Archive for March, 2008

Mac Browser Lineup, Part Deux

March 31, 2008  (Jeffrey Kabbe)

Not to be outdone by Mac Law Students’ excellent article, Macworld today posted their own Mac Browser Roundup. It’s light on lawyerly details, but it covers the basics quite well. I still run with my own mix of Safari, OmniWeb, and Firefox (3.0 beta) for reasons that are beyond explanation.

Daylite 3.7.2 Released

March 26, 2008  (Jeffrey Kabbe)

Today saw the release of version 3.7.2 of Marketcircle Daylite. Notable additions in this release include a law template and the ability to merge letters with Word 2008 and Excel 2008. We had been holding back from buying Office 2008. AppleScript support in Office 2008 caught my attention recently, and now this! It looks like this might be the time to buy Office 2008. Full details of the release can be found in the Marketcircle knowledge base.

Mac OS X Turns 45!

March 24, 2008  (Jeffrey Kabbe)

KittehMac OS X celebrated a birthday over the weekend, turning 45 years old (in cat years, that’s 7 in human years). Has it really been 7 years? Well, no, actually because I only got my first Mac in 2003 (a little while before Panther came out). The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted a nice history of Mac OS X, complete with screenshots. Enjoy your trip down memory lane. I sure did!

Lexis and Westlaw Mac Browser Lineup

March 22, 2008  (Jeffrey Kabbe)

Mac Law Students posted a nice review today of the current state of the Mac browser field. The focus of the review is how nicely each of the eight browsers reviewed plays with LexisNexis and Westlaw. Safari 3.1 seems to be the best of the bunch (which isn’t surprising given the effort put in to making Safari standards-compliant). Really, though, none of the browsers did poorly. It’s obvious that both Lexis and Westlaw are designing their sites now with more than just the Windows / Internet Explorer world in mind.

I like (and dislike) a variety of things about Lexis and Westlaw. During law school I primarily used Lexis because Westlaw has historically not played well with tabs. Westlaw’s frame interface throws a wrench into my use of tabs. Invariably, I would click on a Westlaw link in the current tab and nothing would happen – or so it would seem. What actually happened was that a page somewhere on one of my other tabs had been replaced because Westlaw decided that particular tab had the window the page should be loaded in.

One reason I do like running Westlaw on a Mac browser is that Westlaw prints and downloads work better. I am not sure if it’s a bug or a feature, but if I switch to another application while doing a Westlaw print in Internet Explorer (on Windows XP), the Westlaw popup window closes and the print stops. The same thing happens if I switch applications during a download. It’s irritating that Westlaw forces me to sit there and watch, unable to do any other work on the computer, while it’s building the pages. Westlaw doesn’t do this on any of the Mac browsers I tried. For some reason I haven’t tried Westlaw on Firefox for Windows. Does anyone know if Firefox for Windows has this “feature”?

One omission from the review is Firefox 3.0. The Firefox team recently released Firefox 3.0 Beta 4, and I haven’t encountered any problems with it (unlike with Beta 2). Firefox 3.0 is getting close enough to an “everyday browser” that it should probably have been included.

Disc Cover 2.0 Released

March 18, 2008  (Jeffrey Kabbe)

BeLight today released Disc Cover 2.0. Disc Cover is a design application for making CD and DVD labels. I have been using the pervious version (most recently, 1.5.1) for over a year. Disc Cover is quite intuitive and makes it a snap to throw together some pictures, other graphics, and text to make something quite attractive.

My wife has been using Disc Cover in her estate planning practice to burn CDs for clients and referral sources. If you need to deliver documents, video, or audio to someone, it’s very impressive to do it with a CD that has your law firm name and logo printed on it along with a description of what is on the disk.

For a list of the new features in Disc Cover 2.0, visit the BeLight website.