Legal Research

Two Tech Tips

By Simon Fodden

I’ve been learning the ins, outs, and inbetweens of my new iPad, which means for the most part figuring out what apps work on it and what their limitations are. (e.g. I don’t use Word so I’m not fussed about its lack; but I do use RTF and am disappointed that I can’t create rich text files.) In the course of doing that, I’ve downloaded the iPad app version of Dropbox and have been impressed all over again by that great service.

If you don’t know Dropbox you should take a look. It’s a file storage and sharing system that works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, and soon the BlackBerry. Two GB of storage are free, 50 GB costs $10 a month, and 100 $20 a month. Essentially, the files you want to have in the cloud live on Dropbox’s servers; you work on them as you would with any file on your computer; and Dropbox records the changes. That’s it. Simple. And that’s the point: no muss, no fuss, files of any kind.

In fact there’s a shadow copy of your files in the local Dropbox application on your machine; you can work on this when you’re offline; and it gets synced when an internet connection becomes available. As well, Dropbox keeps a copy of all your alterations for the prior 30 days, and if that’s not enough for version freaks, all prior versions are kept forever if you have a pro account (and the free Rat-pack add-on).

One final note in this encomium: on mobile devices, which may lack apps to view a file, Dropbox provides its own file viewer for many formats. Icing on the cake.

My second tip is just for those who are figuring out their iPads. Check out Penultimate, which turns your iPad (or iPhone) into a handwriting tablet. Using a finger or a stylus, you record whatever you wish in one of your notebooks in the app. To get the drawing off the machine, you email it out. I discovered, as a bonus feature, that if you email it to your Evernote account ( — you do know about Evernote, don’t you? — ) you may find that their OCR program renders your cursive note searchable. It did mine, at least, and my penmanship is weak, to say the least.

Ubiquity, interconnection, ease of use . . . it’s all good.

And as soon as I figure out how to put an image in an entry using my iPad, I’ll show you a sample of the Penultimate at work.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 06, 2010 (boomark / email).