

Another magical free iPhone app. Put your iPhone close to a stereo and it "listens" to the song, identifies it, then lets you tag it, play a related YouTube video, buy it on iTunes. Hard to believe? I just had it listen to an Atahualpa Yupanqui song (Argentine poet/musician, very obscure). Identified the song AND took me to the video.

Pure unadulterated magic. Believe.