Author / Jeffrey Schoenberger

by Jeffrey Schoenberger

HoudahSpot Helps You Find Your Way Through Search, Paperless Strategies and Document Management

While Spotlight is an incredible piece of the Mac OS, lawyers sometimes need a little more horsepower to find the right document in a digital sea of files. HoudahSpot is an advanced search utility that uncovers an immense amount of search functionality across your Mac. Jeffrey compares HoudahSpot to Spotlight in this review, and then describes the features and explains how HoudahSpot can become your helpful search assistant.

Houdahspot small

While attending the Mac Power Users session at TechShow in March, renowed Mac-using attorney Randy Juip discussed Spotlight.1  For those of you unfamiliar with Spotlight, it is one of the great reasons to own a Mac. Released with OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005, it is a system-wide, real-time search function built directly into every modern Mac.

At its most basic, clicking on the magnifying glass in the top right corner of your menu bar, Spotlight lets you search your files by numerous criteria.2  When you begin typing, Spotlight instantly narrows matches as you continue typing. Spotlight searches by file name, metadata, and even file contents. It searches your documents, emails, addressbook, and calendar items. Spotlight can even launch applications and perform simple math. If you’re not using Spotlight yet, it’s an excellent way to speed up your file access.

Having said that, you may quickly run up against Spotlight’s usability limits. By making this feature so approachable, Apple hid much of Spotlight’s power.3  Fortunately for Spotlight fans, a third party program has stepped into the gap. Houdah Software created HoudahSpot, which approachably exposes the full capabilities Apple built into Spotlight. HoudahSpot’s easy access to Spotlight’s complete functionality makes Spotlight a topflight stand-in for legal document management on the Mac.4

Why is that important? As I joked to an older friend at a technophobic law firm, the future of storage is not in bankers’ boxes. If you’re not making a strong, successful effort to go paperless in your law practice, you’re wasting time (searching for documents), space (storing documents), and ultimately money. Either you’re wasting billable hours handling paper or you’re paying subordinates or offsite companies to do it for you. HoudahSpot lets you take scanned documents and access last year’s client matters as quickly as yesterday’s.5

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by Jeffrey Schoenberger

Portable Security For Us All, Or Why Steve Gibson Is My Hero

We’ve all done it. You probably did it before you fired up your browser to read this article. You logged onto your computer or network with a *mediocre password* (like your spouse’s name). Maybe you feel bad about this. More likely you don’t think about it at all. I didn’t used to either.

Yubikey Review on www.macsinlaw.com

We’ve all done it. In fact most of us still do it. You probably did it before you fired up your browser to read this article. You logged onto your computer or network with a mediocre password: your spouse’s name, your child’s birthday, your pet’s name. Maybe you feel bad about this. More likely you don’t think about it at all. I didn’t used to either.

The importance of password security didn’t dawn on me until I was attending a CLE conference in Michigan a couple of years ago. It was July of 2010, about four months after I bought an iPad. I decided to travel light and only carry my iPhone and iPad – no MacBook. For the most part this worked wonderfully. Taking notes was simple. I could check and respond to email. And both devices had 3G service, which was faster than the hotel’s overpriced, mediocre wifi. The problem was that part of the conference involved team exercises where our work was handed in for review.1 At that time, the iPad and iOS had no printing mechanism.2 Of course, I was not alone in this problem. The participants who brought laptops did not bring printers.3 We would have to use the the hotel’s business center. And I drew the short straw.

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by Jeffrey Schoenberger

Apple’s Surreptitious Entry into the Mac Docking Station Market

Docking stations have a mixed history on the Mac. Guest blogger Jeffrey Schoenberger briefly covers the history of docking stations for Macs, and details how the Apple Thunderbolt Display can function as an incredible docking station for the Mac.

Thunderbolt Display as a Docking Station for the MacBook Air and MacBook pro

I welcome Jeffrey Schoenberger to Macs in Law for his first guest blog post. I met Jeffrey a few years ago at a state bar presentation, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting to know him and his passion for Macs. Here, Jeffrey answers a question I get a LOT from lawyers looking for a Mac-compatible docking station.  Jeffrey’s bio is at the end of the post. Also, please comment on the post if you found it helpful. And thank you for reading!

Docking stations have a mixed history on the Mac. From 1992 to 1997, Apple manufactured the PowerBook Duo line and a set of accompanying docking stations. The Duo docks functioned the same as modern PC docking stations and port replicators. They added additional connections and eliminated the plug-unplug routine. Once Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the Duo docks were shown the door.

Starting with the Wall Street/Main Street line of PowerBook G3s, Apple-blessed docking solutions vanished. Apple left the market to third parties to fill. One of the most prominent was BookEndz, which created a series of docking stations for PowerBooks and MacBooks. These solutions filled a gap, but did so awkwardly. Apple offered no engineering assistance and its placement of critical ports on both sides of the laptop meant that the user had to carefully align his computer so that each port precisely met its mate on the BookEndz unit. But, so long as Apple neglected the market, third parties would do what they could to fill a real need.

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