Criminal Defense Law With An Apple

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.