A little Christmas eve treat for anyone who is frustrated by the rather lame integration between DropBox and Apple’s iWork suite on the iPad.

Your standard options for importing files into iWork apps are fairly limited (as you can see from this screenshot).

If the file is stored in your DropBox then you can open the DropBox app and then use the “open with” option to get it into the iWorks app, but there isn’t an easy way to sync it back again. If you change the file on your iPad then the DropBox version will be out of date.

Enter a service called DropDAV. This is a very simple service (at least from a user perspective) which allows you to upload and download files from DropBox using the “Copy to/from WebDAV” options in the iWorks apps.

You simply enter your DropBox credentials and DropDAV then emails you the login link to use. Just click on the “copy from WebDAV” or “copy to WebDAV” option in any iWorks app and enter this link and your DropBox credentials. You can then copy to or from anywhere in your DropBox file structure direct from the app thus keeping the copy on your iPad and in DropBox the same.

The price is calculated as 30% of your DropBox plan price. So if your DropBox plan is free then WebDAV is also free.

This solves a really annoying “missing link” in iWorks and has made it much easier for me to import Keynote presentations onto the iPad, edit them and save the changes back to DropBox.

The only thing I can’t vouch for is the security of passing on your DropBox credentials in this way (although most of the other apps which use DropBox as storage or for syncing require you to do so).

I have researched this as much as I can and nobody has reported any security concerns, but if you have sensitive or valuable information in DropBox then I guess you need to think carefully about this.

Thanks to everyone who has read this blog during 2010. Best wishes for the holidays… hopefully with the launch of iPad 2 and some interesting competitors like the RIM Playbook 2011 will be a very exciting year for iPad lawyers everywhere!

I was interested to see Kevin O'Keefe (CEO of the LexBlog blog network) endorsing the iPad this morning as “a wonderful client and professional development tool”.

I always look out for Kevin’s posts in my RSS feed so when he suggests that an iPad is the perfect Christmas present I am inclined to pay attention (although it may be worth bearing in mind the likely arrival of the iPad 2 next year).

Find out why Kevin is such a fan here.

One of the most obvious uses of the iPad should be for law texts and reference books.

These are typically bulky, heavy tomes which aren’t easily portable. If you could transfer your whole bookshelf to the iPad and have it with you at all times, then why wouldn’t you?

LexisNexis have now made some of their books available as eBooks and have kindly let me have an eBook copy of Tolley’s Employment Law Handbook to review on the iPad.

The books aren’t available from the Apple iBook store so you have to download them from LexisNexis to your computer and then transfer them to the iPad. This is a simple drag and drop via iTunes if you want to add the book to iBooks (although it is best to read the rest of the this post first) or via the iTunes USB file transfer if you are using another eBook reader.

The book is in the ePub format, which means it is difficult to give a definitive review because the reading experience depends so much on which app you use to read it.

The most obvious choice is Apple’s own iBooks, but I found this to be almost unusable for a book of this size as it slows to a crawl when opening the book and for a minute or two afterwards.

The reason for this is that ePub books don’t have “pages” as such. It is a reflowable text format, which means that the amount of text on each “page” will depend on which eBook reader and settings you use.

It seems that iBooks calculates this for the whole book each time you open it or change settings (or change the iPad orientation). This process causes a progress bar to appear which slows iBooks almost to a standstill. On a normal novel you don’t notice this as it doesn’t take that long and you are generally reading one page at a time in order. By the time the indexing finishes you have probably only read a couple of pages and haven’t really noticed the slowdown.

For a textbook which is several thousand pages long and used as a reference rather than being read cover to cover it is a serious issue as it slows down searching and finding subjects in the index to an unacceptable crawl. I timed the process and it can take up to three minutes to open the book, search for a term and select the relevant page.

Luckily there is an answer. Stanza is a free eBook reader for iPhone and iPad which reads ePub books and doesn’t have the same speed issues as iBooks. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I think it only counts the pages in your current section and not the whole book.

Using Stanza the book presents a totally different experience. It is easy to browse the table of contents and index or search for terms. It all zips along pretty quickly without any noticeable lag.

You can add your own bookmarks and annotations and it is easy to select and copy text. This is very useful now that IOS 4.2 allows you to switch to another app like an email or document and paste text into it (copyright permitting of course!).

Stanza also allows quite a bit of flexibility in the formatting of the book. This includes not just the font, but also line spacing, margins, justification etc. Because the ePub format is similar to XHTML much of what you seen on the screen is a function of how your reader presents different formatting (body text, heading levels etc.) and it is also possible for publishers to use a form of CSS to dictate formatting so it may be possible for more “polished” formatting to be introduced as the market matures.

I still find that eBooks in Stanza don’t quite have the polished look which you expect from content on the iPad, but they are certainly functional. Freed from the iBooks startup lag it is much quicker to find a search term and hit the relevant page than it is with the paper copy of the book.

It is also possible to convert the eBooks into Kindle format if that is your thing (Lexis Nexis have instructions on their website) and Google have recently launched an eBook reader which may be a workable alternative to iBooks and Stanza.

Of course, you can also use your laptop or desktop to view the eBooks. I don’t know about other publishers, but the LexisNexis DRM allows the licensed user to install the books on their mobile and desktop devices.

Ultimately, I don’t believe that the ePub format as it is currently used allows law eBooks to reach their full potential. What I would really like to see is a more powerful format which allowed:

• Collaborative bookmarking and annotations (see what comments other lawyers in your firm have made on the book)

• Push updates from the publisher as they become available so the text is always current

• Ability to link to standard documents and resources on your firm’s own know-how system

• A great looking and lightning fast interface which delivered a true iDevice experience and wasn’t so dependent on the reader app used

I don’t know how much of this is dependent on the reader app and how much could be done by better use of the ePub format, but if someone could deliver this I believe it would drive a huge uptake in eLaw books.

For now though, eBooks on the iPad are still a worthwhile format… the prices of the LexisNexis ones come in at less than the paper equivalent and you can carry a whole library in your briefcase.

If you own an iPad and you are considering updating a law text I would recommend checking if it is available as an eBook first.

The focus of this blog has always been on using the iPad in practice and how it really works for lawyers.

Because of this I decided that rather than post a review of IOS 4.2 on the iPad the day it was released I would wait for a while until I had a chance to see how it worked in real life.

I already posted on the upgrade to Apple’s iWork suite for the iPad, but apart from this, how big a difference has IOS 4.2 made to the iPad?

The biggest feature for me is the introduction of “multitasking” (although I appreciate it isn’t multitasking in the true sense).

I am writing this blog using Elements from Second Gear Software, a great text editor featured on Tablet Legal recently which allows you to preview text in Markdown – very handy for writing blog posts.

IOS 4.2 multitasking lets me switch from Elements to Safari to cut and paste links (and check a few facts!) without losing the work on the post… and this in itself is enough to make the iPad much more attractive for writing blog posts.

This applies to an even greater degree with legal documents and correspondence… the ability to switch to Safari or an eBook law text and cut and paste into what I am working on makes a huge difference to productivity.

I have had a few teething troubles with multitasking (in particular the WiFi file download in iAnnotate seems to get “stuck” when you switch away from the app and require a forced exit before it will reconnect), but generally it is all very familiar from IOS 4.0 on the iPhone and works pretty smoothly.

What else is good apart from multitasking?

The integration with MobileMe Calendar is much neater and the threaded emails and unified inbox in Mail are very welcome… if hardly game changing.

AirPrint would be a great feature if it actually worked with printers on your local network rather than a few select HP printers. Luckily, Printopia (which I have previously blogged about) steps into the breach to fix this… Heaven knows why Apple couldn’t just have done it themselves though.

There are a few “so what?” features (for me at least). Game Centre I would just like to delete (you can’t, but at least with IOS 4.2 you can dump it into a folder called “Pointless” or something).

Speaking of folders, the jury is still out on this for me. I have quite a few folders on my iPhone, but on the iPad I have left most of my apps to stand alone on the home screen. I don’t really like the look of folders and I don’t have a ridiculous number of apps so I generally just try and keep the ones I use most on the first couple of home screens. If you use a lot of apps though it may be useful.

AirPlay seems like a good idea in theory, but I don’t really have much music on my iPad and I tend to use it the other way round… using the Remote App to stream music and movies from my main iMac to Apple TV or AirTunes speakers. If you could stream from your computer to the iPad it would be much more interesting.

I can’t end this review without referring to what seems to be Apple’s least popular decision of all… to change the hardware lock switch from orientation lock (as under IOS 3) to a mute switch.

This seems to have generated a lot of debate, but personally I find the mute switch more useful as I use the iPad in a lot of meetings. If I want to use the orientation lock then I will be in an app anyway and it isn’t a problem to scroll across to the software lock… whereas with the mute switch I often just want to kill the sound without even unlocking the device so to me it makes sense. I know that you could do the same thing with the volume switch, but I prefer to have the orange mark as a visual confirmation that the iPad isn’t going to chirp at me at an embarrassing moment.

For me, IOS 4.2 is a great improvement to the iPad, but it is a case of evolution rather than revolution. This is especially true because of the time I have had to get used to IOS 4 on the iPhone.

However, I always thought that multitasking was essential for the iPad to work as a serious business tool… and in this respect IOS 4.2 really delivers. I think Apple are right on this… it may not be multitasking in the true sense, but it delivers what I need in terms of fast switching and persistent data in my apps – so does it really matter?