The first day of MILOfest was exciting, engaging and educational.

Victor Medina (@victormedina) organized a bigger and better conference this year – attendance is up, the sessions are expanded, and everyone is giddy to be talking Mac.

You almost get the sense that folks have been looking forward to this for several months, and it’s sort of like a little Mac-therapy session – everyone has a glowing Apple on their laptop and there are iPhones and iPads everywhere.

The three sponsors from last year are back, but they brought extra folks to man the booths – Rocket Matter, Clio, and Marketcircle (Daylite / Billings) are good friends of MILOfest by now.

New sponsors this year are Summary Judgment and Smart Marketing and they’re getting a lot of traffic. Victor set up the conference room so that anyone that wants a snack or beverage has to pass by the vendor tables.

Intro to Mac OS X | Victor Medina

Thursday was our “half-day” with the sessions starting at 11am. Victor gave an “Intro to Mac OS X” session that was fairly attended well. Some of the more experienced Mac users presumably visited the magical place down the road in the morning so they could be ready for the more advanced topics later in the day.

But even for an “intro” class, Victor provided some excellent tips. For example, Victor mentioned that a black dot in the red circle in the upper left corner of any application means that there is un-saved information in that application.

Before save in TextEdit:

After save in TextEdit:

Keynote – Creating Basic Presentations | Amin Rahmani

Next up after lunch was Amin Rahmani from Marketcircle providing some basic tips and workflows on Keynote. I watched several folks follow along with Amin on their own laptops working right in Keynote. Amin walked us through animating a car crash, applying an Alpha layer, and several more tips.

(Tomasz Stasiuk has an excellent video interview of Amin on the Planet 10 Tech blog.)

PDF Proficiency in Practice | Mark Metzger

Next was Mark Metzger, an attorney from Naperville, IL providing an excellent session on using & manipulating PDF files. I first met Mark last year at MILOfest when we had dinner at the airport before flying home, and I learned one of my best tips from Mark in using Default Folder X for document management (e.g. quick access to recent folders, applying tags to documents, etc.).

Mark hit a home run with the room when he mentioned David Sparks’ tip (on MacSparky.com) on setting up the ⌘+P+P keyboard shortcut for bypassing the full print dialog and quickly saving a document as a PDF. One attendee commented this tip alone will save them about a half hour every day.

Mark also walked the crowd step-by-step through adding a signature with transparent background to the PDF file.

Along with the signature tip, Mark explained the necessity for adding the “flatten.js” JavaScript menu to Adobe Acrobat so that after you apply your signature, you “burn” it into the document so that the signature image can’t be lifted or moved around. (Rick Borstein walks you through the steps in his Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog).

Mark also spent some time walking folks through creating a form in Acrobat from a document that was not originally created to be filled-in digitally. Most folks viewed this as an excellent way to create an intake form.

Pages – Basic & Advanced | Victor Medina

Victor Medina rounded out the educational sessions of the day with a focus on Pages showing some excellent tips on using styles, cross-linking text within the document, and adding signatures.

Group Dinner

About half the attendees elected to attend the group dinner at Downtown Disney last night and from what I could tell, everyone had a blast. I remember from last year that I made some great friends at the dinner since we all had more time to talk, catch up, and share pictures from our iPhones. It was great this year too.

Friday Schedule

Today (Friday) promises to be fantastic with Ben Stevens talking about Circus Ponies Notebook and Evernote, Jack Newton from Clio talking about clouds, Ron Elkins on using the iPad in trial and Larry Staton providing some info on using Apple Script, Automator and more.

Not too mention that Jack Newton from Clio will be announcing the results of the Apple in Law Firm Survey!

#MILOfest Tag on Twitter

You should most definitely follow the #MILOfest hash tag on Twitter since you’ve got a great gang of Twitterers in the room.