Until very recently, I have not been a fan of GTD applications. Frankly, I resisted learning anything about David Allen’s widely celebrated methodology for getting things done. In my quest for a law practice management solution, however, I have tried out a lot of GTD type applications.
Recently, I have become a convert, and, although I have never read David Allen’s book, I have become convinced by some of the most rudimentary elements of his methodology (capture tasks, assign them to a context, assign them to a project, and move on)
One day, several weeks ago, I inexplicably became obsessed with finding a solid to do application that would be attractive, powerful, and easy enough to use that I’d actually use it.
To me, the most important element to any GTD application is the ability to dump a thought as soon as it comes to you. You think of something, capture it, and move on with whatever you were doing.
In order to manage my tasks in the past, I’ve used the Sticky-Notes application on my Mac, I’ve used TextEdit files, I’ve tried to use Mail.app’s built-in to do functionality, and I’ve used scraps of paper laying around as well as the palm of my hand. I know, chaos. But, I kind of reveled in my ability to be chaotic.
So, I don’t know what came over me a few weeks ago, but I have found what I think is a great solution for me.
I know a lot of folks are big fans of OmniFocus. I tried it out extensively, and I just couldn’t get into it. The interface felt a little wonky to me. I really didn’t like how the “items” didn’t have any sort of UI that made them feel like “items.” They are just kind of text fields, and you can’t really just click on the item itself without entering into a text field. This is a small complaint, but to me it is significant, and it made the app just feel not right. The other big pain I found about OmniFocus was the inspector window that always hangs around. That does not make for a clutter-free desktop environment. [rant warning] I know you can get rid of it, but so much of your necessary and mundane functionality is in the inspector window that you can hardly do anything without it open. To me, the inspector window is like using footnotes in legal writing: Sometimes they’re great to use, but for the most part, you should say what you need to say in the body of your work. If it’s important, don’t bury it in a footnote. OmniFocus, to me, feels like a brief that is written with 30% of the text in the main body and 70% in the footnotes. A very capable brief can be written that way, but it’s a pain in the ass to read [end of rant]. OmniFocus is plenty competent in terms of functionality, however, and it allows you to manage contexts and projects like any good GTD app. I just couldn’t get down with the feel of it.
Anyway, this post isn’t supposed to be about how much I don’t like OmniFocus, it’s supposed to be about why I have a thing for Things.
Things is a beautiful application from Cultured Code. Currently, Things is in beta, with version 0.9.4 being the latest release. The app is free while in beta, and will cost $49 when it is released “Summer 2008.” If you sign up for their newsletter at their website before its release, however, you can purchase it for $39.
In Things, you can set up a system-wide hot key that will bring up a window that allows you to enter a new to do with as much or as little information as you want. This is awesome for me, because I don’t want to leave whatever application I’m in just to make a silly to do. What is really nice, for me, is the fact that you can drag files into the notes section of the to do item, and it will create a link to that document. That works with emails as well, which is a huge help to me.
If you have been following me on Twitter lately (@esquiremac), you may have noticed me commenting on the zero-ness of my inbox. Now, when I get an email that I need to act on, but can’t or don’t want to right now, I hit command-shift-space and drag that email into my new to do window, make a quick note of what to do, set a due date and click save. Then, I file the email away from my inbox, and the inbox goes back to zero. Now, everything I have to do is in my Things app, and not lingering around haphazardly in my inbox.
The next best thing about Things, and the thing that actually sold me on Things, is the iPhone app and the ability to do two-way sync of your to do’s. Cultured Code introduced Things for the iPhone and iPod Touch several weeks ago, but it did not allow for syncing. I was definitely not willing to shell out ten bucks for a stand alone to do app on my iPod Touch - especially after I had become proficient familiar with the desktop app. But, then Cultured Code announced that sync for the iPhone app had become their top priority and that it would be included in the next update to the iPhone app.
They delivered. The day they announced that the Things iPhone app would be updated with sync I plunked down my ten bucks and bought it. And, the day Things was updated, I downloaded the update.
The sync interface is actually quite clever. It operates over the local wifi network and requires your desktop app and your iPhone app to be running at the same time. This may be a pain to some, but it’s beautiful to me. I don’t have an iPhone, so I’m not used to ubiquitous internet, and therefore cannot demand that the app be synced whenever the heck I feel like it. I also applaud Cultured Code for not requiring me to sync my iPod through iTunes to sync my to dos. That would have been a huge buzzkill, and they are wise for avoiding that method. I don’t know whether they’re working on cloud-based sync, but I suspect they are.
Once you link your desktop app and your iPhone or iPod Touch through the preference pane of your desktop app, all you have to do to sync your to dos is to open your iPhone app any time your desktop app is running and on the same network. Instantly, the two apps sync.
I will admit that there are some bugs and limitations. For instance, there are no “Areas” in the iPhone app, and I have seen duplication once or twice. That said, it’s still very useful, and I have a ton of confidence in Cultured Code, and I know they are working on these issues as I type.
To put things in perspective for Things, they have been pushing towards a 1.0 release for many months, and then this iPhone thing came up, so they diverted their attention to build a great iPhone app. Now that they have gotten the basics of sync down, they are reshifting their focus to rolling out the 1.0 release. I cannot wait, and I wish them the best.
For more about Things from another Macs in the law office kind of guy, check out Jeffrey Kabbe’s fantastic write-up about Things here at Apple Briefs.
Now, I get to check off the “blog about Things” item on my to do list.
If you don’t know about Jott, yet, I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s really a convenient way to send yourself reminders while you’re on the road or otherwise not at your computer.
The way it works is you call the Jott number from phone that is linked to your account and leave a message. The Jott service then transcribes the message and emails it to you. Jott does way more, but this post is not a review of Jott - sorry.
Anyway, this morning on the way to work, I wanted to remind myself to put up a link to Victor Medina’s new blog, Another Thing To Do, in my links in my sidebar. So, I broke out my trusty Katana and hit the speed dial for Jott. I told Jott “Remember to add Victor’s new blog to your blogroll.”
When I got to the office this morning, there was my Jott email, telling me: “Remember to add vista’s new blog to your blog hole.”
So, there you go, Vista, you’re now in my blog hole.
Recently, I had the opportunity to have Larry Port from Rocket Matter give me an online/telephone demonstration of the web-based law office management and billing solution. Much has already been said about Rocket Matter by my fellow legal Mac bloggers, so I will not duplicate their efforts.
I was impressed by the streamlined interface and ease of use.
Unfortunatlely, however, there are a few significant downsides which make it likely Rocket Matter won’t be an ideal solution for us.
No Document Management. Unfortunately, Rocket Matter does not currently offer a way to manage your documents. For me, this is a required function. I don’t like to have to have too many applications running at the same time. As of now, I have one of the fastest Macs available, but that won’t be the case in a couple of years. It’s not really fair to fault Rocket Matter for this, as this is just something it simply doesn’t do. But, for the kind of cashola required for the web-app, I need it to do more…which leads me to my next point…
Cost Prohibitive. I found that Rocket Matter is just too expensive for our needs. Even with the special rate given to early adopters, you have to pay $50/attorney and $15/support staff. For our firm this would cost us easily over $1,000 per year, every year. I explained to Larry on the telephone that, while I believe their product has a lot of value, that is a lot of money to be guaranteeing to spend every year on software. Even if you went with high end products like FileMaker Pro, Daylight, Quickbooks Pro, etc, you’re not likely to spend $1,000 total, and that cost is not recurring. Surely, there will be upgrade costs for these products, but they are not going to be anywhere near $1k/year. Of course, Rocket Matter offers something those big boy products don’t - simplicity.
Web-Dependent. I’m not one of those paranoid types about having your information in the cloud. I mean, my email’s been up there forever, my calander is web-based (albeit with localized syncing), and using SugarSync, my files are securely stored both locally and online. I am fairly comfortable with stuff being on the web. What I don’t like, however, is the fact that I’m bound to the web with Rocket Matter. So far as I can tell, there’s no offline access. Although I am rarely without an internet connection, I am without often enough for this to be a problem for me. Today, in fact, our internet went out at work today. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself! After the initial bouts of sweating and shaking, I called my sponsor and he told me to go to a meeting and take it one day at a time. Thank God elixer of life internet came back after about a half hour.
(Hint: Relevant Joke is at 3:25ish to 4:00ish)
Notwithstanding all of these things that will ultimately prevent our firm from taking the Rocket-plunge (for the time-being, anyway - sorry Larry), I have the utmost respect for this outfit who has been building a great product designed for lawyers. Rocket Matter doesn’t seem to be for us, but they are definitely changing the game by creating a solution that is simple yet powerful - something that has been lacking in law office management software, period - PC and Mac. I wish nothing but success on the folks at Rocket Matter, because regardless of whether we ever use it, their innovations will drive the industry to compete. And competition is teh awesome!!1!
After my post about redacting PDFs without Adobe, Craig Landrum, the author of ScanTango sent me an excellent email. With his permission, I am posting his comments for your benefit.
I’m the author of ScanTango and I really appreciate the nice mention of the application in your blog. Some feedback on redaction:
When most applications redact, they simply put an opaque white or (more typically) black rectangle over the sensitive areas of the document. In most PDF software what this actually does is simply creates an opaque rectangular image object that sits above what is being redacted (whether that is portions of an image or actual selectable text). This allows “PDF hackers” to dig below the obscuring layer you just applied to get to the original stuff beneath. For this reason, ScanTango provides a “Convert to Bitmap” function. This function creates an bitmap image into which it draws the PDF page you convert, creating a pure, non-layered bitmap with everything on a single image plane. Because the layers are removed in this plane, PDF hackers have nothing they can dig into. The newly created bitmap plane replaces the original (perhaps text-based) page in the PDF document. This means that the text on that page will no longer be selectable.
Printing to a PDF via Apples print dialog may or may not do this type of conversion (I have not tested this). One way to check is to print a text-based PDF via Apple’s print dialog and see if the output PDF still contains selectable text. If it does, you haven’t hidden anything and are still vulnerable.
ScanTango takes the brute force method to solve this problem as I described above, assuring you that what you intend to hide is really, really, hidden
In our latest version, we allow potential buyers to try the app with their own hardware. Until the application is registered, all pages that are scanned have a gentle registration reminder stamped on them. However, existing PDFs that you input and redact will not have this warning, so for people that just want to redact existing PDFs, it’s a free tool (a nice word to your legal friends above the app would be appreciated though).
Thanks, Craig! I definitely feel better about redacting live-text PDFs with ScanTango after you explained what’s up.
Jayson Adams of Circus Ponies wrote on August 4 to update us on the status of version 3.0 of its highly regarded Notebook app:
I promised 4 weeks ago to check in again and let you know how NoteBook 3.0 is coming along. Beta testing has been going well and we plan to ship NoteBook 3.0 at the end of August. Over the coming weeks we should be able to pin down an exact date, as well as provide information about obtaining your free NoteBook 3.0 upgrades (for those of you who purchased NoteBook 2.1 this year).
As you may have noticed from my previous post about PDFs, for reasons spelled out there, I’m not a big fan of Adobe. I recently had occasion to produce several hundred pages of discovery. After bates stamping the documents, I had to redact some handwritten notes from the client to myself as they were privileged communications.
There are multiple ways to redact PDF documents on a Mac. Here are a couple that I found useful.
PDFPen and PDFPen Pro have tools that allow you to select an area and have it fill with black. PDFPen is $50 and PDFPen Pro is $95. There is no difference between the Pro and the regular version in terms of this functionality. Using PDFPen in demo mode, because I haven’t paid for a license, the program inserts a watermark on your documents. Obviously, this is not suitable for use in litigation.
That’s why I chose to use ScanTango. ScanTango is a pretty usable application I came across. It costs $99 or $149, depending on the type of scanner you have to work with. I found the redaction tool worked pretty well. Actually, it even seemed to muck up the text in a live pdf document so you couldn’t copy what was under the redaction. Here’s what they have to say about it:
There are times when you may wish to send a document to a colleage, but need to selectively protect sensitive information. The solution is redaction. ScanTango allows you to select any area of a TIFF or PDF page and either Erase (white out) or Redact (black out) areas. And for you PDF-savvy lawyers out there, ScanTango even allows you to convert those hackable PDF pages into non-hackable flat Bitmap pages before saving and sending the document, so nobody can hack beneath your redactions..
I can’t say how much I’d trust this feature with sensitive live text. I scanned all of my documents to PDF with no OCR before I did my redaction. Then, I printed to PDF to add one more layer of separation to make sure nobody could see what was behind the redactions.
So far as I can tell, ScanTango doesn’t impose many limitations on the demo mode of its software. There are other ways to redact PDFs on a Mac without using Satan Adobe, but these are the simplest I have found. I’m actually kind of bummed there’s no freeware or open source way to do this - or to bates stamp PDFs for that matter. These tasks seem simple enough. I don’t understand why the only tools to do these kinds of things cost from $50 to hundreds. Heck, I’d even settle for a $10 or $20 solution, but there’s no way I’m paying hundreds for these simple tasks. Oh yeah, it’s because rich lawyers are about the only ones who need this kind of stuff. Got it, nevermind.
You may have heard that, while bar exam takers in New York can use their laptops, they can’t use their Macs: PCs only, please. Fellow legal Mac bloggers discussed the story here (No Macs!) and here (New York State Bar Says No To Macs).
I was pleased to see that Maryland bar exam takers could use their Macs if they wanted. Maryland uses the same software as New York: Examsoft.
Here are the Maryland requirements:
The ExamSoft software works on PCs using the English language version of Windows Vista (any edition), Windows XP (Professional, Home, and Tablet PC editions) and Windows 2000 (Professional) operating systems.
The ExamSoft software also works on Apple laptops using Apple’s Mac OSX
v.10.4.4 (Tiger) or Mac OSX v10.5 (Leopard) running SofTest in Windows XP or Vista
installed via Apple’s Bootcamp. ExamSoft CANNOT be run on Apple laptops running in
the native Mac operating system environment.
You can read the full laptop policy here (pdf). Congrats, Maryland Board of Law Examiners, for living in the 21st century.
Maryland bar exam takers, according to the Maryland Daily Record blog, had to disable wifi and then, before midnight on the night of the exam, had to find a place to upload their answers. The Daily Record covered the story here: The Laptop Effect.
Last night, Spanning Sync announced a new initiative to recruit new users. It is in the nature of a referral incentive program, and it’s called “Save 5 + Make 5.” The idea is simple enough: If I (as a paid Spanning Sync user) refer you (a new customer), then you get $5 off your purchase and I get $5.
It’s an interesting idea. I’m going to go ahead and throw a link up here for my referral code in case anybody is interested in signing up for Spanning Sync. You might as well save 5 bucks while you’re at it and make me 5 bucks as well, because despite the fact that I’m supposed to be a rich lawyer, there’s a good chance I’ll be paying back my student loans well into my 50’s.
What’s the reason for this? Spanning Sync says:
Why are you doing this?
Since we launched Spanning Sync in March 2007, we’ve never done any paid marketing: no ads, no conference sponsorships, no press releases, no laptop stickers, nada. Just a two-page website and a blog. But in spite of that, Spanning Sync has seen great success, due mostly to the fact that our customers recommend Spanning Sync to their friends and colleagues. So in addition to saying “thank you” we’ve decided to actively invest our customer community with “Save 5+Make 5″.
My guess is that, in light of the fact that Calgoo has gone free and Google is beginning support of CalDAV, they are feeling some pressure.
I might give Calgoo a try before I paid for Spanning Sync, since it’s free. I’ve never tried Calgoo, so I can’t vouch for it. I’m definitely a believer in Spanning Sync, and have been using it effortlessly and flawlessly for the last 8 months. Google’s free CalDAV support could be the killer gCal/iCal sync solution, but for now it’s way too buggy to depend upon for a law practice, IMHO.
Spanning Sync 2.0 (presently in beta) does offer Address Book/Google Contacts sync, though, which I don’t believe Calgoo offers. At present, however, I’m not sure how much better it is than Address Book’s built-in ability to sync with Google Contacts. The killer feature, for me anyway, will be the ability to sync specific groups of contacts from Address Book to specific groups of contacts in Google Contacts. Charlie Wood, from Spanning Sync, says they’re looking into that feature, but it’s not planned for the 2.0 release. No word on exactly when it will be coming. For me, that may well be enough to keep me on as a paid subscriber in 4 months when my subscription runs out.
If you sync iCal and Google Calendar, you know that up until now, basically your only choice was a paid solution. I wrote extensively about our firm’s calendaring solution recently.
Well, today I read that Calgoo is changing its business model to be ad supported, meaning that, as of July 22, 2008, it is free. Calgoo will sync not only sync iCal and Google Calendar, but also a whole host of other calendars - Mac, PC and Linux.
In even more exciting news this afternoon, I read on Cnet’s Webware that Google Calendar now supports CalDAV. According to Cnet:
Mac users who use Google Calendar and iCal to manage their on and offline calendaring have had to use a myriad of third-party products to keep the two in sync. That’s changed now that Google is including CalDAV support as part of Google Calendar’s built-in functionality. This means you’ll be able to make changes in iCal and have them instantly reflected in iCal and vice-versa. Previously that data swap was a one-way affair, with users simply subscribing to their Google Calendar feeds in iCal.
CalDAV is a standardized sharing protocol, allowing you to access the same set of data with others to edit and sync data changes between multiple users. On a workflow level, this means people with access to edit your Google Calendar will be able to make changes in both iCal and Google Calendar that will sync up with both.
Cnet does warn, however, that the CalDAV for iCal is not officially supported by Google at this very moment, and that there is a long list of known issues. So, you may want to hold off just a bit while they work out the kinks.
I haven’t tried out Calgoo or Google Calendar’s CalDAV yet. Given that I still have until the beginning of 2009 before my paid Spanning Sync subscription runs out, I think I’ll stick with that until then. But, I am super excited to try out Google’s CalDAV solution.
Gratuitous, barely related, but funny, clip of the day: DAV’s not here, man (yet).
One thing every Mac-using lawyer has to ask themselves is what software they’re going to use to manage their practice. Anyone who’s scoured the interwebs for a solution has likely come to the same inescapable conclusion: there’s simply no obvious comprehensive software solution for the Mac-using attorney (or law firm, for that matter).
In my view, at a minimum, a lawyer needs the following functions in a single software solution:
Client/Contact Management
Case/Matter Tracking and Management
Document Management
Calendaring/To Do Tracking (GTD)
Billing
There’s a lot of great applications out there that have some potential for being used as law office management solutions. I like to see how actual lawyers are using these programs in their actual law practices. To that end, I’ve gathered a pretty significant cache of lawyers’ writings on how they actually use these applications in their practices. I hope you find this to be a useful resource in your quest for law practice management nirvana.
Daylite
Perhaps the lawyer who’s told us the most about using Daylite is Kevin Morton from A Mac Lawyer’s Notebook. He has posted excellent write-ups and screencasts about how he uses Daylite in his law practice. Check the link below for his great tutorials and reviews.
Daylite looks like a pretty useful solution. Frankly, though, it is too complicated to set up for my tastes, and is not particularly well-suited for the kind of document management I’m looking for.
Billings
Billings is the companion program to Daylite that comes from the folks at MarketCircle. Billings can be used as a stand-alone billing app, without Daylite. Grant Grif
Anyway, this post isn’t supposed to be about how much I don’t like OmniFocus, it’s supposed to be about why I have a thing for Things.
Once you link your desktop app and your iPhone or iPod Touch through the preference pane of your desktop app, all you have to do to sync your to dos is to open your iPhone app any time your desktop app is running and on the same network. Instantly, the two apps sync.
There are times when you may wish to send a document to a colleage, but need to selectively protect sensitive information. The solution is redaction. ScanTango allows you to select any area of a TIFF or PDF page and either Erase (white out) or Redact (black out) areas. And for you PDF-savvy lawyers out there, ScanTango even allows you to convert those hackable PDF pages into non-hackable flat Bitmap pages before saving and sending the document, so nobody can hack beneath your redactions..
