Criminal Defense Law With An Apple

Are you switching to a Mac for the new year? Are you giving the gift of Apple’s OSX simplicity this holiday season? Then you should consider the Mac Switcher Bundle. This bundle includes 1Password and Text Expander. These two programs are huge time savers and worth the price. Even you seasoned users should consider checking out this deal.  Check out the Mac Switcher Bundle here.

Look, widgets are not as cool as I thought they would be. When I had my PC, I added some variation of widgets on my computer. Just to make it more Apple-like. In the end, I couldn’t find enough useful reasons to press F12 and visit the widget page. Much like the iPhone apps, there are numerous novel, fun and even silly applications. But nothing that leant to my practice.

About two months ago, that all changed. A program called Easy Envelopes was mentioned in passing. It was an envelope widget. The program integrated with the address book and was receiving a fair amount of praise from my fellow mac-lawyers. After two months of using this widget, I can say that the praise is well deserved. First off, the program is free. Second, it is super easy to set-up and use (as Mac apps should be). And third, the integration into address book is flawless. 

I know there are mail-mergers and Quick Silver superstars out there. You will not find this application handy. But if you are using MS Word or Pages Templates to print up an envelope, you will really love this app.  I still only hit F12 to use this widget. But it is nice to have a reason to hit F12 again. You can find Ambrosia’s Mail app here. 

Yes, another cloud service bites the dust.  I liked Sandy. It was a free internet service that was integrated into your email, calendar and address book. It was uber-smart and had some fun little ways of keeping you on top of things. Unfortunately, I don’t know that it was well tailored for a Criminal Defense Attorney but maybe I didn’t give the girl a chance. I know a few other lawyers were singing her praises and will be sad to see her go. Here is the announcement: 

Sandy will going offline at close of business (5pm Pacific Time) on Friday, December 19th, 2008. Until then, she’ll be working as usual to allow you time to make the transition, find alternative services, and download any data you wish to take with you.

Adding no fuel to my paranoid friends fire, Sandy is giving everyone a couple weeks to get stuff out:

You can download and import it all into an alternate calendar, to-do list, contact management or note-taking application. You’ll also get a person-readable text file containing everything you’ve had Sandy remember for you. (Open it in your favorite text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, Word, et al) or your Web browser.) Please be sure to export anything you’d like to keep before Friday, December 19th. After that, Sandy and the iwantsandy.com web site will be offline and all user data will be permanently deleted.

Interesting note, Sandy lives on in the hands of Twitter. Apparently they purchased the intellectual property of Sandy and another program called Stikkit. In addition, the CEO and primary programmer is closing the doors of his company to work with the folks at Twitter. 

Sandy replacements? 

Google Calendar: http://calendar.google.com

* Remember the Milk: http://rememberthemilk.com

* Backpack: http://backpackit.com* PBWiki: http://pbwiki.com  

* Backpack: http://backpackit.com* PBWiki: http://pbwiki.com