***UPDATE – Please note that a video is posted in the comments below purporting to be TrialPad displaying the wrong exhibit on the display than that shown on the iPad. I have been in direct contact with the developers of TrialPad and neither they nor myself are able to reproduce this alleged “defect”. Upon closer examination, it appears the creator of this post and YouTube video is actually the developer of a competitor to TrialPad. I am currently investigating this and I will update this post accordingly.***
Hot on the heels of our review of Exhibit A, the first trial presentation app for the iPad to do callouts of exhibits, comes TrialPad’s new version, 2.0. Remember we interviewed the lead developer of TrialPad, Ian O’Flaherty, at the ABA TechShow 2011 where he showed us some amazing features such as multiple callouts of one exhibit as well as what has to be the best highlighting of documents (now with green, blue and pink highlights) of any trial presentation app for the iPad. Well Ian and the rest of the TrialPad team have been quite busy because they have a host of new features in version 2.0 that quite honestly make it well worth the wait. So let’s get down to what I think are the best new features.
CALLOUTS AND SPLIT SCREEN
As mentioned in our review of Exhibit A, any app which attempts to call itself a trial presentation app has to do callouts. These are the zoom in boxes attorneys use to ‘callout’ certain areas of an exhibit, say paragraph 3 of a document, so that the jury can focus on a particular part of the exhibit. While Exhibit A was the first to offer this ability but did so with some bugs, TrialPad has executed this feature flawlessly. Callouts are as simple as selecting the callout tool from the toolbox menu at the top of the screen and using your finger to select the area to zoom in on. What sets TrialPad apart from Exhibit A is the ability to not only do multiple callouts on one document, but to do have two documents on the screen (split screen) and do callouts from each of the exhibits simultaneously. Each callout can be moved around to difference positions on the screen by dragging with your finger.
As you can see, this sort of thing is imperative if you want to compare and contrast two versions of a document, say a contract, and bring the difference between them to the jury’s attention. In the example above you will notice that the annotations made to the underlying exhibit are shown in the callout as well (this has been lacking in some other apps which do callouts).
One suggestion I have however is that because TrialPad automatically sizes the callouts to the width of the screen, it can be a bit confusing when you have two callouts from separate exhibits to know which document each came from originally (since they are both the same size). One solution might be to have the callouts downsized a bit and shifted either to the right or left depending on from which exhibit it was called out.
Bottom line is that this feature was executed perfectly with TrialPad 2.0.
VIDEO CLIPS
While I knew the ability to play video on TrialPad 2.0 was going to be available, what I didn’t know was that we would be able to make video clips using TrialPad 2.0. Calling up a video is simple as they are accessible in the left hand pane under the “Video” tab. Once a video is selected it is loaded into the presentation area and ready to play. I have so far loaded a 4 GB deposition into TrialPad 2.0 and it literally was brought up instantly and ready to play. Play controls come up over the video just like they would when watching any video on your iPad, along with the ability to ‘push’ the video out to an AppleTV.
What is a surprise however is that below the video are two new icons. One to take a snapshot of the video from wherever the playhead is and the other to create a clip of the video. This is nice if you want to create a snapshot of a part of a video or want to create a clip on the fly of a portion of a deposition. When you press the clip button a “filmstrip” of the video opens up with the standard yellow brackets used by iMovie and the built-in video function of the iPAd, allowing you to trim your video to only play a certain portion of the video. The only problem is that the size of the editing window is a bit too small and it takes a couple of tries sometimes to get the clip to “trim” to exactly where you want it. Once you’re done trimming the video though, the resultant clip is saved in your list of Videos as a clip and you can use the edit button to rename the clip to anything you want. This is a killer feature and to be honest, one I hadn’t thought of putting into a trial presentation app on the iPad for fear the hardware could not handle it (forgetting that the iPad already lets you trim videos in the Video app and iMovie already).
WHITEBOARD
The other nice addition to TrialPad 2.0 and one which is certainly available in other trial presentation apps is a blank whiteboard for drawing. This was a feature TrialPad had to include in the new version and it has all of the standard features you would expect: multi-colored drawing pens with variable widths, the ability to erase and undo drawings and the ability to save the whiteboard, email it or add it to DropBox directly from TrialPad 2.0. This feature is quickly becoming a standard feature in these apps and it’s good to see TrialPad getting on board.
KEYNOTE VIEWING
While most developers will not understand why, TrialPad’s new feature of allowing keynote presentations to be displayed in TrialPad 2.0 is probably one of the most welcome for me as a Mac-using trial lawyer and fanatic fan of Apple’s Keynote. I don’t know of any other trial presentation app which will allow you to bring in Keynotes into the app and display them (it shows them slide by slide), annotate on them and save them using the HotDocs feature, but I was really excited when I saw this ability in TrialPad 2.0. Now when I want to bring in portions of my opening and show them to a witness, to demonstrate the jury the credibility of exactly the slide I showed them earlier, I can open my Keynote in TrialPad 2.0 and mark on the actual slide, emphasizing certain parts, etc… this was a really nice touch and another I didn’t expect from the new version.
There are many other new features to TrialPad 2.0, such as importing of PowerPoint slides, multi-page TIF’s, list view of cases, exporting of pages as PDF’s with or without annotations, moving exhibits between cases, multi-colored laser tool (one of my favorites) to name but a few. TrialPad has just risen the bar for other trial presentation apps with all of these new features and it will be exciting to see what this new competition will foster in this growing market!
TrialPad’s initial cost is $89.99, which is certainly higher than any of the other trial presentation apps out there. However, given the attention to detail in the user interface, highlight readability, split screen feature, multi-callout functions, and the rest, $89.99 is certainly worth the cost of the app.
We will be going to trial with TrialPad twice in July so be sure to check back here as we put TrialPad through its paces in a real court-room setting. We are looking forward to what all of these apps have to offer and are now even more excited for the iOS 5 update to come out bringing with it wireless displaying of these apps on the AppleTV.