There were a lot of positives about the Pre. To name a few:

• Hands down, best rate plan available, by a long shot;
• Aside from the iPhone, probably the best darn phone out there;
• Good 3G data access;
• Nice size, comfortable fit in your hand or pocket;
• Physical Keyboard;
• Decent 3 megapixel, still camera;
• Good IMAP email with multiple account support;
• MMS is easy, free and fun.

There were significant negatives, though, that took precedence for me.

• Battery Life: What can I say, the battery life on the Pre is horrible. Unless you’re comfortable living in a state of paranoia that you may not be close to a power outlet, car charger or a USB port every few hours, the Pre is going to let you down big time here. Our Pre’s would barely make it to dinner time each day before they required recharging. And then, you have to leave it on the charger, which, for some strange reason juts awkwardly straight out from the side, making the phone unwieldy to hold and use while charging.
• It’s No iPhone: Perhaps the biggest problem we had with the Pre was that it just doesn’t measure up to the mature platform that is the iPhone OS. I am reasonably confident that if I had never owned an iPod Touch, and never knew how wonderful a mobile OS could be, I would have loved the Pre.
• OS/Interface: Compared to the iPhone OS, the Pre’s WebOS is slow, immature, sloppy and cluttered. As in the desktop OS market, Apple reigns supreme with its emphasis on user-friendliness and its mature and refined OS. I found the notifications on the Pre to be too small to see at a glance and hard to accurately touch. There are several “pages” of apps that you can slide left and right, like on the iPhone. But, what makes it cluttered and confusing is that each page, once you slide to it, also scrolls up and down. So, if you slide over to a page, you can’t see immediately if the app you need is right there, you also have to slide up and down. Also, the up and down sliding doesn’t “lock” into place, and it has a slippery sort of feel to it.
• Plastic Screen vs. Glass Screen: Speaking of slippery feel… I believe this particular problem is attributable to the fact that the Pre has a plastic screen, whereas the iPhone and iPod Touch have glass screens. The problem I found was that if there was any sweat on my hands whatsoever, the Pre would not respond. I missed several calls trying to slide the unlock button with sweaty hands. My fingers or thumbs would kind of stick to the screen and jump around, and the screen wouldn’t register the touch. This was very frustrating. The glass on the iPod Touch is much more responsive and forgiving to sweat.
• Form Factor: I felt the Pre was a pretty solid design at first. However, as compared to the rock-solid iPod Touch/iPhone form factor, the Pre felt a bit creaky and there was a fair amount of play related to the sliding mechanism that made the phone feel a little jiggly.

Commitment-phobia

The bottom line with the Pre, for us, was that they were ok phones with great rate plans, but also some pretty big drawbacks. I have no idea what will happen with the iPhone and its exclusivity agreement with satan AT&T or its extortionist outrageous text-messageless hellhole expensive rate plan. But, the one thing that really drove me crazy was the idea that I would settle for the Pre, and then 6 months to a year later, the iPhone would open up to Verizon or Sprint or would finally adopt a humane rate plan. I don’t know how I would survive the regret if such a thing were to happen while I was stuck with my Pre for another year-plus.

So, we returned our Pre’s, reactivated our Katanas, resumed our month-to-month posture with Sprint, and, in the process, discovered that for the last 2 years, Sprint has been charging us a bogus $3.50ish fee every month for living in a county in which we never lived. Even after the restocking fees for the Pre’s, we actually came out ahead.

Admittedly, texting on a 10-digit keypad sucks, but at least the Katana’s 2.5 year old battery still lasts me pretty much all weekend, and life is definitely sweeter without a cell phone contract.

Anyway, we’re happy we turned the Pre’s back in. My ownership of an iPod Touch has gone a long way toward mitigating the need for an iPhone - not the whole way, but a long way.

For now, I will sit hiding in the bushes with my trusty Katana and iPod Touch, fending off the evil temptations that lure me to the dark side AT&T. I don’t know how much longer I can last…

Why Pre?

My wife and I have been getting along pretty well with each of us having a cell phone, iPod Touch, and a digital camera (of the Canon SD variety). We completed our latest 2 year contract with Sprint a little over 6 months ago, and we loved being contract free. We have been waiting for the iPhone to end exclusivity with AT&T and we both know that iPhones would be great phones because of our wonderful experiences with our iPod Touches (iPods Touch?). Texting has taken a bigger role in our lives over the last several months and, as you know, texting with a numeric keypad is a huge pain in the bum (does that make me sound English?). We really wanted our next phones to have a full keyboard - physical or otherwise.

In the last couple of weeks I became pretty excited about the Palm Pre. I was excited about how it would merge all of my contacts and calendars from my work, google and facebook accounts. It looked like the Pre has a great web browser and a strong app platform that would be usable by literally millions of capable web developers.

The main factor that drove us to purchase the Pre was the price, however. It looked like the Pre was a good enough phone that the money we would save over going with the iPhone would be worth it - even if it ultimately didn’t turn out to be as good as the iPhone.

The jury is still out for me as to whether I will stick with the Pre. I will give it a few more days before I commit to sticking with it or consider moving to the iPhone or elsewhere.

Rate Plans

As of today (I will note that this blog was published on June 7, 2009, the day before whatever announcements Apple makes at WWDC 2009 on June 8), Sprint far and away has the best rate plans available. Here is the minimum plan for the Pre on Sprint, compared with a comparable plan on AT&T for the iPhone and a Blackberry Curve on Verizon:

Sprint (Pre) [info here] $129.99/month 2 Palm Pre’s ($400.00) 1500 Minutes Unlimited Data Unlimited Text (and MMS) 25 (approx.) TV channels GPS with turn by turn directions Total 2 year price including purchase price: $3,519.76

AT&T (iPhone) [info here] $179.99/month 2 iPhones ($400.00) 1400 Minutes Unlimited Data Unlimited Text (presently, no MMS for iPhone) GPS Total 2 year price including purchase price: $4,719.76

Verizon (Blackberry Curve) [info here] $229.95/Month 2 Blackberry Curves ($99.99) 1400 Minutes Unlimited Data Unlimited Text (not sure of MMS) GPS (Verizon Navigator) Total 2 year price including purchase price: $5,618.79

The Phone Itself

I read in some reviews that the Pre felt plasticky and light. I don’t really share the same impression - perhaps because I came into it with lower expectations. I came into it knowing that the iPhone was the best damned phone out there, and expected this to be a phone not made by Apple. That said, I was not disappointed in the Pre. It feels pretty solid for a phone not made by Apple. It’s a wonderful size - definitely thicker than the iPhone, but shorter, more rounded and a nicer fit in your pocket.

The sliding mechanism feels fairly sturdy, but it is not always a snap to slide open. You naturally want to slide it up from the bottom, but you need to put your thumb pretty much right in the middle of the screen to get the proper leverage to propel the top up (or the bottom down, depending on your perspective).

Even though the slider feels pretty sturdy, the phone does creak when you hold and touch it - a consequence of having moving parts, unlike the iPhone.

Physical Keyboard

Over the last 1.5 years or so, I have gotten pretty used to using the virtual keyboard on the iPod Touch. Apple was right when they told us that once we learned to trust the auto-correct on the virtual keyboard, we’d move a lot faster. I wouldn’t characterize my typing on the iPod Touch as flying, but it is certainly manageable. That said, I still hate to write any more than a couple sentences on it.

The Pre’s keyboard has been criticized by many for being too cramped. I don’t really have a problem with it, and I have some pretty big hands (me being 6′3″ and 230 pounds, and all). I find that I do type faster on the Pre, and that I don’t mind typing more. I won’t be drafting any motions on the thing, I’m sure, but it’s easier to bang out a couple paragraphs in an email.

This next point is more related to text manipulation than to the keyboard itself, but moving the cursor around on the Pre is a process that can be described as wonky - especially as compared to the iPhone. On the iPhone, you place your finger on the screen and hold it there until a bubble appears that zooms in on where your finger is and shows you the cursor that you can drag around and place anywhere with relative precision. On the Pre, you have to hold down the red/orange button on the keyboard and drag your finger on the screen. The wonky part is that the cursor doesn’t really follow your fingertip. It generally follows the direction of your finger, and in my experience thus far, is a little jumpy. This is a little disorienting because it’s a little like using a trackpad, where you move your finger on the pad and the cursor moves on the screen, only your finger’s already on the screen so you expect the cursor to be at your fingertip but it’s not. It’s workable, but not as effortless and smooth as the iPhone.

Copy and Paste works in basically the same way, only, instead of holding the red/orange button, you hold the shift button while dragging.

Multitasking

Frankly, I don’t find the multitasking to be a big deal. The speed with which apps launch on the Pre is about the same as with my iPod Touch (first generation). Certainly, when you leave apps running in the background, switching to them is faster than opening them up from scratch. Although, I will say that allowing things to load in the background is nice for when you don’t feel like waiting (web pages, contact & calendar syncing, emails, etc.). Of course, most of these occur in the background on the iPhone anyway - except web pages.

In practice, I tend to close out my apps when I’m done with them anyway because having a lot of open “cards” makes me feel disorganized, so, the ability to multitask on the Pre doesn’t really improve my life all that much. It’s a nice, but overhyped, feature.

Camera

The camera on the Pre is actually pretty good. It’s 3 megapixels and there’s no optical zoom (or digital zoom for that matter), so, you can’t expect it to completely replace your 8 megapixel point-and-shoot with 3x to 4x optical zoom and built in image stabilization. There is a flash, however, which makes it not only possible to take pictures in low light, but they actually come out pretty well - for a camera phone. It’s beyond dispute that the Pre takes far better pictures than the iPhone 3G. I am wondering how the next-gen iPhone will stack up.

Speaking of the camera in the next-gen iPhone… It’s a foregone conclusion that the next iPhone will take videos. The Pre’s camera does not presently take video, although, Palm has alluded that they could enable video recording with a software update. I won’t be holding my breath, however.

Even juicier rumors point to the 2009 iPhone as having a front facing camera that can be used to video-chat, as seen in these supposed spy-shots of the heretofore unreleased device here and possibly here.

For myself, however, I wonder if video isn’t one of those things that seems really awesome to have, but that you would rarely actually use it. I think the ability to quickly upload and share video would be the factor that determined how much I would use it.

… And speaking of sharing… The Pre does allow you to share the pictures you take - by email, MMS or by uploading to Facebook or Photobucket. I would like to have more options here - like Flickr and Picasa. And, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to upload pictures to short-url-picture-sharing services like twitpic or pic.im for use with Twitter.

Email

The email application for the Pre is actually pretty strong. I use three email accounts, primarily. Gmail for personal email, and Google Apps for My Domain for my work and EsquireMac email accounts - all using IMAP.

The one significant advantage Pre email has over the iPhone email app is that it provides a unified inbox view for “all inboxes.” A feature that Apple’s Mail.app has had for years, but strangely, the iPhone is missing.

Once you set the preferences properly with IMAP, you will receive your emails instantaneously. It works pretty much how you want it to work.

Apps

As many others have said, the App catalog for the Pre is very limited at present. I’ve downloaded Tweed (ok), Pandora (awesome), Accuweather (awesome), Spaz (don’t use it), LinkedIn (don’t use it), and FlightView (don’t use it).

The big deal, according to Palm, with its WebOS is that you can develop applications for the Pre using only basic web standards. I’m not smart enough to know this for sure, but the impression I’ve gotten from what I’ve read about WebOS is that the apps you can develop will be more powerful than the simple webapps the iPhone started out with, but not as powerful as the native third party apps that the iPhone presently hosts.

For now, there is no Fring or Skype on the Pre. I’m not sure if you could build a Fring or Skype client using solely WebOS, but I suspect you could. It would be nice to be able to make calls via WiFi that wouldn’t ding your monthly minute allotment.

The Pre does have a Tasks program that comes installed. It has a pretty nice interface, and supports multiple lists, but it has no sync capability. I suppose you could use something like Remember The Milk (of which I am not a big fan), but there are definitely no apps like Things, OmniFocus or the forthcoming The Hit List which all have excellent desktop Mac apps that sync with excellent iPhone apps.

Charging and Syncing

The Pre charges and syncs via a micro-USB cable and port that is on the right side of the device. Micro-USB cables are essentially ubiquitous, and you probably have a few laying around the house already, especially if you’ve ever bought a point-and-shoot camera or a portable USB hard drive. Although, if you’ve ever owned an iPod or two, you probably have just as many iPhone charger cables laying around, too.

The problem with the Pre in this regard is that the charging cable comes right out of the side of the device - making it very awkward to hold and use while charging. Compare this to the iPhone whose charging cable comes out of the bottom, making it much easier to use while plugged in.

Interacting with Your Mac

What you have heard is true: the Pre presents itself to iTunes as an iPod, and iTunes will sync with the Pre. It will not sync Apple DRM’d (that’s copy-protected for the uninitiated) files. It will sync playlists, podcasts, photos and videos (again, only non-DRM’d videos, though).

If you’ve taken pictures with your Pre, and plug it into your Mac, iPhoto will recognize that there are pictures on your Pre and will enable you to import them.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to sync bookmarks with the Pre’s browser. This is a big plus for me on my iPod Touch, and something of a downer with the Pre.

The Pre will show up on your desktop as a hard drive. In this regard, it is very easy to drag and drop new wallpapers and ringtones onto your Pre. Actually, as far as I can tell, you can copy any MP3 file to the ringtones directory and the Pre will allow you to select it as a ringtone - not too shabby.

Other than iTunes, iPhoto and the USB-drive functions I’ve described, I do not believe the Pre offers any further Mac-specific interactions.

Other Points of Interest

• The EVDO 3G data speed is pretty good, and the WiFi works pretty effortlessly, picking up recognized networks automatically.
• Voicemail still sucks, requiring you to call in and listen to them in order. Although the Pre does show you how many voicemails are waiting for you.
• Reception seems to be a little worse than my old Katana, but not horrible.
• Accessing the menu dropdown on the top left of the screen can be difficult, and often takes several attempts to hit the menu.
• There are no good cases for the Pre. And by good, I mean (a) protect the phone and (b) leave the phone and its functions easily accessible. The vertical slider form factor makes this a particularly disconcerting engineering feat, I’m sure.
• Battery Life is not very good. With moderate use, I have to charge it at least once, if not twice, per day.
• Speaking of battery life, the cover does come off, but is non-intuitive and labor-intensive. You won’t be changing the battery while driving, that’s for sure.
• Crashing and resetting: Each of our Pre’s have crashed once since we got them yesterday. There is no way to reset the power for a reboot without popping off the back case and removing and replacing the battery - a significant pain in the rear. Compare this with the iPhone’s ability to reset by simply holding the button(s) down for about 10 seconds.
• GPS seems to work now, but it took about 24 hours before I could get the Pre to find itself.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m a little disappointed in the Pre. That said, I’m not completely discouraged. As far as it goes, it’s not a bad phone, it does a lot, and it has a completely unbeatable rate plan. I have faith that the app catalog will grow exponentially over the next several months.

My wife shares about the same sentiments with me - it’s not a bad phone, but we’ve definitely been spoiled by our iPods Touch (iPod Touches?).

What are we going to do?

Well, if I keep the Pre, I don’t want to carry around my iPod Touch anymore - there’s too much duplicate functionality, and one of the biggest advantages of owning a Pre (or iPhone) for me is the ability to converge my three devices that go with me everywhere and make my pockets much happier - phone, camera, ipod.

That said, I can’t help but to have this feeling that I will miss Apple’s App store and iPhone OS if I get rid of my iPod Touch and don’t get an iPhone.

The iPhone plan is just too expensive. I can’t justify spending almost $200 (after taxes and fees) per month on a cell phone. I predicted at the beginning of this year that Apple would end its exclusivity with AT&T at the two-year mark. I hope I’m right because there needs to be some competitive downward pressure on the iPhone’s rate plans, and the sooner the better.

If the Pre doesn’t grow on us, we’ll either be downgrading back to our Katana’s or we’ll downgrade to a non-smart phone with a QWERTY keyboard for easier texting and a cheaper plan.

I will be anxiously awaiting Apple’s WWDC announcements tomorrow, and I am genuinely excited to see what’s in store for the 2009 iPhone - even if I never end up with one. I’m just geeky like that.

Finally - Any Questions?

If you have any questions about the Pre, or would like to know if it can do this or that, please feel free to leave me a comment below, shoot me an email or hit me up on twitter @esquiremac.

Early on, I would write my time down here and there, and at the end of the month, I would be gathering my snippets of billing information from all over my office and my computer - even going back over my recent emails and documents to forensically reconstruct my billable time for the month. As you can imagine, you lose a fair amount of billable time that way - both for time it takes to recreate the month, and for the work that ultimately never gets billed for because it was missed in the reconstruction.

Obviously, I needed to find a system for capturing my time contemporaneously with the work I was billing for. For a while, my solution was to keep a legal pad next to my computer and jot down my work as I was doing it. That’s not a terrible solution, but it left me at the end of the month with a good bit of work still to do. I would go over the pages of chicken scratch (yes, surprise, my handwriting is horrific), and try to give a client-by-client report to our secretary who creates and sends out our billing invoices.

Eventually, I realized that by using a spreadsheet, I could capture my time as I do the work, and, at the end of the month, we can manipulate the data in any way we want. Specifically, the data can be arranged by client or matter to give our billing secretary easy access to copy and paste the relevant information.

As most firms do, our firm bills by the tenth of an hour.

It is easy to type in the start time and end time for your tasks in the spreadsheet. The hard(er) part is to do math with the time, convert it to tenths and round it up to the next tenth. Of course, this can be done manually, which is how I used to do it, but the with power of Numbers and Excel, it can easily be done automatically - if you know the right formulas.

First, you need to make sure your start and end time columns are set to the Date and Time format. The next step is intuitive enough: subtract the start time from the end time. If that is all you do, however, your result will be something like “0.0″ because the spreadsheet doesn’t fully understand what you’re up to. Multiplying the whole answer by 24 will give you a decimal representation of the time. But, you’re not done yet. At this point, you may get an answer like 0.717. You could just set the decimal places to 1 in the cell format settings, but that would round to the nearest tenth, rather than rounding up. The solution is to add the ROUNDUP operator to the beginning of the formula. To tell the spreadsheet what decimal place to round up to, add a “,1″ to the end of the formula.

In the end, your formula for calculating time to the tenth of an hour, rounding up, is “=ROUNDUP((B1-A1)*24,1)” where B1 is your end time and A1 is your start time.

So, without further ado, here are two templates for tracking your billable time:

• Numbers Billing Template
• Excel Billing Template

One final tip: I have found that in order for me to practically capture my time as I do the work, I need to have the spreadsheet very quickly accessible. The way I accomplished this was to put the billing document in my dock. Just drag the document from where ever you keep it to the right side of the dock (where your “stacks” folders are kept), and it will stay in the dock for one click access to your timesheet.

It’s not often that I have something nice to say about Microsoft. That said, Microsoft Word is a pretty top-notch product, if a bit expensive. While I have pretty much abandoned Excel for Numbers, Microsoft Word is still my work horse for drafting correspondence and pleadings. I don’t use anything else in the Office suite of applications; and until Pages enables you to set the default document format as .doc, I will continue to use Word for my law firm documents because, like it or not, the rest of the world uses Word, and therefore .doc. (I will refrain from commenting upon or even acknowledging those still using Word holy-crap-are-people-still-using-this-dinosaur Perfect. No offense, naturally!)

I recently discovered the “Notebook Layout View” in a Microsoft Word Document. It looks a little something like this (ok, exactly like this):

Ironically, I learned about this feature while learning the ins and outs of another great notebook application, Circus Ponies Notebook. If you will tolerate a brief aside… I have been looking for the best way to manage my documents for my cases in litigation - toying with Journler, Evernote, Circus Ponies Notebook, and, well, nothing (hat tip to Peter Summerill, the MacLitigator).

Last week my client had her deposition taken. I decided to take Microsoft Word’s notebook layout for a spin. For those playing along at home, I’m using Microsoft Office:Mac 2008. Your mileage may vary for Office:Mac 2003 or 2004. The first thing you’ll want to do is open a new Word document. You can select the Notebook layout from the Project Gallery that tends to present itself when Word first opens, or, you can select the Notebook Layout View in the bottom left-hand corner, like so:

Once you have chosen your Notebook Layout View, you can start the recording by clicking the record button at the top of the notebook.

As you can see in the screenshot, you can adjust the input volume. I noticed that I had to do this to pick up the voices from across the table. Using the built-in mic on my early-2008 MacBook Pro, I was able to hear everyone’s voices very well on playback. The one drawback was that you could hear the clickity-clack of my keyboard even though I was careful to tread lightly with my fingers. Even so, the voices are still very audible over the keystrokes. While this may not be suitable for courtroom playback, it is plenty fine for your own reference. If you want to enhance your quality, you may want to plug in an external mic.

The coolest part about all of this is that you can play back the audio that was playing while you were typing any particular part of your notes. Just hover your mouse over the note you want to listen to, and a speaker icon will appear next to that note. Clicking it will play the audio that was being recorded as you were typing that note.

I was worried about what kind of file size this would result in. I actually found it to be very reasonable. An hour and a half deposition resulted in a 15 megabyte file. Not too shabby. I wouldn’t take all of my notes that way, but it will certainly be worthwhile in many situations.

You can export the audio as an .mp4 file after the fact if you’d like to add it to your iTunes for playback on your iPod or iPhone.

Voice Annotating in Circus Ponies Notebook

If you use Circus Ponies Notebook to organize your litigation files, you can do essentially the same thing as I described above for Word. According to the Circus Ponies documentation:

You can type notes in a lecture or meeting and record the person speaking using the built-in voice annotation feature. NoteBook adds Voice Annotation Stickers that are synced to the voice recording, so you can start playback at the exact point at which you began typing a note. You can also copy a voice annotation file to iTunes, and from there to your iPod for anywhere playback.

Once you have finished recording, Notebook will place a voice annotation sticker next to wherever you added or changed notes while recording, and you can click those to play back.

Like the notebook layout in Word, in Circus Ponies Notebook, you can choose “Open in iTunes” to export the audio file for playback on your iPod or what-have-you.

Record with Good Old Paper and Pen with the Pulse Smart Pen from LiveScribe

Sometimes, you don’t have your laptop on you, and sometimes you just want to take notes the good old fashioned way - with paper and pen.

I won’t spend too much time on this because I have no personal experience with it, but the LiveScribe pen looks truly awesome. Basically, it does everything the above applications do, but it does it with or without a computer. I will refer you to their site to view the demo.

In short: Using special paper (that you can print yourself, btw) you take notes with the LiveScribe pen and it records. When you want to play back your notes, you tap on the paper on the notes you want to hear and it knows based on where you tap what portion of the audio to play back. Even better, you can transfer the files to your computer, and it will convert your notes into a PDF - no scanning required.

David Sparks (of MacSparky) wrote briefly about LiveScribe in a guest post over at Ben Steven’s blog, The Mac Lawyer earlier this year.

If my review wasn’t enough to satisfy your curiosities, check out these reviews below from (arguably) more qualified sources:

• TUAW First Look: Postbox Public Beta - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
• Postbox competes with Thunderbird using Mozilla code | Webware - CNET
• Downloads: Postbox Collects and Organizes Your Email Attachments

Curious about the new features in iWork ‘09 over iWork ‘08, I downloaded the free trial from Apple a couple of weeks ago. The only app I actually use on a regular basis is Numbers. I have a spreadsheet that I use to track my billable time, and I use it basically every day that I’m working.

Smartly, when you install iWork ‘09, it leaves your iWork ‘08 apps intact. Once I downloaded iWork ‘09, however, my Numbers documents began to open with Numbers ‘09 by default. I vaguely sensed that this was not a good idea, but went along with it anyway.

Today, out of an abundance of caution, I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to open my timesheet (which had been converted from a Numbers ‘08 document to a Numbers ‘09 document) in Numbers ‘08. My suspicions were confirmed: no can do. You cannot open Numbers ‘09 documents in Numbers ‘08.

I have no intention to purchase the upgrade to iWork ‘09 in the near future. The value-add just isn’t there. Frankly, the iwork.com integration means next to nothing for me, and I have not found much added utility to the rest of the suite for my purposes.

Hence, now, the obvious problem: once the iWork ‘09 trial expires, I will have no way to access my now-converted Numbers ‘09 documents. Apple will then effectively be holding my important information ransom.

No problem. I decided I would simply copy and paste the information into a Numbers ‘08 document. Sorry, can’t do that, either. Copying data from multiple rows and columns results in one of two situations: (a) the data fills a single column (even though it was copied from several columns), or (b) the cells “paste” into the ‘08 document as an uneditable picture clipping. Bottom line, there was no way to simply and effectively transfer the data from a Numbers ‘09 document to a Numbers ‘08 document.

I then had the inclination to export the ‘09 document to an Excel document from which I could then copy/paste into an ‘08 Numbers document. When doing a “Save as…” I was presented with the option of Saving as a Numbers ‘08 document. This I did, and the data was safely back in the ‘08 format.

There is one gaping hole in this scheme. If I were to allow the trial to lapse without purchasing it (I assume) the application would become disabled, and I would have no way of accessing the data trapped within the ‘09 document.

Perhaps Apple has thought of this possibility and has implemented another workaround. But, if I were you, I wouldn’t risk it. If you have downloaded the iWork ‘09 trial, be sure to convert all of your important documents back to the ‘08 format if you do not intend to purchase the ‘09 upgrade.

Please, somebody, tell me I’m wrong in the comments. I hope it’s me that’s being stupid here and not Apple.

According to CrunchBase, Scott MacGregor was “a lead engineer at Mozilla Corporation,” and Sherman Dickman was “Director of Product Management at Mozilla Corporation” where he “oversaw market and customer research, analytics and metrics.” Suffice it to say, these guys know something about building an email application.

Postbox grabbed some attention last fall when it was launched at TechCrunch50. You can view their demo below.

Postbox is currently in private beta. I was invited to the beta program about a week and a half ago and have had an opportunity to put Postbox through its paces.

Although I was very excited about Postbox from the beginning and really wanted to like the app, unfortunately, I am underwhelmed. Ultimately, Postbox feels like Thunderbird-dressed-up-all-pretty; which shouldn’t be surprising since this app is built on Mozilla by two former Mozilla employees.

What sets Postbox apart from other email applications?

See for yourself:

Main Interface

Conversation View

Document Search

Image Search

Text Search

Topics Panel

Contacts Panel

New Message Window with Image Search

New Message Window with Places Search

(Source)

Some other things you can do with Postbox:

• Twitter - you can highlight text from an email, right-click and post that text to Twitter. I’m not sure I see how useful this is, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to have the option. I’ve never felt like I just had to twitter something someone sent me in an email. They would do better, in my opinion, to build in a full Twitter client that could show a threaded conversation view. That would actually be useful.
• Annotate Emails - I have not seen this anywhere else, but you can actually add text to emails that people have sent to you as a way to annotate them. This is a pretty neat idea. As a lawyer, however, I tend to treat emails as archival; as evidence of a communication that has occurred. That said, I feel weird adding text to an email because I feel like I’m altering the record. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid (I know you’re listening!). If you can get past the dirty feeling you get by altering a sacred digital record of communication, then this could actually be pretty useful.
• Easy Links, Maps, Images: One of the coolest features about Postbox is the ability to very easily add links, maps, and images to your new emails. When composing new email, on the right-hand side, there is a pane where you can run a quick google or wikipedia search which will display results as you type. You can then drag any of the results over to your message to send to somebody. This can actually come in handy. Check the screenshot below.

What I don’t like about Postbox?

• No Quick Look: As cool as Postbox is in the way it helps you collect and search your attachments, it does not (yet) include support for Quick Look. In our office, we scan all outgoing and incoming mail, pleadings, etc. These scans come into my email box with nondescript filenames. I love how Mail.app allows you to do a Quick Look at an attachment, allowing you to see the full contents of the document without actually opening up the attachment. Obviously, this is much faster than going through the emails one by one and opening the attachments one at a time. This is actually a deal breaker for me.
• No Unified Inbox: Also a deal breaker for me is the lack of a unified inbox. By this, I mean that you can only view your emails one account at a time. I have three main email accounts that I must manage with my email client. In Mail.app, I can have all emails come into my one Inbox. I don’t have to click on my work email account to see my work email, then my personal email account to see my personal email, then my EsquireMac email account to see my EsquireMac email. Beyond this, with Mail.app, I can view all of the folders and sub-folders for all of my email accounts at one time and drag and drop emails between accounts with the magic of IMAP.
• Slow: Postbox has some great features, but it is not fast. Mail.app feels rock solid and is the fastest email client I’ve ever used. Postbox has about the same feel to it as Thunderbird. When you click on an email, there is a definite stuttering period where it is getting its crap together so it can do you the favor of actually displaying the contents of the email you just clicked on. It is not instantaneous like Mail.app.
• One Signature Per Account: Perhaps this is no big deal to some people, but Postbox only allows one signature per account. You actually have to create a text file containing your signature, then point Postbox to that text file to pull your signature from it. It’s a bit klugy.

Conclusion

All in all, Postbox is innovative and is taking the desktop email client in the right direction. I think they’ve already outshone Thunderbird. They’ve got some ground to cover, though, performance-wise and feature-wise, if they’re going to unseat Mail.app.

Oh, I almost forgot. Postbox will be a free application and works on Mac OS X and Windows.

There’s plenty more to learn about Postbox, so don’t take my word for it. Read up on Postbox and sign up for the beta here.

Andy Kim, of Potion Factory, has announced that The Hit List is available for everybody as a free download for a public preview.  You can download the pre-release version from the Potion Factory blog.The version number is 0.9.2, inching ever closer to a 1.0 release. The Hit List is free to use as a beta/pre-release product, but will cost $69.95 when it goes 1.0. If you buy before 1.0 arrives, Potion Factory is offering a $20 discount, allowing you to license the GTD app for $49.95. As of yet, there is no official word as to when version 1.0 will ship. On Christmas Day, Andy Kim stated:

The Hit List has been in closed beta for about two weeks now and things have been progressing well. I wanted to release a 1.0 version as soon as possible, but based on the feedback I’m receiving, I’m back to the “it’ll be done when it’s ready” status. The first major feature I have decided to add is recurring tasks.

While I’m certain that THL won’t be THE solution for everybody, I’m very encouraged by the tweets some beta testers are posting. Validation like this is especially gratifying since I’ve been working on it under the radars for so long without receiving a lot of feedback.

(source)

I published my review of The Hit List a couple of weeks ago, giving it due praise. Ultimately, I purchased Things (which has gone 1.0 officially as of January 6) for a discounted price of $39.95, using discount code: THINGSPRESALE20, which is still available until January 15, 2009.

Go check out The Hit List and feel free to let me know what you think, or, more importantly, let Andy Kim know what you think over at The Hit List Users Google Group. ]]> http://www.esquiremac.com/2009/01/download-the-hit-list-public-preview-today/feed/ http://www.esquiremac.com/2009/01/download-the-hit-list-public-preview-today/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EsquireMac/~3/RTyl1lMdHlM/ http://www.esquiremac.com/2008/12/things-10-release-candidate-available/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:58:18 +0000 EsquireMac http://www.esquiremac.com/?p=235 For those of you waiting for Things, the beautiful task management/GTD app for the Mac, to be released next week at Macworld, you can get your hands on the version 1.0 release candidate now by going to their website. According to Cultured Code:

The Release Candidate is almost identical to the final version that will be released in a week. In addition to bugfixes and performance improvements, it includes some of the most requested features of the past months: global search, filtering by due date, and now also a restructured Today list.

Things retails for $49.95, but can be purchased for $39.95 by using the coupon code “THINGSPRESALE20″ by January 15, 2009.

Last week, I wrote about The Hit List, singing its praises. Even so, I still have a strong affinity for Things. I’ve been using Things for several months and find it to be a very comfortable application. Ultimately, the price tag may be the decider for me.  For $39.95, Things will be an easy choice for anybody reluctant to part with $70 for The Hit List of $80 for OmniFocus.

The beta download was version 0.9, indicating a more or less mature app. In fact, Andy Kim has stated that while he is very interested in hearing new feature requests, he is trying to get version 1.0 out the door quickly, and will give greater weight to feature requests in future versions. Thus, the 0.9 beta version I’m playing with is essentially feature-complete.

The Hit List is set to compete directly with OmniFocus and Things. You may recall that I compared the two and came out heavily in favor of Things.

I am impressed with The Hit List. This is one heck of a task management application. Of course, it has all of the basics you’d expect a competent GTD app to have: tags, contexts, quick entry method. Beyond the basics, The Hit List has a lot of polish and is very well thought out.

Check out this screen shot (click to enlarge):

Some of my favorite features:

Quick Entry with system-wide keyboard shortcut

Like Things, The Hit List gives you the ability to assign a system-wide hot key to call up a Quick Entry window so that you can quickly and easily enter a task without the need to leave whatever application you’re working on and call The Hit List into focus.

Start Date, Due Date, Estimated Time

When adding a task, you can specify a start date, due date, and the kicker is that you can enter an estimate for the time it will take you to complete the task. This will help you plan your activity for the day a little better.

Tabs

The interface exists in one main window, with the ability to have multiple tabs. This works much like a standard web browser, and you have the ability to drag the tabs around to re-order them.

Sub-Tasks

While other GTD apps allow you to have at least one or two levels of sub-tasks, The Hit List offers virtually unlimited sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks, etc. I actually got bored creating nested tasks before it ever stopped me. (click to enlarge)

iPhone version

Evidently, an iPhone version that syncs with the desktop version is on the way:

No annoying floating palettes

One of my main complaints about OmniFocus was the annoying floating palettes. As I recall, I said:

The other big pain I found about OmniFocus was the inspector window that always hangs around. That does not make for a clutter-free desktop environment. [rant warning] I know you can get rid of it, but so much of your necessary and mundane functionality is in the inspector window that you can hardly do anything without it open. To me, the inspector window is like using footnotes in legal writing: Sometimes they’re great to use, but for the most part, you should say what you need to say in the body of your work. If it’s important, don’t bury it in a footnote. OmniFocus, to me, feels like a brief that is written with 30% of the text in the main body and 70% in the footnotes.

Timer (one exception to the no floating palettes)

You can click on a task and type “B” or just hit the begin button, and a timer window will pop up. Handy if you want to track your time on a particular task.

Keyboard navigation

Virtually every control necessary to use The Hit List has an intuitive keyboard shortcut - even things you might ordinarily drag and drop. Some people will use this, some people will not. For myself, the longer I use a computer, the more I find myself using keyboard shortcuts. Being that I have used a laptop as my full-time computer for the last 6 years now, I think using a traditional mouse is a huge drag (no pun intended), and much prefer the convenience of a trackpad right below the keyboard. Even so, I often find keyboard shortcuts to save time even as compared to the relatively short venture down to the trackpad.

/Tags, @Contexts

Of course, no GTD or task management application would be complete without contexts and tags. The Hit List makes tagging and context-ing dead simple. To start tagging, just type the “/” key and type whatever tag you wish to assign. The Hit List will automatically predict what tag you are trying to type. To assign a context, just type the “@” key and it will similarly start automatically predicting the context you are trying to type. Even cooler than that is The Hit List’s predictive tagging and contexts. As you type out the task you are entering, The Hit List predicts based on your prior entries what tags and/or contexts to assign to the task. This is done before ever stroking the / or @ keys. Way cool!

Ultra-Customizable iCal syncing

The Hit List allows you to sync specific iCal calendars with tasks marked with specific tags and/or contexts. I imagine this could come in handy.

Attach files and emails by drag-and-drop

One of the greatest and most essential features I love about Things is its ability to attach files and emails to tasks by dragging and dropping them (sometimes awesomely referred to as “dragon drop”). The Hit List features this functionality as well, however, in this Beta version, there are a few bugs. Don’t worry, Andy, I’m sending in those bug reports!

Conclusion

With The Hit List, the Potion Factory has taken the best features of OmniFocus and Things, learned from their mistakes, and added some great new features and interface and usability enhancements to come up with a task management app that is truly a step ahead of the competition. The Hit List will set the new standard for task management applications for the Mac. I share in TUAW’s prediction that The Hit List will “storm the gates.”

Potion Factory announced the private beta of The Hit List here. Unfortunately for those eager to try out The Hit List, at just over 300 beta testers, Andy has closed the door for the time being, but has indicated he may approve more people as needed.

How will The Hit List be priced? The Potion Factory is shooting for a $70 price target. This places them on the higher end between Things ($49) and OmniFocus ($79.95). It is my opinion, so far, that The Hit List outperforms both Things and OmniFocus and is the best looking and easiest to use of the trio. I consider the $70 price point to be very competitive in light of the quality of the app.