Category Archives: Windows

Inky E-mail is an Attractive New E-mail Client

By
Posted in E-mail Management, Macintosh, Windows and tagged , ,

Microsoft Outlook’s e-mail is the behemoth in the legal world.  Lawyers who don’t use it are likely using one of Microsoft’s free products (Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail) or going directly to their Web e-mail.  Inky is a new e-mail application that installs on Windows and Mac and provides an attractive alternative for those not using Outlook.

Inky describes itself as cloud-enabled.  It’s a bit confusing because you don’t actually do anything on their site.  Once you install Inky (octopus logo!), you tell it how to access your Web mail or other e-mail servers.  It automatically loaded settings for both Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail, which is now common among e-mail clients, including Zimbra and Thunderbird.  It also picked up my own mail server, which has custom settings, and this impressed me because I added 3 accounts without actually configuring anything.

The cloud element of Inky appears to be entirely a processing function.  They store your Inky password on their site, but it is encrypted.  Their FAQ says that their staff can access neither your password nor information about your e-mail.  When you open Inky on your computer, the cloud servers synchronize what you see on your computer with what’s in your e-mail accounts.

I am really attracted to the interface.  It’s exceptionally clean – it reminded me of the very crisp MetroTwit twitter client – and the layout is intuitive. The default view is a unified inbox.  As you can see below in the Windows client, the feel is very much of a modern Web site.  There is a scrolling icon bar on the left with clear flags for new messages.  The icons either use a product logo, for Google Mail for example, or common icons for things like Compose Mail (envelope with pencil).  When you click the inky logo at the top left corner, the menu widens to give you full labels.

inky-unified-inboxI really liked the drop down menus at the top where I could quickly switch to view just unread e-mail or go to a specific account.  If you leave the inbox and view just the Google Mail account, you will have a folder list at the top that reflects your inbox and other Google Mail labels.

The compose mail view is also clean and easy to use.  If you are using Web mail, you’ll find the toolbar similar to the options in Google, Yahoo!, or Outlook.com Web mail sites.  It will access your contact list for auto-filling the address and you can send from any of your configured accounts.

inky-compose-screenIt lacks the integration with calendars and other tools that products like Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird offer.  On the other hand, it has some additional filtering tools to automatically flag mail as a subscription, for example, and have an icon on the left menu show you when you have new messages that apply.  You can’t customize what goes in to these so you may still want to rely on setting filters in your Web mail account and having e-mail sorted into folders before you access it with Inky.

It’s hard to know where Inky is going, since it’s a free application and very new.  If you need a lightweight, easy to read and use e-mail client, Inky will fit your bill.

 

 

Better File Management on Windows

By
Posted in File Management, Windows and tagged ,

MakeUseOf had an interesting, brief review of an automation utility for Windows called Hygeia.  They compare it to IFTTT.  Some of its functionality sounds like Auto Hotkey, which you can use to create small macros to automate simple processes.

Hygeia caught my eye because of the ability to set up rules to manage files.  You can set up folder watchers, and when something happens in a folder, it can trigger an event.  It can also keep track of when you rename or delete a file.  On its own, I can see some minor file management benefits but if it was paired with a cloud file sync service, like Dropbox or Box, you might be able to do things like grab a file that is synchronized down to your computer and place it in a folder that isn’t synchronized.  This might be useful if you’re wary about placing all of your files in the cloud, but occasionally use Dropbox to upload a file remotely and have it sent back to your computer.

Desktop RSS Reading with Omea

By
Posted in Feed Management, Research Management, RSS, Windows and tagged , , ,

The RSS reader world is now pretty cleared out so I was interested to hear about Omea, Jetbrain’s new desktop reader.  I’m a heavy RSS follower and Google’s merger of Reader into the Google+ social environment has made it less functional than it was.  Omea is the first new RSS reader that has some compelling features.

If you are already using Google RSS, you can easily export your current RSS feed list (using the OPML format exporter) and import it directly into Omea.  There are a number of features that make it a compelling alternative:

  • Workspaces.  You can create tabs that focus on specific areas of information you are following, and segment the RSS feeds into those workspaces.  Hootsuite does this nicely with social media tracking but I haven’t seen an RSS reader do this as well as Omea;
  • Annotations.  Most aggregators allow you to mark an RSS item with a star or favorite so that you can quickly return to it.  But Omea has the option of adding an additional annotation so that you can save comments with the post.
  • Alerts.  Omea will watch incoming RSS posts for keywords.  Highlight text in a post that you want to get alerts for, right-click and select Notify me, and the next time one of your incoming RSS feeds contains that text, Omea will warn you.
  • Advanced Search.  The search looks at the index of feed items you’ve already retrieved.  In this way, it’s similar to Google Reader.  It has more filtering options, though, which can be helpful if you’re searching beyond just the RSS feeds you’ve retrieved.

Omea by Jetbrain aggregates RSS feeds, newsgroup items, and allows significant organization and markup. These additional tools can make this Windows-based desktop RSS reader a significant research asset for quickly retrieving resources you have saved for later use.

Omea aggregates newsgroups, can export content as Web pages, and does far more than this post covers.  Its only real drawback is that, like all desktop aggregators I’ve used, it does not maintain synchronization status with an online RSS reader.  If I look at feeds on my phone or tablet or in the online Google Reader, I don’t have any way to filter out those items when I return to Omea.  If you’re primarily on a desktop, however, this is a fantastic tool.

Finding Files Faster in Windows

By
Posted in Document management, File Management, Search, Windows and tagged , ,

Desktop search remains an underutilized and underappreciated productivity tool for lawyers.  Windows 7 has finally delivered a powerful search feature that will uncover content quickly.  In what seems typical, the default settings are not the most powerful.  Check out these tips to make sure that you’ve tweaked your search to be as useful as possible.  In particular, make sure the search is actually looking at the contents of the files you use, not just their names.  You can also create your own search shortcuts, so that when you hit the Windows button, there are other search choices.

Cloud search is always an option but if you use cloud as a synchronized storage medium, then it means those files also exist on your local machine.  If you can improve and use your desktop search, you will be searching the same content and may use it more than a cloud service.

MakeUseOf had a nice roundup of some lesser known search tools that you can use if you still don’t find Windows built-in search to be powerful enough.  These are not the typical ones you may have heard of, like Copernic or X1.  If you are finding yourself hunting around your hard drive for that file that you know you kept, improving your desktop search may be the best way to do it.

Use Qiqqa for Quicker Management of Research PDFs

By
Posted in Case Law, Document management, File Management, Research Management, Windows

Users of Mendeley or Zotero are probably already managing articles or case law or other documents downloaded in PDF format.  An interesting newcomer to this area is Qiqqa.  Unlike academic researchers, for which all of these tools appear to be primarily designed, I’m always curious to see how they do with law-related PDFs.  While they will handle a law journal nicely, I test them against case law.  Zotero, for example, has the ability to capture an item as a case, with special feeds to store date decided, and reporter volume.

Qiqqa does not have a specific case law attribute but offers a lot of other ways to get into the documents you have.  I downloaded an opinion of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in PDF.  It was easy to add to my local library – there is also an online sync function available, so you can have your library stored online – and Qiqqa automatically will perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the document.

It displays this information in interesting ways.  First, it shows a tag cloud of terms that occur frequently in the document.  For example, the case I used – Johnson v. City of Detroit – dealt with housing discrimination and was a Section §1983 case.  The tag cloud displays a large 1983 among the other keywords it highlighted in the case.  You can click on any term in the tag cloud and Qiqqa will highlight that keyword wherever it exists in your document.  You can also search across your library for a keyword to quickly bring documents together.

Qiqqa’s metadata sniffer didn’t extract any useful metadata but, with the PDF of the case downloaded from the Sixth Circuit’s site, when I clicked on Google Scholar, it ran a search and retrieved the same case.  That can help you quickly get into other citations, using Google Scholar’s How Cited feature.

Like Zotero, Qiqqa isn’t ideal for legal research management unless you are primarily dealing with traditional journals and articles. However, the features it has for handling PDFs are quite useful and I could see this being a great tool for managing a case with a lot of downloaded PDFs or for internal functions, like managing articles or knowhow that you have found that relate to your practice.

Rethinking Your Desktop Search

By
Posted in Business Information, Document management, File Management, Google, Research Management, Search, Windows and tagged , ,

Google has announced that it’s long running Desktop search tool will no longer be supported.  It was a great product for a number of reasons.  It improved over the operating system search and ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.  You can download it until September 14th but current installations will not be supported after that date.

Why Desktop Search?

Why would you want desktop search, you might ask?  It provides the ability to search beyond the files on your computer, to make your searching experience more powerful.  As an example, a search with Google Desktop would return results both from your local machine and the Web, without you having to do searches in two places.  The Desktop tool was also extendable, so that it could look into files that the Windows operating system search couldn’t, improving your results.  It could also search network folders, so you didn’t have to clear that first obstacle of figuring out where you saved a file.

Still not convinced that desktop search is worth worrying about?  A LexisNexis 2008 workplace productivity survey of lawyers and non-lawyers found that nearly a third of lawyers spent between 1 and 2 hours a day looking for documents and e-mails.  Another 16% reported spending 2 to 4 hours a day.  That’s a significant amount of potential revenue, whether billable hour or lost time in an alternative fee arrangement, that can be improved by applying better search to information management.

Many lawyers have not yet migrated to Windows 7, and so are limited in their choices for alternatives.  Windows Desktop Search 4 is still available as a free download and is a huge improvement on the search within XP.  Windows 7 users have it built-in to their operating system.  Windows 7 users also have the benefit of additional search configurations, including forcing Windows 7 to index ALL the files on their desktops, and to add search connectors to enable you to search other sites from your search box.

One of the best known alternatives is Copernic, which has a commercial license for their Desktop Search Professional version.  There is a free version but it’s only for home users.  It is a more powerful tool than Google Desktop was, without some of the limitations on the size of file it could index.  It also has additional options for customizing which files are searched.  Copernic is a Windows-only product.

X1 is another well-known alternative to Google Desktop and has a range of fee-based products, for searching your business files or your Sharepoint server, among others.  Both Copernic and X1 have an e-discovery review focus, so if you are replacing Google Desktop, you may be able to get a replacement tool that can do dual duty.

Cloud Search

Another possibility is that your information is no longer stored on your desktop.  As lawyers and others move their files onto hosted Internet servers, the so-called cloud, they may not need to use desktop search any longer.  A great option is Greplin, which will search many of the most popular document and file storage sites, including Google Docs and Dropbox.com.  Here’s a quick video I made of how it works.  Another service similar to Greplin is Cloudmagic, although it searches fewer services.  I would expect to see more of these sorts of offerings appear in the future.

This is the latest in a progression of products to be sunsetted by Google.  Operating system search is improving and the Google ecosystem has been a bit sprawling, so this weeding certainly makes sense.  It’s been a good 7 years.

Windows Mesh and Microsoft SkyDrive are Dropbox Alternative

By
Posted in Document management, File Management, Windows and tagged , , , ,

Online backup and file synchronization have gained a lot of interest since Dropbox came on the scene. Lawyers who are comfortable using the cloud for file storage can drop a file on their computer and have it automatically copied up to Dropbox’s servers. When you are out of the office, you can access those files from anywhere with an Internet connection. You can also have those files automatically copied back down to another computer, keeping your home and office PCs synchronized. There are a number of other products that edo the same thing, including Box.net and Sugarsync.

Windows 7 users can also use Windows Mesh, which provides a synchronization tool to your Microsoft Skydrive account. While Skydrive provides 25 GB of free storage space, you can only sync 5GB of it using Mesh. This is comparable to the free storage of 2GB at Dropbox and 5GB at Sugarsync.

Why would you use Mesh instead of Dropbox? There is no question that Dropbox is the pre-eminent storage utility site, having been extended with extra scripts by its users or integrated into other products, like Rocket Matter’s practice management. If you need that extra space, though, it is nice to have some archival storage space up in the cloud. Using a Microsoft sync product may also mean that your overall environment is simplified by relying on their products for more of your functionality.