Criminal Defense Law With An Apple

In case you were living under a rock, Apple updated just about everything. The real excitement and media buzz is focused on fanboy favorite: iPhone. See the guided tour here.

I had a chance to do a web conference with Nick Lightbody, at Desk Space, to take a look at the new Case Management program that is being released in the coming days.  We spent about an hour looking at the interface and a bit of time looking at the programming behind the scenes of this Legal Practice Management Program.

Desk Space is a very robust program and it looks as though Nick, and his team, have been taking notes on what people want. What do they want? Well, for starters, a lot of folks want control of their data. Desk Space is a child of the File Maker program.  As such, the program resides on your computer. What else is the legal community looking for? Not much else, except…everything. Contacts, calendars, billing, documents (with merging capabilities) and accounting all within one program. Enter Desk Space.

Like similar File Maker Practice Management programs, Desk Space uses a tabs and icon interface but still provides a very clean interface. Like any good Mac program designer should, Desk Space focuses on elegant simplicity. To appreciate what is really going on with Desk Space, underneath the simple design, there would likely be a learning curve, to get the most out of the program. I believe this would be true of all robust practice management systems.

There are some tools (such as job or workflow tracking) that would not be a meaningful tool in my practice. However, if your practice blends civil work, this would be a critical tool. On the other hand, the merge tools built into this program is a unique feature not offered by many competitors. The program also has many of the tools we would expect in a comprehensive program: time management, client management, contacts with “spotlight” search, financial reporting, billing and more.

An immediately noticeable criticism is that many of the naming conventions for the tabs and icons were inconsistent with my own practice. Good news. All the names can be customized to suit your practice. Everything is constructed “soft wired” and the team at Desk Space can change the way anything is described. In addition, many of the features can be finessed to the way you practice. 

Desk Space is also platform agnostic. Meaning it can run on that old PC collecting dust in the closet. But why would you do that?

Overall, I was impressed with the time and thought that was put into Desk Space. It has all the markings of a comprehensive Practice Management tool. Of course, I have not used Desk Space myself, so I am limited to say that it looks very useful. If you are a Desk Space user, we would welcome your first hand impressions in the comments. 

Prices for Desk Space are competitive to what you would see for similar Practice Management Systems on a Mac. Nick did provide that for a short time he would be allowing users to purchase Desk Space at a discount, with some features limited, in order to determine whether this was the right tool for your practice.

For those not ready for SaaS and think the other Practice Management alternatives require to much bending, Desk Space may be for you. The program is designed to be flexible and simple to use. According to Nick, during the beginning phase of introducing Desk Space, early adopters are going to get special attention.  You can contact Nick for a demo: nick.lightbody at deskspace.com

I have been slowing testing the stability and reliability of Mobile Me for the last 6 months. It is always difficult to go back to a program that has proved problematic in the past. But I had a one year subscription and even Apple deserves to have a bumpy software roll-out.

After six months of using calendar and address book things have been going remarkably well. The program has synced across all three computers and an iPhone.  My caveat, I have only used Mobile Me for my personal contacts and calendar. Also, I have not used mobile me for document management or email. 

The one thing I did discover was that using Onyx will wreak havoc on Mobile Me. I am sure if it is a bug that needs to be worked out or who needs to work it out. If you run Onyx, then open up your calendars, you may experience multiple repeated calendar titles (as many as five). I suppose that is better than having them disappear. I am not married to Onyx, but it is a nice program to keep things clean, zippy and spiffy. But I am liking the idea of having a constantly synced calendar and address book. Now we are in search of a new tweaking/optimization program.

We have been following the Psystar battle since it began. This legal throwdown between David and Goliath has little to do with our practice area and more to do with IP law. Still, it has been interesting to watch the fight unfold. Today, TUAW reports that things may be coming to an untimely close.

The folks at  Cult of Mac were sent an interesting email:

Hi,
The reason am writing to you is that your book is among first to
sell in amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/steve-jobs-Books/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Steve%20Jobs&rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3ASteve%20Jobs&page=1

I will try to be as short as possible:

2 years ago, I set a amazon.com fake page, and sent emails to different IT people around the globe. Among some other unknown person, Steve Jobs got my mail, he didn’t notice the scam I set so he “updated” his amazon account with data( name, address, credit card number, phone, amazon user and password) which I received, sent to my mail.

Now, it was not my intention to misuse his account (which is still untouched!), the sole purpose was if the “scam” was so perfect that even IT Guru’s will fall on it.

I saw you are the bestseller with a book on S.Jobs, I still have access on his amazon.com account, with all his purchase/interest details for 6-7 years. Now I just checked again, and he didn’t use it since December 22 last year, for reasons known to us.

I intent to sell this information, that’s why I picked you as first on the list.

If you are not interested, am sure other book authors on SJ life (Jeffrey Young, William Simon, Alan Deutschman, Anthony Imbimbo, Daniel Lyons or any others) will be very interested to know about this.

Hope to hear from you,

Regards

p.s. I can provide “print screens” logged in SJ amazon account.

You can read the full post on how this email spear-phishing-for-whales-ploy is playing out here.

…we have an app for that.

I thought that Mac Students had shut down. But Erik couldn’t stay away. Nice to have this blog back. But Scripting for Lawyers seems to have disappeared. Looks like the whole site is gone. Too bad.

There is a lot of hype this week about Windows 7. Living in the Pacific NW, the echo chamber for the hype is even louder. Still, I read this article today from Chip Bit that surprised me. See, for some of my colleagues, the number one issue with Vista was the complete and shockingly widespread incompatibility with so many programs and drivers.

In fairness, Microsoft had to do this. Dead weight. MS already had a bloated OS that was continuously backward compatible with most everything ever made for Windows 95 and up. This seemed like a hopeless strategy. It made the OS slow and constantly prone to attack. So it was rumored that backward compatibility would have to be addressed. I guess this is how they do it:

“Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it works on Vista, it will work on Windows 7. If it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.”

That’s lame. But from another source the story continues that MS is offering a virtual environment for XP software. If you buy the right version of Windows 7. So there you go. That is the fix. If you were waiting for Microsoft to come out with something that would work with your novel piece of software from Windows 98, you can use it in a virtual environment on 7. If you were waiting for Microsoft to make a novel piece of software…well, hold onto your copy of XP and we’ll see. 

I have recently upgraded from Grand Central to Google Voice. So far, it looks very promising (including a written transcript of voice messages). I look forward to providing a full review after 30 days of use.

I read a few reviews of Sugar Sync last year and I had just finished tinkering with Dropbox and MobileMe. Both programs left me unsatisfied and I couldn’t come up with a good solution. MobileMe was slow and unstable. Drop Box had a clunky interface and lacked some critical features (albeit, it was beta).  Others, like Jungle Disk, were met with mixed reviews. I put the whole project off for a while.

After 30 days with Sugarsync…wow! No problems. What I dig about this software is that a physical file (the magic briefcase) resides on my hard drive and then uses the cloud to sync across the other computers. So far, four computers are syncing flawlessly. I think the “magic briefcase” is what makes this product standout against other cloud solutions. This, coupled with the iPhone application makes Sugarsync a new favorite. I can now access any file from my office on my iPhone. Sweet! Now, if I could just get Circus Ponies Notebook on my iPhone, the planets will have aligned. 

Of course, for a proper review, head on over to Mac Esq’s review. He also has some question and answers on Sugarsync. Bad news, since those posts, Mac Esq has turned his back on Sugar Sync and embraced Dropbox. 

But for our us, Sugarsync is more intuitive and works better than any other solution we have spent 30 days with. Of course, I am still in the honeymoon stage (and we don’t have the “over 25,000 files” problem that Mac Esq dealt with). I just purchased a year subscription and we will see how things go from here.