As anyone trying to decide between the two of these apps can tell you, however, the choice is tough. There are pros and cons to each.

New York Times iPad App Is Beautiful…But Give Me Some Structure

Want to hear something great about the NYT’s iPad app: it’s beautiful and feature rich. For whatever reason, the graphics pop off the screen and the articles feel easier to read than other apps, and particularly the Wall Street Journal app. Another thing going for the New York Times app is the features. If you come across a word you don’t know, you can click it and have it defined. Text can easily be copied and pasted, and the app’s most recent update even integrates the publication’s wide selection of frequently updated blogs. It’s really a terrific reading experience.

There are two huge downsides to the New York Times app, however.

The first and biggest aggravation is that the app is always updating the content. Updating content is great, you may say….but, that’s not entirely true when talking about a newspaper. Sometimes, you want to sit down and read the newspaper as it was published for that particular day. When you are viewing the NYT’s iPad app, you never know what the newspaper looked like on any particular day, and unless you “save” the article when you first see it, it may quickly disappear from those available to read before you ever get around to it. Contrast this to the Wall Street Journal app, which is discussed below, and I think the Journal has the right idea.

The second aggravation is the app’s navigation. You can flip between sections, but getting from an open article back to the section index just feels unnatural. Again, the Journal app has this done right.

The Wall Street Journal Functions Perfectly…But Give Me Some Beauty

The best thing about the WSJ iPad app is that you can open it up and view the newspaper exactly as it was printed on any given day, and the app actually keeps track of the previous week’s editions.  So, as is the case with me frequently, I can open my WSJ iPad app on Saturday morning and catch up on Wednesday’s, Thursday’s or Friday’s news. The articles aren’t going anywhere, I don’t have to guess what was published when, or deal with any of that non-sense. I open the app, I select the day of interest, and there it is.  When I feel like getting the most current Journal content, I can view the “Right Now” edition, which is a lot like the NYT’s all the time without giving you a choice edition.

The other great feature on the WSJ app is that navigation is very, very easy.  Swipe up or down to switch sections, swipe up to go from an article to the section index, swipe left to right to go from article to article, and you can always navigation a section with the article index on the right-hand side of the screen.  The Journal’s app has great user-friendly navigation.

The WSJ doesn’t, however, have the beauty of the NYT’s app.  The New York Times app makes much better use of white space to make reading easier on the eyes, and for whatever reason, the WSJ app does not let you select text, copy text or have a specific word defined.  It’s quite aggravating, and the lack of a dictionary alone makes me teeter towards favoring the New York Times app.

A lot of our family, friends and colleagues have had a very difficult half-decade. Hurricane Katrina’s effects are fading, but they aren’t gone. Just from my own personal experience in the legal profession, I can see the storm’s impact lingering as the subject of on-going litigation.

The city is, however, making it along. And I feel quite lucky to have a great staff, great clients and great family and friends, who without which, Wolfe Law Group could not be the success it is today. Thanks to all of you.

Click on any photo in the main window to see description. For great professional photos, see this story from Boston.com.

The Saints are world champions! New Orleans is a bona fide place to live again. Drew Brees and Sean Payton are geniuses! All this and we’re smack in the middle of Carnival season.

After screaming privately for the game, we went out to the quarter to watch the pandemonium there. In all my years (younger years) of partying on Bourbon during Mardi Gras, I’ve never ever seen the quarter so packed and electric. Normally, you can’t move on Bourbon. On that night, though, you could barely move on Royal. It was wicked packed.

I have a few You Tube videos on my channel here.

There’s no better place in the world to be for the next two weeks than in New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s Carnival time, the weather is perfect, we’ve resoundingly and calmly elected our new mayor, and the Saints are Superbowl Champions.

Some pictures from the dubbed “Lombardi Gras” are up on my Flickr page, and here is a slide show:

Sherlock Holmes
A Case of Identity

It got me to thinking about some of the persistent differences between Americans and Europeans.

It would be mighty rare to see an American label himself as an amateur anything. We have twenty-somethings (like me) strolling around in designer clothes and accessories who are experts in marketing, economics, music, law, entrepreneurism…what have you. From college graduation to the window office…never amateurs.

We’re likely fooled about this. I suppose I actually am an amateur at a whole lot. As a lawyer, a businessman, a husband, a grown up… A bit liberating to admit that actually. Time to change the business card – Scott Wolfe: Amateur.

But of course, damn good.

It was clear that the Louisiana bar wanted to regulate personal injury advertising, but the animosity it harbored for this style of advertising had blinded its duty to its membership…and to me. Particularly, my complaint was with it’s regulation of speech by attorneys on the Internet.

Hoping to prevent personal injury attorneys from posting “disgraceful” ads online, the bar passed a far-reaching rule that restricted all attorney communication on the net. The regs were a bit complex, but here is a summary: If you’re an attorney, and you say something online, it’s regulated.

The rule was so out-of-this-world unconstitutional, I can hardly believe the bar spent its entrusted funds to fight it.

I suppose there are two reasons it did so: (1) It was blinded by its disdain of personal injury ads; and (2) It was clueless about how the Internet actually worked.

After a nine-month constitutional battle, the Louisiana Eastern District Court agreed with our position, and the state was enjoined from enforcing the component of its rules regulating attorney speech online.

In retrospect, the entire experience was fun. There I was, less than 4 years out of law school, as a lone plaintiff against the Louisiana State Bar Association. Standing before the district court judge, I could barely remember how I stumbled into the situation.

The experience was eye-opening, too. A small faction within the powers-that-be in the Louisiana bar single-handily decided to over-regulate attorneys, and it took a lot of work (and unfortunately, thousands of dollars) to stop it. Shouldn’t the bar association be more responsible to its membership? I found the bar surprisingly stubborn about its position, even though it had no support.

Word is that the bar will go back to the drawing board on Internet regulations. Someone asked me a few months back what would be a fair regulation of attorney communications online. My answer was that bar associations should regulate in response to an actual problem, and not because because they’re interested in having a regulation. If they can’t identify a problem…how are they going to successfully regulate the non-existent problem?

As the bar prepares to take a second shot at Internet regulation, I hope they do their homework. They owe it to their membership, and to me.

**

I kept a blog about the progress of this suit, which you can read at http://www.protectspeech.com. You can also check our some of the press we got here:

Forbes Magazine: Lawyers Say Limits on their ads unconstitutional

Lawyers USA: Judge Rules on Louisiana Advertising Rules

ABA Journal: Judge Strikes Down Louisiana Ad Restrictions on Lawyer Internet Ads

JDScoop: Explaining the Court Decision and Order

First, as you may or may not know, I’ve filed suit against the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board in the Fall to 2008 to challenge the constitutionality of their new regulations of attorney advertisements.

We argue that the regulations go too far in the restrictions they impose on attorneys who use the internet to communicate…and advertise. We created an entire blog dedicated to tracking its progress, which you can visit at http://www.protectspeech.com.

• On Monday, we’ll be filing our Motion for Summary Judgment in the federal suit against the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board. We’ll post a copy on our JDSupra page.
• On Thursday, I’ll be among the faculty for an American Bar Association legal ethics teleconference (with CLE credit) titled: Ethical Implications of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World: From Facebook to LinkedIn, Websites to Blogs. More information on the teleconference (including how to sign up) here.

Second, Chinese Drywall is rampant in the news these days, and our firm has tried to lead legal discussion on the topic with our Chinese Drywall Blog. We’ll be discussing the Chinese Drywall situation, and the status of Chinese Drywall litigation in two venues:

• On Wednesday, I’ll join the Legal Talk Network in their Lawyer2Lawyer podcast to discuss the status of Chinese Drywall litigation.
• On July 31st, Doug Reiser & I will co-present at the Chinese Drywall seminar in New Orleans, LA, put on by Half Moon Seminars.

So, I like the country. But, my goodneess is there a lot of it.

It’s astonishing really, because while we all know its there is a lot of country, I’m not sure if we think about it. I know I don’t, as I pretty much assume that life-as-I-know-it is life, and that everyone lives with a Starbucks near by, a shopping mall within 10 miles and a move theater close enough to attend without planning.

But everyone doesn’t live this way, and this becomes apparent on just two occassions:

(1) When you’re driving cross-country; and

(2) When you’re watching national election returns.

So, one is obvious, and that’s because my wife and I drive across the country for almost three solid days to get to Seattle, and we go through cities for about a grand total of 45 minutes.

For two, just think about those nights when presidential election returns come in, and candidates collect electorial votes with each of those mid-West states, and each of those counties that we’ve never heard of and never thought of. Who are these people? Don’t they blog?!

Well, they don’t blog, and they don’t have protests, and they aren’t very boisterous at all [short of the string of anti-abortion billboards on I-70 in Kansas]. In fact, the only time I ever think of them politically is when national election returns come in, and Iowa and Idaho make the rest of the states’ hold their breath.

For this reason, concentrated folks in the main American cities have fought the electorial system, and they have their reasons. It’s not 1776 anymore, Toto, right?

Well, that would make us closer to a pure democracy, and I happen to agree with Publius on this type of government:

A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Federalist #10.