Typography for Lawyers, Second Edition


There is a strange dichotomy with lawyers and documents. We spend much of our time generating documents and slaving over every word and comma. Yet the documents themselves often look like a blob of Times New Roman mush. Matthew Butterick started his own personal crusade years ago to get lawyers thinking about typography. 

Recently Matthew released the second edition of his book and it’s really great. The new version is full of stylistic and technical advice. I wish every lawyer and judge would buy a copy and think about implementing Matthew’s ideas. If you are in the legal industry, you really should read this book.

Episode 300 today at 2pm PST

Today Katie and I are celebrating a milestone with the Mac Power Users when we record episode 300 at 2pm PST. You can tune in for the live feed right here. For the first time, we are turning the show over to someone else. Myke and Stephen will be questioning us with listener questions. (Just tweet them out with #mpu300 attached.) It should be fun and we’d love to have you in the live audience.

MPU 299: Plex

This week we gave a full show to the Plex service with guest Plex expert, Todd Olthoff. If you’ve got an Apple TV, you’ll really want to listen to this one.

About Removing the iPhone Headphone Connector …

There is a growing list of alleged leaks that the iPhone 7 is going to drop the headphone connector. Here’s the most recent from Fast Company. We’re still probably nine months out from seeing the iPhone 7 so I’m not going to put much stock in these rumors … yet. Speaking hypothetically if the new iPhone does remove the headphone jack, I expect the Internet will shortly after need clean underwear. People went crazy when Apple replaced the 10-year-old 30-pin connector with the Lightning connector a few years back. The current headphone jack is older. Much older. Nevertheless, the outcry in response to removing the headphone jack will be exponentially louder than it was for replacing the 30-pin connector. People are going to go nuts.

I can sympathize. People who are serious about audio most likely have a fancy-pants set of headphones that they paid hundreds (or thousands) for and finding out that investment will no longer plug into their phone will not please them. I often use my earbuds at the same time my phone is charging and if removing the headphone jack means I can do only one at a time, it will be a problem. I’ve heard rumors of inductive charging but I’ll need to be convinced. I know that inductive technology has improved but I wonder if it has improved enough. Also, how would that work for someone that wants to charge her phone in her car and plug it into her car stereo at the same time? Is there going to be a mobile inductive charger or some wonky, expensive cable?

I am generally pretty willing to roll with Apple’s new products upsetting the status quo. If history is any judge where Apple goes, its competitors soon follow. However, if this were to come true and Apple were going to remove the headphone jack, they’d have to convince me of two things:

1. It’s Worth It

Specifically, what are the benefits to removing the headphone jack that justify the effort and expense that will go into adjusting to this change. For me at least, it would have to be more than making the phone slightly thinner. I’m told the internals of those headphone jacks take quite a bit of room. If I could get 2 hours of extra battery life, it’d probably be worth it.

2. They Are Helping with the Transition

I’d need to feel that this isn’t a money grab. The new phones should be bundled with Lightning adapter headphones. Also, Lightning to traditional headphone jack adapters should be sold at non-ridiculous prices. 

Don’t get me wrong about this though. Even if Apple were to convincingly make the above two points, the Internet is still going to blow up with claims of “greedy” Apple. We may have an interesting Fall this year.

Blurring Photos for iOS Wallpaper

I’m not a fan of busy wallpaper on my iPhone and iPad home screen. It’s fine on the lock screen but when you’ve got a screen full of icons, a noisy background image gets in the way. So while I may have something fun in the lock screen, I generally keep things simple behind the home screen. Then I found this image of BB8 from Brazilian artist Jonathan Silva.


star_wars___bb8_minimalist_by_jhonaatan-d9khwst-2.jpg

I started out with a cropped version for my lock screen but I wanted it to carry over into my home screen. For awhile I used a plain orange background cropped from the same image but that wasn’t BB8-ish enough for me. Then I tried using the actual image but had the exact problem described above. Specifically, I couldn’t find icons in it. So I decided to blur the image and it worked splendidly.

The idea occurred to me while I was holding my iPhone so I used Pixelmator as my weapon of choice. I already had the image in my photos library so I loaded it from there and selected the blur tool. The gallery at the bottom of this post walks you through the steps and the image below shows the final product. Now you may not be as enamored with a certain astromech droid as I am, but you may have child or a dog or even a bit of art worthy of the same treatment.


iPhone to iPod

Deron Bos wrote a nice little guide about how to turn your old iPhone into an iPod for your kids. It’s well written and includes instructional videos. If you’d like to repurpose an old iPhone for someone else this way, check it out.

The Steve Jobs Mythos

Since Steve Jobs’ death, he’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and two motion pictures. It seems to me he is increasingly being painted in one dimension. People are eager to give him credit for everything that came out of Apple while at the same time boiling his personality down to nothing more than his worst traits. I never met Steve Jobs but I’ve known several people that did and the story I get from his friends and co-workers is that everything about Steve was the exact opposite of one-dimensional. 

I think part of the problem is that Apple is so secretive that much about Steve at Apple won’t really see the light of day for years to come and outside of Apple, he was very private. Either way, I do hope that at some point we’ll all back away from the caricature that has emerged over the years since his death.

Sponsor: Curbi Parental Controls

The holidays are over and you may know of some little ones with shiny new iOS and Android devices. That’s great. Kids should be using technology. However, they should also be subject to rational limitations. That, however, is easier said than done. Enter curbi

Curbi lets kids enjoy the Internet while at the same time protecting them from the nefarious parts. One of the great things about Curbi is that it protects kids not only your local WiFi network, but also through a cellular connection or at a friend’s house. curbi solves this problem, giving you amazing parental controls for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You can easily block specific types of content or add a specific site list. curbi tracks (and can block) websites through Safari or any other iOS app that has a web browser. Perhaps even more importantly, the curbi blocks will work no matter how they access the Internet, even using their pal’s home WiFi on the other side of town.

curbi also lets you set boundaries. For example, you could block social networks from 3pm to 6pm and the entire Internet from 9pm to 8am. For just $6.99 a month, you can protect all of the iOS devices in your home. curbi is the only service I’ve ever seen that can protect your kids, no matter where they are. Learn more here.