Reading is an essential task for keeping up with the latest trends and news in the constantly changing legal environment while also learning how to be more effective with the business side of the legal profession. However, busy schedules can make it difficult to make time to read the documents, law blogs, and books that you want. Here are three tips for utilizing your Mac to get more reading done.

1. Mac’s Text to Speech Feature Macs have a built in text to speech feature so that you can have your Mac read your documents or text out loud without having to buy any additional software. This can be turned on by going into System Preferences and Speech. In the Text to Speech section check the box that reads “Speak the selected text when the key is pressed”. Then click on the “Set key” button to choose a combination of keys that you want to use to have your Mac read a selection of highlighted text. You can choose multiple voices and adjust the speed of the voice. This could be great for reading documents while you are doing other tasks that don’t require your full attention such as working out or organizing your desk. It also works on PDF documents.

2. Kindle App for Mac and iPod Touch

The Kindle App for Mac allows you to access and read books in your Kindle library. It also syncs with other devices so it knows your location in a book if you recently did some reading on your Kindle device. The Kindle App for iPod Touch and iPhone is probably more useful because you can access your library of digital books when you are on the go to get some quick reading squeezed in while you are waiting in line or have some spare time.

3. Download Audible books into iTunes

If you are not using Audible yet, you could easily double the number of books you read each year with audiobooks. Audible has thousands of audiobooks that are compatible with iTunes and they have an extensive library on law related topics and business books. You can also store audiobooks on your portable devices like iPads or iPod Touch. That way you can be catching up on your reading while you are at the gym or commuting to work. You can also play audiobooks in the background on your Mac to keep you going when you are doing tedious work. Audiobooks can also help you with falling asleep if you listen to an author with a calm voice like Malcom Gladwell, author of Outliers.

About the Author:  Charles Sipe is a writer for Criminal Justice Degree Schools, a free resource site on criminal justice degrees and careers. The following guest post is from Kenji Crosland, a writer for TeachStreet, a website that provides online and local classes including law classes and mac classes:

If you want to get your Mac black belt, you’ve got to learn your keyboard shortcuts. Knowing how to use CMD + C, V, X, and sometimes Y is a good start, but when you want to graduate to the big leagues you might want to get acquainted with the shortcuts here:

1.  Quick Screenshots :: If you ever need to explain a computer procedure to someone else, making screenshots are a necessity. Macs are pretty cool in that you can use a keyboard shortcut to actually select the area of the screen that you want to save as an image. This saves you all the time it would take to crop the image in an image editor later. All you have to do is type in CMD + SHIFT + 4 and a marquee tool will appear right on the tool to appear on the screen like so: 2.  Save some characters on Twitter :: You really want to put an ellipsis on your Twitter update, but you’ve ran out of room. The keyboard shortcut (OPTION + 😉 will make the ellipsis appear as just one character. Very handy for when you’re running out of room!

3.  Instant word suggestion + dictionary :: If you hit the F5 key in a text editor (when writing an email or blog post like this one), you’ll get suggestions for the word you’re trying to write. Like so: And CMD + CTRL + D will look up the highlighted word in the system-wide dictionary app. What about you, what are your favorite mac keyboard shortcuts?  Let us know in the Comments below…

Note: The awesome photo you see us taking a screenshot of above is by pardeshi. Has this ever happened to you?  You click on a PDF file, wanting it to open in Preview, only to have it open in Acrobat instead (or vice versa).  Fear not.  The solution is quick and easy — of course, because you’re using a Mac.

The next time you click to open any PDF file, it will open using Preview.  This process works with other programs too.  For instance, if you want to open Microsoft Word files with Pages by default, you simply right click on a *.doc file, then select Pages as the "open with" option, and click change all.

Addendum:  As shown below in the Comments, one of my readers pointed out a shortcut to do this: Right click on the file, while the popup menu is open press the Option key, and watch the "Open with" become "Always open with". Select the App from the list (or a new one if not in the list) and it will always open with that App. (Thanks to Warp for this tip) The following is a Guest Post from iGadgetLife website, which covering tech reviews and news:

Macs are great tools for a lot of different computer uses, and it can be argued that they are one of the most user friendly computer gadgets on the market. But someone new to Macs (or even a more experienced Mac user) may not realize that there are many different ways to manage and ride herd on all of those windows that a typical computing session incorporates.

In fact, there are many tips, tricks, and shortcuts that can make your Mac experience much more productive and enjoyable. Over the years I have found several that I use on a regular basis, and sometimes I still find a new one that is handy. Let’s take a look at some of my favorite Mac window management tricks.

Basic Window Switching

Most users know that command-tab will switch between open windows. But Windows converts may be put off that command-tab only switches between running apps, not individual window instances. That is, if you have five Safari windows open and email, pressing command-tab will switch back and forth between Safari and email – it will not cycle through the open Safari windows as well.

Instead, use the command-tilde ("~") combination to cycle through your Safari windows (or any other multiple windows of the same app, such as Finder). Once you get used to this slight difference (the tilde key is right above the tab on the Mac layout), you will find that being able to cycle through only that app’s current open windows is actually much easier than having to cycle through ALL open windows on the computer.

Another thing to note about window management on OS X is that the first click usually only gives the window focus. That is, if you have a background window that you want to click on, for example a link on a web page, you will find that it is a two click operation, The first click brings the window to the forefront, the second launches the link. There are exceptions to this (as we mention below), but in this way, accidental clicks on background windows are avoided.

Background Window Scrolling

As a user, we sometimes have need of background windows while working in a different activated window. However, switching different apps in and out of the foreground is not always the most efficient way of working. Thankfully OS X offers some handy ways to manage your background windows.

For starters, you can scroll a background window simply by hovering the mouse over it and scrolling. This works equally well with the two finger drag on the trackpad or the scroll ball and wheel on your mouse. The following is a Guest Post from broadband suppliers:

There is a common thought among Windows users that Apple is more complicated and is only for techies. I was a Windows user for a long time until I got a chance to access one of my office’s Macbooks. It was an easy and friendly experience that provoked me to upgrade to Macintosh.  I feel more comfortable, faster and proud to be with Apple now.

Every Apple product is embedded with an innovative solution that provides more accessibility to the user. Assistive technology has become a default standard of Apple at no extra cost. The experience of the product is same for all the users including the users with special needs. These are the key factors for the success of Apple.

All the Mac products are provided with an alternative simplified interface that can help users to learn and explore the features. Especially users who have difficulty in using a mouse are provided with features like slow keys, sticky keys, gestures, voice over, quick nav, etc.

Accessibility for Vision Disabilities

Apple’s assistive technology provides wide options for the users who have visual difficulties, which allows users to control the screen without even looking at it. Voice over is a speech to text tool that can auto speak and describes what is happening on the screen. This tool can be controlled by simple gestures like tapping or flicking the track pad. It can also be controlled using a virtual dial called the rotor to change its settings. Users are allowed to assign gestures using voice over commands to control the MAC. It also supports USB and Bluetooth Braille displays and automatically programs the keys based on the model.

Alex voice is one of the most important features which speaks English with a natural intonation even after faster speech rates. It analyzes a paragraph, understands the meaning and delivers content more naturally taking enough breathe between the passages.

Voice over includes a built in screen magnification with up to 40 times zoom in and a cursor magnification which makes it easy for the user to follow. High contrast and reverse video lets the user to play with display settings like color, contrast, scaling and system widening. Also there are a variety of apps with a talking feature like talking alert, calculator and clock. This is Part Two of “Why We Went Mac, and Have Never Looked Back….”, a Guest Post by my friend, Randy Juip, which explains why his former firm converted to Macs.  If you want to read Part One of his Guest Post, which addressed their firm’s hardware considerations, click here. Otherwise, I hope that you enjoy Part Two:

Software, Calendar, Mail and Other Stuff

We purchased a copy of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 for each station, which provided us with the basic software necessities — word processing and spreadsheet mainly. If you keep your eyes open, you can pick up copies of this software on discount from time to time. Since I prefer to use Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), my partner and I have copies of that software as well.

To work and play well with the Federal Court ECF system, we use Mozilla’s Firefox 4.0 browser instead of Safari as our default browser. I use a neat little add-on called X-Marks to sync my Firefox bookmarks to Safari (which, in turn, syncs my bookmarks to Mobile Me). The process is then repeated in reverse at home.

For those stubborn, PC-only programs (like our timekeeping package, Sage’s TimeSlips, RealLegal’s .ptx transcript viewer, and Corel’s WordPerfect), we have installed Parallels 5.0 running Windows XP (we’ve recently moved on to Windows 7). I have no reason for using Parallels over VM Fusion other than I’m used to Parallels now, and don’t have the time (or desire!) to switch. Boot Camp was not an option because our workflow requires switching between the PC programs and their Mac counterparts. There have been great posts on this topic in the past.

Each employee has a MobileMe account, which was a simple, efficient, and quick solution to our remote access and mail needs. We use Mail for our email and iCal for our Calendar. To make the calendars work nicely with each other, we invested in BusySync licenses at each station — this software allows us to share iCal calendars over our local area network (LAN) without needing to set up a server or the like. I understand that the publisher of BusySync has recently released a replacement program, BusyCal, which supposedly does even more amazing stuff. However, BusySync is working so well for us now and I really don’t see the need to fix something that doesn’t need fixing.

So what’s the other stuff? For me, it’s all the other programs that I use to make my life easier. I have come to rely on DataViz’s MacLinkPlus Deluxe for converting old WordPerfect files into Word Files. I am committing myself, more and more each day, to integrate Evernote into my workflow. I can not live without DropBox, which I’ve had for years. In my mind, DropBox is the single greatest utility ever created, and I frankly can’t understand people who still use thumb drives. Really.

Backup and Networking

One point which I think deserves some discussion is Time Machine. This may be preaching to the choir, but I can not tell you what a frustration computer security and back up in a PC environment can be. I’m not speaking about any firm in particular, but any PC environment — through a combination of technological ignorance, bad habits and practices, and inherent flaws in the Windows system — is asking for expensive IT support. I know firms that spend, literally, thousands upon thousands of dollars every year on security, firewalls, and, of course, IT support to rebuild and restore affected systems. This is a near constant headache, and for a sole practitioner or small-firm attorney, is not financially sound management.

It’s odd, then, that many older generation attorneys insist on PC’s over Macs, especially when they’re the least capable of dealing with the constant onslaught of PC-specific malware. “Yeah, Macs are nice,” an older Judge told me a this year’s ABA TechShow, “but at some point you have to grow up and get a PC.” Whatever.

Each of my key workstations has a 500GB or 1TB external drive attached to it locally for hourly time machine back ups. Our central file storage server is a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ which has 4x1TB drives with RAID, so we have 2.7TB of effective central file storage which is mechanically secure. If one HDD fails, I can hot-swap it for another, and the entirety of our data is unaffected. It’s small, quiet, and powerful for our purposes. I understand that Netgear’s ReadyNAS Pro is even faster, with more RAM and Gigabit ethernet, but to date, our office has not run into any disconcerting issues in that regard. Our mission-critical documents and files, in turn, are backed-up offsite using Mozy, which I’m not totally satisfied happy with, but which does the job. We chose Mozy over other worthy competitors (like Carbonite) due to Mozy’s support for Networked Attached Storage.

Time Machine, RAID in the ReadyNAS, and Mozy — all of this means, to me, that I really don’t spend much time thinking about Viruses, Malware, etc… I don’t know if some crazy 13 year old is holed-up in his parent’s basement working on a blockbuster Mac virus or not, but what I do know is that if we get it, we’ll just rewind things an hour or two using Time Machine and our offline backup. Don’t misunderstand me — I’m not completely unconcerned, but the worst case scenario is really not that bad with a Mac.

The Other Benefits

Aside from the Mac’s unmatched business functionality, it’s aesthetics, and it’s reliability, there are a number of other benefits to Mac users. If you use a Mac in your personal life you already know that the iLife programs — iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, etc… — are must-haves. The integration of your business life and your personal life is just one added benefit to taking your office Mac.

Don’t forget, either, the iPhone and the iPad. I hope it’s safe to say that the iPhone has established itself as the go-to smartphone for busy professionals. It seems to me that people who use other smartphones either don’t know better, are too close-minded to consider the alternatives, or more likely, have no choice. I don’t want to dismiss the alternatives out of hand — everyone likes competition, but its clear that the iPhone competitors are trying hard to emulate the iPhone’s appeal, design, and capability.

And, no one even knows how the iPad will infiltrate our workflows and professional lives, but the smart money is that it will, in a big way. Although PC’s can integrate with iPhone and iPad, they don’t do it as seamlessly or as nicely as a Mac does.

In the End…

The short of it is this — I can’t tell you how simple my and my practice manager’s jobs are not having to worry about the technology in the office. Our technology does what it is supposed to do — it works and lets us work to serve our clients. We don’t spend valuable time working on getting out

technology to work. While there have been a few headaches, are significant only in that they are the exception, not the rule.

To each their own, I think. There are so many close-minded attorneys out there, who don’t understand how Intel chips forever changed Macs into business-friendly machines; but they’ll never get it.  For my part, you should not hesitate, even for a second, to take your firm Mac. Besides, people will think you’re cooler then. Do you find yourself getting frustrated when trying to figure out how to insert certain characters (like ⌘, ⌦, §, or ¶) into documents?  I know that I used to – until I learned how to use the Character Palette.  Now this process is very quick and easy.

There are a couple of different ways to access the Character Palette, including (1) press Command, Option/Alt and T together to open it, and (2) go to the Edit menu and choose Special Characters  From there, you simply locate your desired characters and insert them by either clicking "Insert" or dragging the character into your document.

If you find that there are certain characters that you use more frequently, you can add them to your "Favorites" by selecting the character, clicking the "gear" icon on the bottom left, and selecting "Add to Favorites".  Finally, the search window in the bottom right can help you more easily locate certain characters if you need assistance.

You can learn much more about the Character Palette here and here. There has been a great deal of discussion and debate lately regarding the position that Apple has taken with regard to Adobe Flash.  Steve Jobs posted an article yesterday which clearly sets out the basis for Apple’s decision not to allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

He listed the following six reasons as the basis for Apple’s position:

Source:  "Thoughts on Flash" by Steve Jobs, posted at Apple.com. I installed Snow Leopard shortly after its release, and overall I have really liked it. The one thing that has been driving me absolutely bonkers was the fact that now under Snow Leopard, Finder automatically resets its columns back to a narrow width.  If I had hair, I would have been pulling it out over this quirk, but luckily I have finally found a fix.

Let me explain the "problem" and then I’ll show the simple solution.  When using Finder, my preferred view is the "multiple columns."  I’m not sure there’s any specific reason why, but that’s just how I like to navigate.  Prior to Snow Leopard, the columns would resize themselves in such a way that you could see the names of the files listed in each column.  Times were good, people were happy.

The "problem" is that when I installed Snow Leopard, Finder began making all columns extremely narrow by default, with no apparent option to change this setting.  Yes, it was nice to be able to see more columns, but it actually caused more problems than it solved.  My office uses a standardized naming method I use our client files (YYMMDD File Name), which results in everything being listed in chronological order.  Therefore, all I could typically see as  part of the date with little to no file name.  The image below shows how my "Applications" folder looks using the default column width.  Again, this can drive one mad in a very short period of time.  (Note: I realize that many would argue that it’s a very short trip for me, but I digress…) Since I am male, I am hesitant to ask for directions, so I tried every trick I could think of to attempt to change the default size of the colums, short of voodoo or black magic – though those options were becoming more appealing as time passed.  Finally, I gave in and conducted a Google search, and voila – found a solution.  To set a new default column size, you simply hold down the Option (Alt) key while sizing the columns in Finder.  Then, when you open a new Finder window, the default size is changed going forward.  The image below shows the same "Applications" folder from above after the columns have been resized. Thanks to Geert Vanderkelen of the Some Abstract Type! for his post on this topic. MacInTouch has posted a list of Frequently Asked Questions for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which answers questions in the following topics:

Macworld has also published an article that explains everything that you need to know about installing Snow Leopard, including step-by-step instructions with illustrations.  You can read that article by clicking here.

Source:  "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard FAQ" published at MacInTouch; and "Installing Snow Leopard: What You Need to Know" by Dan Frakes, published at Macworld.com.
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