Apple Briefs

I’ll admit it – I am a sucker for Finder replacements. I have Pathfinder, which I mostly use, and Forklift. Forklift is also an FTP program, but I primarily use it as a file manager (albeit occasionally) because I have Transmit for FTP. Yep Software (makers of Yep, which I have discussed before) are coming out with a new program called Leap (it is currently in a public beta release). Yep Software is billing Leap as a Finder replacement. For that to happen, though, you will have to totally rethink the way you use and look for files.

The main window of Leap has three parts: a sidebar, a filter panel, and a file list. Leap shares many similarities with the Leopard Finder. Finding a file starts by choosing a source from the sidebar. The sources are grouped into categories (Library, File Types, Places, and Search). Once a source is chosen, the file list will display all of the files that match the criteria for that source. If there are too many results, the list can be narrowed by choosing one or more options from the filter panel and/or using the search field. The file list defaults to an icon view with a live preview, allowing you to quickly find the file you are looking for.

The most powerful feature of Leap is the ability to add custom tags to your documents. Tags are labels that describe the contents of the file or how you would use the file. Leap allows you to easily add tags to files, and then filter your results by the tags associated with those files. None of this is anything that you can’t accomplish through the Finder in Leopard. However, working with tags in the Finder is clumsy and slow. Leap, on the other hand, is designed around custom tags. Leap has many ways to add and edit tags, including drag-and-drop and the info panel.

Many of Leap’s features don’t translate perfectly to the world of law. Some practice areas, though, will value Leap more than others. For example, lawyers in practice areas with thousands of client files – like estate planning – will often organize their files in a specific folder hierarchy. In this situation, Leap doesn’t add much. On the other hand, litigators can generate thousands of research documents and pleadings that will likely be scattered throughout the file system. Leap can be very helpful in that environment.

Leap’s custom tagging and search capabilities could be a real benefit in enabling the reuse of previous work. A litigator may want to use one set of tags to describe the kind of document (e.g. letter, pleading, research file) and another set of tags for practice areas (e.g. civil procedure, trademark, copyright). By using tags of varying detail, you can create a highly-structured repository of information without worrying about what directory a particular file sits in.

Starting to use Leap seems pretty daunting. Some of the features, particularly custom tags, won’t be very helpful in the beginning because none of my files will be tagged when I start using Leap. So leap requires a commitment, and a little bit of faith that using it will become better over time. I am still undecided, but I will certainly give it another look once the final version is released.

I wrote in a previous post that I planned to put Bento through its paces. Today, I finally got that chance. I walked away impressed with Bento, but still wanting something more.

Our initial plan was to use Marketcircle Daylite for my wife’s law practice. We have started to implement Daylite, but aren’t so far along that we won’t switch to something else. When Bento came out, it looked like it would do everything that Daylite can do plus a few things we need that Daylite can’t do. Bento seemed like a good candidate to replace Daylite because we don’t anticipate needing the multi-user features of Daylite. The main drawback with Daylite is its apparent inability to link files to contacts and projects. Bento can do this easily with its file list data type.

Bento has its drawbacks too. To my eye, Bento’s critical failing is its lack of a record summary feature. Bento is great at creating, editing, searching, and sorting records. That’s useful, but it’s not enough. The most powerful way to use your data is to analyze and summarize the data. But, Bento’s focus is records and the ability to combine information from those records is quite limited.

For example, Bento lets me create projects and associate tasks with them. Viewing the projects list in Bento will show me all my projects, even the ones that are no longer active. Using a smart collection, I can view only the active projects. My view of the data is limited, though, to a traditional record view. I can’t, for instance, see a list of all the active projects and detail about the currently-pending task for each project. Bento also won’t show me a list of all the people I am supposed to call today, along with the reason for the call and the person’s contact information.

It’s apparent that what I need for my wife’s law practice is something more sophisticated than Bento. That “something” will probably be Filemaker Pro. The disadvantage with Filemaker Pro is that it doesn’t naturally integrate with Address Book and iCal. Like most things, that can be solved with money – by buying a set of pre-built commercial templates.

We will probably spend that money. Managing the client relationship is too important to risk messing it up by being cheap. Bento still looks like a very interesting product. It just looks too lightweight to handle the daily grind of a busy law practice.

I thought I would wrap up the month by highlighting one of the few websites I visit every day: MacZot. I mentioned in my first post that I bought much more software for my Mac (actually Macs, plural) than I ever expected. One big factor leading to that result was MacZot.

MacZot is similar to woot!, except it lists Mac software. Almost every day, MacZot has a piece of Mac software on sale. On rare occasions, MacZot has a bundle of applications or application templates on sale. The MacZot sale price is usually very good. The catch is that the sale price is only available for that one day.

MacZot has served two useful purposes for me. First, it has allowed me to buy software that I wanted, but didn’t really need, by offering the software at a more affordable price. Second, it has introduced me to software that I didn’t know existed. I visit several Mac news websites regularly, but MacZot will still occasionally list software that I haven’t seen before.

To date, I have succumbed to temptation on MacZot 23 times in just over a year. The pace has slowed a little bit as my software stable has gotten larger. But still look forward every morning to finding out what that day’s special is on MacZot.

This post is one part review and one part love letter. I have had my iPhone since the price drop when I was able to nab a 4GB model for $299. Since that time it has been a whirlwind romance. There are some things I don’t like, and I will probably write an article about those. But there are so many things I like that I now can’t imagine not having an iPhone. These are my top reasons to own an iPhone, in no particular order:

1. It’s an iPod!

I always carry my phone and my iPod. An iPhone is one less thing to carry.

2. Price Shopping

Before my iPhone, my shopping trips would go something like this:

ME: I really like this, I think we should buy it.
WIFE: I wonder what price it is on [Amazon/other internet store]?
ME: Ok, let’s check the price when we get home, and if it’s the same price online we’ll come back and buy it here.

Sometimes the roles were reversed, but you get the idea. The internet had really screwed up my shopping! That doesn’t happen now, though. With my iPhone, I can check the internet prices while I am in the store.

3. Surfing at Lunch

I usually go out to eat by myself at lunch. I just find that lunches go faster that way. I still like to have something to entertain me while I eat, though. That’s where my iPhone comes in. I read quite a few blogs and forums regularly and lunch is the perfect time to get in some reading. The iPhone screen is big enough that I can read quite comfortably with my iPhone on the table once I rotate the view in Safari.

4. Listening to Only the Voicemail Messages That I Want To

Listening to voicemail messages on my old phone was a pain – multiple menus followed by a long wait to connect to the system, having to listen to every message, and finally having to remember which number to press to do anything. I disliked it so much that I generally just didn’t listen to my messages. Instead, I simply called people back if my phone showed I ever missed a call.

Visual voice mail on the iPhone changed all that for me. I don’t listen to all of my messages now, but I don’t have to because I can play only the messages I want to hear. Plus, if I know right away that I don’t need to hear a message, I can just hit the delete button – right in the middle of the message. The iPhone makes voicemail fun again!

5. Teletubbies

My 15-month-old daughter can sometimes be difficult to calm down when she gets upset. But one thing is almost guaranteed to get her smiling – Teletubbies. It takes a good connection, but YouTube on my iPhone usually delivers up the goods. The only real difficulty is finding the actual Teletubbies videos and not the rap songs mixed with Teletubbies dancing (some of them are actually pretty good – seriously!).

OmniWeb is a web browser from The Omni Group. Unlike Apple’s own Safari web browser, Mozilla Firefox, and others, OmniWeb isn’t free – it costs $14.95. This might lead you to ask, “why should I pay for a web browser?” Simply put, OmniWeb has many features that Safari doesn’t have – features that are worth paying for. Two of the features in particular are especially useful and save me lots of time and frustration when doing research on the internet.

The internet is an amazing tool for research. Whether I am looking up facts on Wikipedia or researching on Google, I can easily get to a point where I have 10 or 15 websites open. But having that many websites opens creates problems. I use tabs to avoid the clutter of so many open windows. With traditional tabs, though, it is sometimes difficult to remember which tab has the page I want to go back to. Tabs on Safari and Firefox show the title of the web page. The problem is that some websites have the same or similar titles for all of their pages. That can become very confusing when I have three or four pages open from a website. Even if a website uses different titles for each page, finding the right tab can be hard because only two or three words of the title is usually shown on the tab.

OmniWeb solves the problem of finding the right tab by using a small thumbnail picture of the website in addition to the website title. The thumbnails are big enough that you can make out the major features of the current page, enabling you to quickly see the differences between the pages. At the same time, the thumbnails are small enough that 5 or 6 will probably fit on the screen at one time, depending upon the size of your monitor, so you shouldn’t have to scroll much – if at all – when changing tabs.

Thumbnail tabs are a minor efficiency improvement, but this second OmniWeb feature can be a real lifesaver. OmniWeb allows you to save your entire workspace, including what websites you have open, what page is in each of your tabs, and where your windows are on the screen. There is also an auto-save feature, that constantly keeps track of your workspace. If you quit OmniWeb or it crashes, your entire workspace will be restored the next time you launch the program. Safari doesn’t crash very often. When it does crash, though, it is very frustrating to have to hunt through the browse history for “a website about X that I know I found Tuesday or Wednesday night but hadn’t decided whether to bookmark yet.” With OmniWeb, you can simply restart the application and you’re back where you left off.