I always like to check the prices on the old models after a nice refresh.  I was pleasantly surprised to see 15-inch MacBook Pro’s as low as $1349! Yesterday, this bad boy would have set you back $2000.  If you’re not pressed for the new model, hurry up and get yourself a steal.

Check out all of Apple’s refurbished Macs here.

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I have toyed with Bento v1 in the past, but I never gave a serious attempt to organize our practice with it.  This is a product that seems to have a lot of promise - but, at the same time, seems very time consuming to set up.

FileMaker’s “Top Ten List” of new features:

1. New! Apple Mail integration – Get instant access to related messages

   • Link Apple Mail email messages, notes and RSS articles directly to information stored in Bento with a simple drag and drop.
   • View messages instantly from within Bento using Quick Look.
   • Open selected messages in Apple Mail with a single click to easily reply or forward.

2. New! More Spreadsheet-like Behavior – Includes familiar features you already know how to use

   • Use the new fill down feature or copy and paste to enter information faster and easier than ever before.
   • Just click, type, and tab to enter data just like you do in Microsoft Excel or iWork Numbers.
   • Plus, you can now add new fields and change field types right from the Table View with a few simple clicks.

3. New! Direct Numbers and Excel Support – Work with Numbers and Excel seamlessly

   • Directly import Microsoft Excel or iWork Numbers spreadsheets. You no longer need to save spreadsheets as CSV files first.
   • Directly export Bento libraries to Microsoft Excel or iWork Numbers format. You no longer need to export libraries as CSV files first.
   • Copy and paste selected blocks of Microsoft Excel or iWork Numbers data into Bento to view information in beautiful Bento forms, get easy iTunes-style searching, quick sorting and instant summary stats.
   • Copy and paste Bento data back into your spreadsheet for further analysis and charting.

4. New! Import and Export Tab-Delimited Files – Great news for AppleWorks Users

   • Now you can do more with the AppleWorks information you already have on your Mac by bringing your databases and spreadsheets into Bento with a few clicks.
   • Simply export your AppleWorks data into text file and then import into Bento.
   • You can also export data just as easily to get it back to AppleWorks or any program that supports tab-delimited files.

5. New! Template Import and Export – Exchange Bento Templates

   • Now you can exchange your favorite Bento library templates with other Bento users by simply exporting individual templates.
   • Plus you can get templates from other Bento users by importing them with a simple drag and drop.
   • Note: Individual Bento library templates contain the fields and forms from a library, but not the data.

6. New! Split View – See summary and details together

   • The new hybrid Split View shows summaries and details together on one screen to make viewing and editing information easier than ever.
   • Now you can see lists of information in Table View on top and details in Form View below - all on the same screen.

7. New! Faster Form Customization - Say “Goodbye” to customize mode

   • Now you can change a form layout instantly without having to enter Customize Mode.
   • Simply click near a field’s edge to select it. You can move or resize it, or change the font size, shading and more.
   • When you need to edit the data, just click inside the field. It’s that simple.

8. New! Built-In Links to Maps and Chat - Get maps and start chats from Bento

   • Just click the new button near any address to automatically display maps or driving directions from the Web.
   • Even start a chat session with your IM buddies right from within Bento. (Requires an Internet connection and iChat account.)

9. New! More Printing Options – Print lists and forms easier

   • In Form View, you can now print more than one record per page.
   • In Table View, you can use the new ‘Fit to Width’ option to make your columns automatically fit the width of the page.
   • This is great for phone lists, sales reports and more!

10. New! Ten More Themes – Make your forms look even better

You may also want to check out Apple Briefs’ reviews of Bento v1 here:

• Apple Briefs | Bento: FileMaker “Lite”
• Apple Briefs | Mini-Review: Bento

Bento 2 will set you back $49 for a single license and $99 for a family license.  Enjoy.

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Finis Price (TechnoEsq) says:

a study done by Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University in England, found that “it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train if thought after interruption by email…So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.” While most people claim to check their email every 15 minutes, when actually studied, the average user actually checked their email every five minutes.

I have to say that I very rarely “check” my email. I look for the red badge to show up, and if there’s an unread email, I tend to it. I admit that it probably does take me a few seconds/minutes to get back on track.  However, I gave up on using Growl for Mail.app notifications, and instead, now use Mail.appetizer.

I am a huge fan of Mail.appetizer. It’s advantage over GrowlMail is simple: you can actually perform actions from the notification window. Oh, and like Growl and GrowlMail it’s free.

When an email comes in, you can preview as much of the email as you wish by resizing the window. Once you know what it is, you can do something (or nothing) with the email. By clicking the “x” button (bottom-left), you simply send the notification away. By clicking the delete button, you can actually delete the email without even bringing the Mail.app to focus. By clicking the magnifying-glass button, your Mail program comes to focus with that particular email selected for viewing. Finally, if you don’t want to switch to Mail.app, but you’ve gotten the gist of the email from the notification window, and you don’t need to leave it in “unread” status, you can click the checkmark button and it will mark the email as “read” without switching to Mail.app. This is beautiful if you are like me and go bonkers if there are unread messages staring you in the face with that nasty red badge. 

I suppose, as an alternative, I could take MacSparky’s approach and turn off all notifications - but I ain’t there yet. I like to know when emails come in. Sometimes, particular clients need immediate attention, and sometimes, minutes can matter.

Ultimately Mail.appetizer saves me time and enables me to be more efficient than if I was using GrowlMail or nothing at all.

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The completion of the website work and launch window constraints makes it hard to declare when 3.0 will go live. To be safe I’m going to say it will happen within the next two weeks. It should not take two weeks to get the website ready, but stranger things have happened during this release cycle. Thank you again for your patience

Check the rest of his announcement for all the details.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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).

I, for one, can’t wait to get my free upgrade!

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