Book

“1L of a Ride” is a great book that can calm your nerves as a 1L and put things in perspective. Lots of great advice from a professor on the first year experience.

Useful apps for Mac

Things – a great ToDo, Get Things Done (GTD) app without all the complication. Simple and flexible. I set up each course as a “Project” in Things to keep my tasks per class separated. You could also achieve separation by using tags.

iCal - built in app from Apple. Between iCal and Things I can pretty much stay organized. These apps play well together too, read more on Things website.

OmniOutliner – great tool for outlining.

OmniGraffle – Great for those who like see visual relationships. Also, I found it works great to make T-briefs in. Here is my template file: T-Brief OmniGraffle Template (use at your own risk, I take no responsibility for it).

WriteRoom – If you need to get some words down without the distractions use this app. Great for essay writing.

TextExpander – Use this for repetitive words or phrases. For example, type “IIED” and TextExpander turns it into Intentional Inflection of Emotional Distress, whoa a mouthful – see why its handy? You do NOT want to type that more than once.

Useful apps for iPhone

Blacks Law Dictionary – I don’t actually have this but it looks nice. At the moment, I’m relying on the built in Dictionary app with Bouvier’s law dictionary added into it (see below). Note the edition currently available offers the 8th edition of the dictionary where the 9th is out in print. So there may be an update coming soon with the next edition.

Things - this app works great as a standalone or with the app for Mac. If you have both, they sync wirelessly.

Links

Mac Law Student Blog – this is a great resource which goes well beyond the scope of my little post. The whole blog is dedicated to using a Mac as a law student. Lots of great info here.

Article on studying for exams – recommended by my professor.

Add a law dictionary to Mac’s built in Dictionary

]]> http://blog.nathanglass.com/2009/09/mac-tech-for-the-1l/feed/ 0 http://blog.nathanglass.com/2009/08/gcuts-gmail-shortcuts/ http://blog.nathanglass.com/2009/08/gcuts-gmail-shortcuts/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:18:38 +0000 Nathan http://blog.nathanglass.com/?p=32 If you spend alot of time in Gmail as I do then you may be wondering how to speed up navigating through emails. Keyboard shortcuts are a powerful way to speed things up. Using the mouse is great, but believe it or not the keyboard can be faster once you invest a little time learning the magical keystrokes. Let me introduce the keyboard shortcuts I use most often to get you started.

First, keyboard shortcuts must be enabled in your Settings. Check this first.

Using shortcuts may be awkward at first but once you learn a few you will be addicted. Give it a try, you may be surprised.

To see all the keyboard shortcuts type “?”. Hit any key to close the keyboard shortcuts guide.

Gmail shortcuts to live by:

Go to Inbox. g then i.

Buried deep in a conversation, and need to re-center your chi: g then i.

Go to Drafts. g then d.

I use Drafts as a place to store notes so I’m always in there. I have one email draft called “Scratch” that I take notes in and as a bonus I can add notes to this draft from my iPhone as well.

Go to Tasks. g then k.

Tasks is another handy place to keep things.

Go to Labels. g then l.

Labels are powerful. Think of them like folders but better. My favorite way to use labels is by setting up filters that automatically archives emails, thus cleaning up my inbox, and applies labels to them. For example, I’m always getting notifications from Facebook so these are archived out of my inbox and have the label “Facebook” applied.

Select conversation. x.

Great if you want to delete a conversation or label it or archive it.

Try this: Select a conversation with “x” then hit “l” to pull up labels. Start typing a label name, then hit enter to apply label. Then “x” again to deselect label or * then n to deselect all conversations if multiple conversations are selected.

Newer/Older conversation. k/j

Good email navigation keystrokes.

Move to trash. #

Very handy.

Open conversation. Enter.

This is how you get into an email and read it.

Scenarios

Let’s put these keystrokes in action. Here are a couple scenarios I find myself in and keystrokes to make things snappy.

One. Open up your inbox, you go down the list of emails and delete a few of them.

g then i. Takes you to your inbox.
j to move down the list of emails.
x to select the current email. continue until all emails are selected you want to delete.
# to delete all the selected emails.

Bravo! Well done.

Two. Open your inbox, select some emails, and apply a label.

g then i. Takes you to your inbox.
j to move down the list of emails.
x to select the current email. continue until all emails are selected you want to apply a label.
l to pull up Label menu.
Start typing the name of the label to be applied. Once the correct label appears, hit enter.
* then n. Deselects all emails.

See how easy that was. Congratulations you’re a Gmail Master.

10 Keyboard Shortcuts for Firefox that could save lives…the lives of a few seconds anyways.

Firefox has several keyboard shortcuts that can save you time. In order to move to the next level of Nerd-dom, then consider learning these. These are for Mac users. Windows users’ shortcuts will be slightly different. See the link below.

Complete list of Firefox shortcuts.

By the way, for Mac users “Command” means the button with the Apple logo and/or the flower-ish thing, not sure what it’s called. Cmd = Command.

My Favorite Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts.

1. Find. Cmd+F.

Often I find when I’m searching for a specific model number or specific name or word on a webpage that using the Find command makes things faster. Cmd+F to pull it up then start typing what you want to find. As you type Firefox automatically starts searching the page and takes you to the first instance of the search word. Then use F3 to find the next instance.

2. Select tab. Cmd+(1-9).

I put Gmail in the first tab, Facebook in the second, and Twitter in the third. Everything else is after that. Now if I want to jump back over to Gmail from another tab, all I do is Cmd+1 and I’m there. Or Cmd+2 for Facebook, etc. This is also helpful if there are two tabs I’m flipping between often. I’ll slide them over to the first few tabs so I can take advantage of this trick.

3. Open new tab. Cmd+T.

Use this to open a new tab. By default, the cursor is placed in the Location box or URL box. Start typing and Firefox will try to fill in as you type. Hit the down arrow to select a link that Firefox pulls up and then enter to go to that page.

If you’ve opened a new tab but want to search Google instead, then hit the Tab button to shift the cursor to the Search box.

4. Close tab. Cmd+W.

Use this when you’re done using the web page on the current tab.

5. Open link new tab. Cmd+click.

Hold the Cmd button while clicking on a link to open the page in a new tab. When searching for something on Google, I will look through the list of links Google gives me and open the seemingly best two or three pages in new tabs using Cmd+Click. If the pages don’t give me what I want, I go back to the Google search tab and keep looking. This way, I can keep track of what pages I’ve visited.

6. Reload the current page. Cmd+R.

Forget the reload button; use a shortcut to reload that page.

7. Print. Cmd+P.

Prints the current page.

8. Select Location bar. Cmd+L.

Moves cursor to the Location bar a.k.a. the URL bar.

9. Web search. Cmd+K.

Moves the cursor to the search bar.

10. Complete .com Address. Cmd+Return.

Say you want to navigate to amazon.com. Hit Cmd+L for the cursor to move to the Location bar. Type “amazon”. Now hit Cmd+Return and “amazon” is turned into “amazon.com”.

Final note: if you use a keyboard shortcut while inside of a text box or certain fields inside a web page, then the keyboard shortcut will not work. You must click outside the box then use the shortcut.