As you know, the default paste command (Edit > Paste, or command-v), however, retains the formatting from the source (e.g., bold, underlined, font, size, color, etc…).

For most Apple applications (Pages, TextEdit, Mail, Safari, etc…), there is a universal command called “Paste and Match Style,” which will – you guessed it – paste and match the style of the document you’re pasting to. Using the Keyboard preference pane (System Preferences > Keyboard), it is possible to simply map a system-wide keyboard shortcut that will invoke the “Paste and Match Style” command in whatever application you’re using, assuming it’s available as an option in that particular application. I learned this tip a few months ago from the good folks at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, although I modified their suggestion slightly for my own tastes. I prefer to have the default Paste remain as command-v, and have the Paste and Match Style be command-shift-v. But that’s just my preference. You can make your shortcut anything you want, even command-shift-option-control-function-F7 if having crazy complicated keyboard shortcuts is your thing.

The simple steps to accomplish this Paste and Match Style near-global shortcut are:

• Go to System Preferences and click on the Keyboard pane;
• Select “Keyboard Shortcuts” at the top of the window;
• Select Application Shortcuts from the lefthand pane;
• Hit the plus sign at the bottom of the right pane;
• Select All Applications from the Application drop-down;
• Type “Paste and Match Style” in the field for Menu Title;
• Click in the field for Keyboard Shortcut and type the command you’d like to use.
• Click Add.

And, you’re done.

Except, if you use Microsoft Word a lot, like I do, this won’t do the trick there. Word for Mac 2008, surprise, does not use the standard Paste and Match Style command. Instead, the command is Edit > Paste Special…, which, by default, does not have a shortcut assigned to it. After clicking Edit > Paste Special… in Word, you are presented with the window below from which you must choose Unformatted Text and hit OK. So, instead of one simple keystroke, it’s a 4 step process.

The best I can do is reduce that process by one step, and I’ve got two ways to do that. One is to put the Paste Special command in the toolbar so you can just click it, and the other is to assign a keyboard shortcut to the Paste Special command. Either way, however, you are stuck with dealing with that window. If you figure out a way to automate that part of the process, please let me know!

Putting Paste Special in the Toolbar

To put the Paste Special button in the Toolbar for one-click access to the Paste Special command, right-click on the toolbar and select “Customize Toolbars and Menus…”

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be presented with this window:

Select the Commands tab at the top, select the Edit item in the lefthand pane, and in the righthand pane, find the “Paste Special…” item and drag it to wherever you want on your toolbar. I put mine on the right, as seen here:

Creating a Keyboard Shortcut for Paste Special

To create a keyboard shortcut for the Paste Special command in Word 2008, you can follow the same instructions above for the near-system-wide command, only instead of choosing “All Applications” from the drop-down menu, choose “Other…” and then choose Microsoft Word. You can use the same shortcut as for the near-global one you did earlier if you want. For the Menu Title, type “Paste Special…” instead of “Paste and Match Style.

Alternatively, you can assign the shortcut from within Word, if you’d prefer to do it that way. To do this, right-click in the toolbar again to select Customize Toolbars and Menus. Then, when the window comes up, from the bottom-right, next to the OK button, hit the Keyboard button. This will bring up the following window:

• In the Categories pane, select Edit.
• In the Commands pane, select EditPasteSpecial.
• Click in the “Press new keyboard shortcut” field and press your new keyboard shortcut.
• Verify it’s the right command, and click Assign.

NOW, you’re done.

Gee, now that I’ve written it all out, that seems like an awful lot of work just to save one click. But, hey, productivity takes time.

Google says the invites will not be sent out immediately, but I got mine within 24 hours of when I was invited, so, hopefully you have a similar experience.

If you are interested in a dedicated app to run Google Wave, you may want to check out Waveboard. Waveboard is basically a site-specific browser for Google Wave. You could accomplish essentially the same thing by using Prism or Fluid.

I, frankly, have not used Google Wave too much, and can’t vouch for how useful it is. This below graphic more accurately illustrates my experience:

Anyway, leave a comment, and I’ll get your invite in as soon as possible.

The reason I say that “Herald bumps Apple mail notification up a notch” is because Herald takes the idea first implemented by mail.appetizer and adds some nice improvements. In fact, Erik Hinterbichler freely admits that Herald is “[i]nspired by the excellent Mail.appetizer plugin.”

Herald improves upon Mail.appetizer in a few ways. Herald allows you to customize the color and opacity of your notification window, and enables you to perform a few additional actions right from within the notification window.

Here’s how it works: When a new email comes in, the notification window appears. It will disappear after a few seconds if you do nothing. If you hover your mouse over the window, it will become opaque and stay put as long as your mouse is over top of it. If the body of the email is too long to display in the window, you can actually scroll the length of the email to read the whole thing. Clicking the checkmark on the right marks the email as read and dismisses the window. Clicking on the magnifying glass opens the email in the Mail program. Clicking the reply arrow opens up a mail reply window and you can start writing a reply right away. The next button over is a junk box, which you can use to – you guessed it – mark the email as spam. Finally, clicking the delete button simply deletes the email.

Using this great plugin, I am able to deal with most of the email that comes my way, as it comes in, with a very minimal disruption to my focus.

Herald is graciously provided for free, so, if you really like it, please drop by Erik’s site and show him your support by clicking that Donate button on the right-hand side!

As you know, I have joined a firm that runs primarily on Windows. I’m the only Mac in the place, and pretty much everyone there uses WordPerfect. Of course, simply opening and/or editing WordPerfect docs on a Mac is no problem, since there are a number of applications that can handle them (AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, etc.). The Mac Lawyer recently had a post detailing even more ways to access WordPerfect files on your Mac.

I wanted to take the solution one step further, and provide a quick and easy way to convert multiple WordPerfect documents to Word documents in one fell swoop.

My weapon of choice this time is AbiWord, which you can download here (direct download link).

This script isn’t quite as elegant as the Pages to Doc script, since AbiWord is not actually AppleScriptable. This basically means that instead of simply telling the application to “save” the file or “save as…” AppleScript has to go through a series of automated keystrokes to get the job done. The end result is essentially the same, but the code just looks a bit uglier.

So, here’s the code, if you’re interested:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in added_items
set this_item to item i of added_items
tell application “AbiWord”
open this_item
tell application “AbiWord”
activate
end tell
delay 2
tell application “System Events”
key code 1 using {command down, shift down}
delay 1
key code 2 using {command down}
key code 124
key code 51
key code 51
key code 51
key code 2
key code 31
key code 8
key code 36
key code 13 using {command down}
delay 2
end tell
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to

You can recreate the script yourself by pasting this text into your AppleScript Editor and saving it, or, you can just download it from here. If you want to know the ugly details, this script is literally just going through the manual steps, one by one: opening the file, hitting command-shift-s (“Save As…”), command-d (to set the path to the desktop), right-arrow (to set the cursor to the end of the filename), delete-delete-delete (to delete the “wpd” from the end), d-o-c (to put “doc” at the end), return (to complete the save), and command-w (to close the document), then repeating. I told you it was ugly, but it gets the job done!

After you have your script, place it in Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts. When you have done that, right click on the folder you would like to be your “drop” folder, and select “Folder Actions Setup…” as seen below.

Select the script you just created (or downloaded), and click “Attach” as shown below.

And, you’re done! To test this, just drag one or more WP docs into the folder and see if AbiWord goes through its paces to save your new Word docs to the desktop.

You will probably experience a glitch from time to time, so, you’ll want to keep an eye on the process as it’s unfolding to make sure nothing goes wrong. Also, although it should probably go without saying, keep your hands off your computer until the process is completed. Any interrupting clicks/keystrokes will probably throw the whole thing off course.

One final thing I did to streamline things was to place this folder in the right or bottom side of my dock so that it’s always there for quick access for me to dump WP files into when needed.

The next great hurdle is the fact that Pages will not simply allow you to “Save As” a Word document. You have to “Export.” This means that you cannot just set the default save format as .doc. So, I would end up having two documents at the end of the day – one .pages and one .doc. Then, of course, every time I edit the file, I can’t just save it again, I have to export it and create yet another file. This is truly a cumbersome process.

I decided to come up with a better solution. The solution I had in mind was one where I could create a way to convert them all at one time. This would enable me to create my documents for work (correspondence, pleadings, notes, etc.) and store them in a holding folder, and then before I file them in their respective places on the server, I could convert them all at once.

What I ended up doing was creating a Folder Action using AppleScript. It actually works just as well with a single document as with many documents.

How It Works

Take your Pages documents, drag them into the folder you have set up, and the script will run and convert each document to a Word document with the same name as it had before, and save it to your Desktop.

To create this script, I borrowed some of the code from MacSparky’s post on creating a Folder Action to automatically OCR pdfs placed in a folder with PDFPen. The rest of the code, I borrowed from a page on the MacScripter forums, which is an AppleScript to convert Pages docs to Word docs.

I combined the two because I wanted the documents to convert automatically upon dragging them into a certain folder. It took some tweaking to get the code just right, but it works like a charm – for me, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

In any event, here’s the code I ended up with:

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in added_items
set this_item to item i of added_items
tell application “Pages”
open this_item
set docName to name of front document
— Remove .pages extension.
set prevTIDs to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “.pages”
— Add .doc extension.
set docName to first text item of docName & “.doc”
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to prevTIDs
— Save file to Desktop.
set docPathAndName to (path to desktop as string) & docName
save front document as “SLDocumentTypeMSWord” in docPathAndName
close front document
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to

You can recreate the script yourself by pasting this text into your AppleScript Editor and saving it, or, you can just download it from here.

After you have your script, place it in Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts. When you have done that, right click on the folder you would like to be your “drop” folder, and select “Folder Actions Setup…” as seen below.

Select the script you just created (or downloaded), and click “Attach” as shown below.

That’s it! Now, to test, just drag one or more Pages documents into the folder and see if Pages goes through its thing and deposits the new Word documents on your desktop.

One final thing I did to make my life easier was to drag the “drop” folder itself into the Dock. Now, any time I want to convert one or more Pages documents, I just drag them into the folder on the Dock, they get deposited there, and their new Word offspring show up on the desktop.

You can fiddle with the script to do anything you like, such as make the new Word docs save to a location other than the desktop.

If you’re interested in learning more about AppleScript, I recommend you check out these two posts from MacAppStorm:

• The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To AppleScript
• Advanced AppleScript Techniques

There were a lot of positives about the Pre. To name a few:

• Hands down, best rate plan available, by a long shot;
• Aside from the iPhone, probably the best darn phone out there;
• Good 3G data access;
• Nice size, comfortable fit in your hand or pocket;
• Physical Keyboard;
• Decent 3 megapixel, still camera;
• Good IMAP email with multiple account support;
• MMS is easy, free and fun.

There were significant negatives, though, that took precedence for me.

• Battery Life: What can I say, the battery life on the Pre is horrible. Unless you’re comfortable living in a state of paranoia that you may not be close to a power outlet, car charger or a USB port every few hours, the Pre is going to let you down big time here. Our Pre’s would barely make it to dinner time each day before they required recharging. And then, you have to leave it on the charger, which, for some strange reason juts awkwardly straight out from the side, making the phone unwieldy to hold and use while charging.
• It’s No iPhone: Perhaps the biggest problem we had with the Pre was that it just doesn’t measure up to the mature platform that is the iPhone OS. I am reasonably confident that if I had never owned an iPod Touch, and never knew how wonderful a mobile OS could be, I would have loved the Pre.
• OS/Interface: Compared to the iPhone OS, the Pre’s WebOS is slow, immature, sloppy and cluttered. As in the desktop OS market, Apple reigns supreme with its emphasis on user-friendliness and its mature and refined OS. I found the notifications on the Pre to be too small to see at a glance and hard to accurately touch. There are several “pages” of apps that you can slide left and right, like on the iPhone. But, what makes it cluttered and confusing is that each page, once you slide to it, also scrolls up and down. So, if you slide over to a page, you can’t see immediately if the app you need is right there, you also have to slide up and down. Also, the up and down sliding doesn’t “lock” into place, and it has a slippery sort of feel to it.
• Plastic Screen vs. Glass Screen: Speaking of slippery feel… I believe this particular problem is attributable to the fact that the Pre has a plastic screen, whereas the iPhone and iPod Touch have glass screens. The problem I found was that if there was any sweat on my hands whatsoever, the Pre would not respond. I missed several calls trying to slide the unlock button with sweaty hands. My fingers or thumbs would kind of stick to the screen and jump around, and the screen wouldn’t register the touch. This was very frustrating. The glass on the iPod Touch is much more responsive and forgiving to sweat.
• Form Factor: I felt the Pre was a pretty solid design at first. However, as compared to the rock-solid iPod Touch/iPhone form factor, the Pre felt a bit creaky and there was a fair amount of play related to the sliding mechanism that made the phone feel a little jiggly.

Commitment-phobia

The bottom line with the Pre, for us, was that they were ok phones with great rate plans, but also some pretty big drawbacks. I have no idea what will happen with the iPhone and its exclusivity agreement with satan AT&T or its extortionist outrageous text-messageless hellhole expensive rate plan. But, the one thing that really drove me crazy was the idea that I would settle for the Pre, and then 6 months to a year later, the iPhone would open up to Verizon or Sprint or would finally adopt a humane rate plan. I don’t know how I would survive the regret if such a thing were to happen while I was stuck with my Pre for another year-plus.

So, we returned our Pre’s, reactivated our Katanas, resumed our month-to-month posture with Sprint, and, in the process, discovered that for the last 2 years, Sprint has been charging us a bogus $3.50ish fee every month for living in a county in which we never lived. Even after the restocking fees for the Pre’s, we actually came out ahead.

Admittedly, texting on a 10-digit keypad sucks, but at least the Katana’s 2.5 year old battery still lasts me pretty much all weekend, and life is definitely sweeter without a cell phone contract.

Anyway, we’re happy we turned the Pre’s back in. My ownership of an iPod Touch has gone a long way toward mitigating the need for an iPhone – not the whole way, but a long way.

For now, I will sit hiding in the bushes with my trusty Katana and iPod Touch, fending off the evil temptations that lure me to the dark side AT&T. I don’t know how much longer I can last…

Why Pre?

My wife and I have been getting along pretty well with each of us having a cell phone, iPod Touch, and a digital camera (of the Canon SD variety). We completed our latest 2 year contract with Sprint a little over 6 months ago, and we loved being contract free. We have been waiting for the iPhone to end exclusivity with AT&T and we both know that iPhones would be great phones because of our wonderful experiences with our iPod Touches (iPods Touch?). Texting has taken a bigger role in our lives over the last several months and, as you know, texting with a numeric keypad is a huge pain in the bum (does that make me sound English?). We really wanted our next phones to have a full keyboard – physical or otherwise.

In the last couple of weeks I became pretty excited about the Palm Pre. I was excited about how it would merge all of my contacts and calendars from my work, google and facebook accounts. It looked like the Pre has a great web browser and a strong app platform that would be usable by literally millions of capable web developers.

The main factor that drove us to purchase the Pre was the price, however. It looked like the Pre was a good enough phone that the money we would save over going with the iPhone would be worth it – even if it ultimately didn’t turn out to be as good as the iPhone.

The jury is still out for me as to whether I will stick with the Pre. I will give it a few more days before I commit to sticking with it or consider moving to the iPhone or elsewhere.

Rate Plans

As of today (I will note that this blog was published on June 7, 2009, the day before whatever announcements Apple makes at WWDC 2009 on June 8), Sprint far and away has the best rate plans available. Here is the minimum plan for the Pre on Sprint, compared with a comparable plan on AT&T for the iPhone and a Blackberry Curve on Verizon:

Sprint (Pre) [info here] $129.99/month 2 Palm Pre’s ($400.00) 1500 Minutes Unlimited Data Unlimited Text (and MMS) 25 (approx.) TV channels GPS with turn by turn directions Total 2 year price including purchase price: $3,519.76

AT&T (iPhone) [info here] $179.99/month 2 iPhones ($400.00) 1400 Minutes Unlimited Data Unlimited Text (presently, no MMS for iPhone) GPS Total 2 year price including purchase price: $4,719.76

Verizon (Blackberry Curve) [info here] $229.95/Month 2 Blackberry Curves ($99.99) 1400 Minutes Unlimited Data Unlimited Text (not sure of MMS) GPS (Verizon Navigator) Total 2 year price including purchase price: $5,618.79

The Phone Itself

I read in some reviews that the Pre felt plasticky and light. I don’t really share the same impression – perhaps because I came into it with lower expectations. I came into it knowing that the iPhone was the best damned phone out there, and expected this to be a phone not made by Apple. That said, I was not disappointed in the Pre. It feels pretty solid for a phone not made by Apple. It’s a wonderful size – definitely thicker than the iPhone, but shorter, more rounded and a nicer fit in your pocket.

The sliding mechanism feels fairly sturdy, but it is not always a snap to slide open. You naturally want to slide it up from the bottom, but you need to put your thumb pretty much right in the middle of the screen to get the proper leverage to propel the top up (or the bottom down, depending on your perspective).

Even though the slider feels pretty sturdy, the phone does creak when you hold and touch it – a consequence of having moving parts, unlike the iPhone.

Physical Keyboard

Over the last 1.5 years or so, I have gotten pretty used to using the virtual keyboard on the iPod Touch. Apple was right when they told us that once we learned to trust the auto-correct on the virtual keyboard, we’d move a lot faster. I wouldn’t characterize my typing on the iPod Touch as flying, but it is certainly manageable. That said, I still hate to write any more than a couple sentences on it.

The Pre’s keyboard has been criticized by many for being too cramped. I don’t really have a problem with it, and I have some pretty big hands (me being 6′3″ and 230 pounds, and all). I find that I do type faster on the Pre, and that I don’t mind typing more. I won’t be drafting any motions on the thing, I’m sure, but it’s easier to bang out a couple paragraphs in an email.

This next point is more related to text manipulation than to the keyboard itself, but moving the cursor around on the Pre is a process that can be described as wonky – especially as compared to the iPhone. On the iPhone, you place your finger on the screen and hold it there until a bubble appears that zooms in on where your finger is and shows you the cursor that you can drag around and place anywhere with relative precision. On the Pre, you have to hold down the red/orange button on the keyboard and drag your finger on the screen. The wonky part is that the cursor doesn’t really follow your fingertip. It generally follows the direction of your finger, and in my experience thus far, is a little jumpy. This is a little disorienting because it’s a little like using a trackpad, where you move your finger on the pad and the cursor moves on the screen, only your finger’s already on the screen so you expect the cursor to be at your fingertip but it’s not. It’s workable, but not as effortless and smooth as the iPhone.

Copy and Paste works in basically the same way, only, instead of holding the red/orange button, you hold the shift button while dragging.

Multitasking

Frankly, I don’t find the multitasking to be a big deal. The speed with which apps launch on the Pre is about the same as with my iPod Touch (first generation). Certainly, when you leave apps running in the background, switching to them is faster than opening them up from scratch. Although, I will say that allowing things to load in the background is nice for when you don’t feel like waiting (web pages, contact & calendar syncing, emails, etc.). Of course, most of these occur in the background on the iPhone anyway – except web pages.

In practice, I tend to close out my apps when I’m done with them anyway because having a lot of open “cards” makes me feel disorganized, so, the ability to multitask on the Pre doesn’t really improve my life all that much. It’s a nice, but overhyped, feature.

Camera

The camera on the Pre is actually pretty good. It’s 3 megapixels and there’s no optical zoom (or digital zoom for that matter), so, you can’t expect it to completely replace your 8 megapixel point-and-shoot with 3x to 4x optical zoom and built in image stabilization. There is a flash, however, which makes it not only possible to take pictures in low light, but they actually come out pretty well – for a camera phone. It’s beyond dispute that the Pre takes far better pictures than the iPhone 3G. I am wondering how the next-gen iPhone will stack up.

Speaking of the camera in the next-gen iPhone… It’s a foregone conclusion that the next iPhone will take videos. The Pre’s camera does not presently take video, although, Palm has alluded that they could enable video recording with a software update. I won’t be holding my breath, however.

Even juicier rumors point to the 2009 iPhone as having a front facing camera that can be used to video-chat, as seen in these supposed spy-shots of the heretofore unreleased device here and possibly here.

For myself, however, I wonder if video isn’t one of those things that seems really awesome to have, but that you would rarely actually use it. I think the ability to quickly upload and share video would be the factor that determined how much I would use it.

… And speaking of sharing… The Pre does allow you to share the pictures you take – by email, MMS or by uploading to Facebook or Photobucket. I would like to have more options here – like Flickr and Picasa. And, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to upload pictures to short-url-picture-sharing services like twitpic or pic.im for use with Twitter.

Email

The email application for the Pre is actually pretty strong. I use three email accounts, primarily. Gmail for personal email, and Google Apps for My Domain for my work and EsquireMac email accounts – all using IMAP.

The one significant advantage Pre email has over the iPhone email app is that it provides a unified inbox view for “all inboxes.” A feature that Apple’s Mail.app has had for years, but strangely, the iPhone is missing.

Once you set the preferences properly with IMAP, you will receive your emails instantaneously. It works pretty much how you want it to work.

Apps

As many others have said, the App catalog for the Pre is very limited at present. I’ve downloaded Tweed (ok), Pandora (awesome), Accuweather (awesome), Spaz (don’t use it), LinkedIn (don’t use it), and FlightView (don’t use it).

The big deal, according to Palm, with its WebOS is that you can develop applications for the Pre using only basic web standards. I’m not smart enough to know this for sure, but the impression I’ve gotten from what I’ve read about WebOS is that the apps you can develop will be more powerful than the simple webapps the iPhone started out with, but not as powerful as the native third party apps that the iPhone presently hosts.

For now, there is no Fring or Skype on the Pre. I’m not sure if you could build a Fring or Skype client using solely WebOS, but I suspect you could. It would be nice to be able to make calls via WiFi that wouldn’t ding your monthly minute allotment.

The Pre does have a Tasks program that comes installed. It has a pretty nice interface, and supports multiple lists, but it has no sync capability. I suppose you could use something like Remember The Milk (of which I am not a big fan), but there are definitely no apps like Things, OmniFocus or the forthcoming The Hit List which all have excellent desktop Mac apps that sync with excellent iPhone apps.

Charging and Syncing

The Pre charges and syncs via a micro-USB cable and port that is on the right side of the device. Micro-USB cables are essentially ubiquitous, and you probably have a few laying around the house already, especially if you’ve ever bought a point-and-shoot camera or a portable USB hard drive. Although, if you’ve ever owned an iPod or two, you probably have just as many iPhone charger cables laying around, too.

The problem with the Pre in this regard is that the charging cable comes right out of the side of the device – making it very awkward to hold and use while charging. Compare this to the iPhone whose charging cable comes out of the bottom, making it much easier to use while plugged in.

Interacting with Your Mac

What you have heard is true: the Pre presents itself to iTunes as an iPod, and iTunes will sync with the Pre. It will not sync Apple DRM’d (that’s copy-protected for the uninitiated) files. It will sync playlists, podcasts, photos and videos (again, only non-DRM’d videos, though).

If you’ve taken pictures with your Pre, and plug it into your Mac, iPhoto will recognize that there are pictures on your Pre and will enable you to import them.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to sync bookmarks with the Pre’s browser. This is a big plus for me on my iPod Touch, and something of a downer with the Pre.

The Pre will show up on your desktop as a hard drive. In this regard, it is very easy to drag and drop new wallpapers and ringtones onto your Pre. Actually, as far as I can tell, you can copy any MP3 file to the ringtones directory and the Pre will allow you to select it as a ringtone – not too shabby.

Other than iTunes, iPhoto and the USB-drive functions I’ve described, I do not believe the Pre offers any further Mac-specific interactions.

Other Points of Interest

• The EVDO 3G data speed is pretty good, and the WiFi works pretty effortlessly, picking up recognized networks automatically.
• Voicemail still sucks, requiring you to call in and listen to them in order. Although the Pre does show you how many voicemails are waiting for you.
• Reception seems to be a little worse than my old Katana, but not horrible.
• Accessing the menu dropdown on the top left of the screen can be difficult, and often takes several attempts to hit the menu.
• There are no good cases for the Pre. And by good, I mean (a) protect the phone and (b) leave the phone and its functions easily accessible. The vertical slider form factor makes this a particularly disconcerting engineering feat, I’m sure.
• Battery Life is not very good. With moderate use, I have to charge it at least once, if not twice, per day.
• Speaking of battery life, the cover does come off, but is non-intuitive and labor-intensive. You won’t be changing the battery while driving, that’s for sure.
• Crashing and resetting: Each of our Pre’s have crashed once since we got them yesterday. There is no way to reset the power for a reboot without popping off the back case and removing and replacing the battery – a significant pain in the rear. Compare this with the iPhone’s ability to reset by simply holding the button(s) down for about 10 seconds.
• GPS seems to work now, but it took about 24 hours before I could get the Pre to find itself.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m a little disappointed in the Pre. That said, I’m not completely discouraged. As far as it goes, it’s not a bad phone, it does a lot, and it has a completely unbeatable rate plan. I have faith that the app catalog will grow exponentially over the next several months.

My wife shares about the same sentiments with me – it’s not a bad phone, but we’ve definitely been spoiled by our iPods Touch (iPod Touches?).

What are we going to do?

Well, if I keep the Pre, I don’t want to carry around my iPod Touch anymore – there’s too much duplicate functionality, and one of the biggest advantages of owning a Pre (or iPhone) for me is the ability to converge my three devices that go with me everywhere and make my pockets much happier – phone, camera, ipod.

That said, I can’t help but to have this feeling that I will miss Apple’s App store and iPhone OS if I get rid of my iPod Touch and don’t get an iPhone.

The iPhone plan is just too expensive. I can’t justify spending almost $200 (after taxes and fees) per month on a cell phone. I predicted at the beginning of this year that Apple would end its exclusivity with AT&T at the two-year mark. I hope I’m right because there needs to be some competitive downward pressure on the iPhone’s rate plans, and the sooner the better.

If the Pre doesn’t grow on us, we’ll either be downgrading back to our Katana’s or we’ll downgrade to a non-smart phone with a QWERTY keyboard for easier texting and a cheaper plan.

I will be anxiously awaiting Apple’s WWDC announcements tomorrow, and I am genuinely excited to see what’s in store for the 2009 iPhone – even if I never end up with one. I’m just geeky like that.

Finally – Any Questions?

If you have any questions about the Pre, or would like to know if it can do this or that, please feel free to leave me a comment below, shoot me an email or hit me up on twitter @esquiremac.

Early on, I would write my time down here and there, and at the end of the month, I would be gathering my snippets of billing information from all over my office and my computer – even going back over my recent emails and documents to forensically reconstruct my billable time for the month. As you can imagine, you lose a fair amount of billable time that way – both for time it takes to recreate the month, and for the work that ultimately never gets billed for because it was missed in the reconstruction.

Obviously, I needed to find a system for capturing my time contemporaneously with the work I was billing for. For a while, my solution was to keep a legal pad next to my computer and jot down my work as I was doing it. That’s not a terrible solution, but it left me at the end of the month with a good bit of work still to do. I would go over the pages of chicken scratch (yes, surprise, my handwriting is horrific), and try to give a client-by-client report to our secretary who creates and sends out our billing invoices.

Eventually, I realized that by using a spreadsheet, I could capture my time as I do the work, and, at the end of the month, we can manipulate the data in any way we want. Specifically, the data can be arranged by client or matter to give our billing secretary easy access to copy and paste the relevant information.

As most firms do, our firm bills by the tenth of an hour.

It is easy to type in the start time and end time for your tasks in the spreadsheet. The hard(er) part is to do math with the time, convert it to tenths and round it up to the next tenth. Of course, this can be done manually, which is how I used to do it, but the with power of Numbers and Excel, it can easily be done automatically – if you know the right formulas.

First, you need to make sure your start and end time columns are set to the Date and Time format. The next step is intuitive enough: subtract the start time from the end time. If that is all you do, however, your result will be something like “0.0″ because the spreadsheet doesn’t fully understand what you’re up to. Multiplying the whole answer by 24 will give you a decimal representation of the time. But, you’re not done yet. At this point, you may get an answer like 0.717. You could just set the decimal places to 1 in the cell format settings, but that would round to the nearest tenth, rather than rounding up. The solution is to add the ROUNDUP operator to the beginning of the formula. To tell the spreadsheet what decimal place to round up to, add a “,1″ to the end of the formula.

In the end, your formula for calculating time to the tenth of an hour, rounding up, is “=ROUNDUP((B1-A1)*24,1)” where B1 is your end time and A1 is your start time.

So, without further ado, here are two templates for tracking your billable time:

• Numbers Billing Template
• Excel Billing Template

One final tip: I have found that in order for me to practically capture my time as I do the work, I need to have the spreadsheet very quickly accessible. The way I accomplished this was to put the billing document in my dock. Just drag the document from where ever you keep it to the right side of the dock (where your “stacks” folders are kept), and it will stay in the dock for one click access to your timesheet.