Financial software heavyweight Intuit recently purchased Mint, one of the hottest free online personal finance websites.

Mint provides free personal finance accounts and all sorts of services to help users balance their books, manage debt, and spend wisely. Mint launched just two years ago and by all measures has been a runaway success; earlier this year Mint jumped by 250,000 users in a matter of months—an unprecedented feat.

Intuit is the financial powerhouse behind such programs as Quicken and TurboTax. Some are critical of the purchase, noting that Intuit already has large amounts of data on how Americans use their money.

Critics also point out that while Mint generally provides a nice experience, Intuit is known for the opposite. Gotta love capitalism.

Mint gets eaten by the Borg | Felix Salmon
Quicken Online Can’t Believe Mint Is Doing So Well; Sends Threatening Letter | TechCrunch

(photo: Ido Atlasian)

Intuit Eats Mint is a post from: Lawyerist

Earlier this week we mentioned a great deal on Adobe’s Photoshop Elements photo editing software, which is 40% off for the next week.

On Friday, Peter Berge at Small Firm Success found a bargain on the Epson R280 color photo and CD/DVD printer, currently priced as low as $55.00.

As Peter notes:

“The R280 is an excellent photo printer. It uses the Epson Claria ink system (Epson does have an even higher end ink system, UltraChrome K3, but Claria is plenty good for producing lush photos) using six separate ink cartridges. Printing on photo paper (like Epson’s Luster or my favorite Museo) you get a truly professional quality photo. You can, frankly, produce a better product that a photo store because you have so much more control using a program like Photoshop Elements and the Epson printer. Whether for a demand letter or preparing photo evidence, this printer will give you quality results and can print up to an 8.5 x 11 print.

“As more and more information in cases is digital, you will likely find yourself in the position of creating DVDs or CD-ROM in discovery or preparing demand. The R280 has an attachment that allows you to print directly on inkjet printable CDs and DVDs. You get a vastly more professional looking product than just scribbling on the disc with a Sharpie®.

“It also prints text just fine and fairly speedily at 38 pages per minute. I have to say, however, it feels like riding a racehorse to go get groceries. This printer really was made to print high quality professional resolution pictures in beautiful color!”

If you are in the market for new hardware, now might be the time to pick up some great bargains.

Deal: Epson photo/CD-ROM printer only $55 is a post from: Lawyerist

A2 Hosting has some pretty awesome hosting plans. For less than $8/month (if you pay 3 years in advance), you can get unmetered storage and bandwidth. They do not mean unlimited. No using your account for offsite backup, for example. But still, pretty good. No worries if you get hit by BoingBoing, for example.

But a word to the wise: when buying things online, if a “coupon code” line pops up, always Google for coupons. As it turns out, you can get 20% off at A2 Hosting with the following coupon code:

20percentoff

Self-explanatory, eh? Happy hosting.

Get 20% off of A2 Hosting’s already-cheap plans is a post from: Lawyerist

KOffice was originally developed for Linux, but one of the primary goals for KOffice 2.0 is for it to run on all three major operating systems: Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux.

Like OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, KOffice is a full office suite. KOffice is free software and offers a full suite of applications, including for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, image editing, slideshows, and more. Like OOo, KOffice uses the Open Document Format.

KOffice 2.0 is in alpha now, and TechWorld recently took a look at KOffice for Windows. As an alpha, this release is primarily for developers for debugging, but it is also a first look at the features of KOffice 2.0 and what it has in store for Windows users.

First look: KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 | TechWorld (via /.)

KOffice: a free office suite available soon on Windows is a post from: Lawyerist

Website and e-mail hosting are services for which you can pay a little or a lot with little difference in service. And sometimes you actually get more when you pay less.

For example, I pay $10/month for hosting for my firm website, three blogs (this blog, Caveat Emptor, and Lawyerist), and unlimited e-mail accounts. I get 2 GB of storage—more than I need at the moment—and plenty of bandwidth.

You can find cheaper hosting or more storage for less money, but I like my hosting provider and do not see any reason to move.

On the other end of the spectrum, I know of attorneys who pay $250 per month for hosting from “specialized” hosting providers like LexisNexis/Martindale-Hubbell and Findlaw. These services supposedly offer more traffic, but I am dubious. Basically, they offer a directory listing and a few web site templates, but little else that I can discover.

For about $1,000-2,000, or four to eight months of Martindale hosting, you could instead hire a professional website developer to build a beautiful, dynamic, search-engine optimized, and easy-to-update website, probably with some new stationery to match your new look, as well.

From time to time, take a good, hard look at what you are paying for, and make sure you are getting your money’s worth.

What are you paying for hosting—and are you getting your money’s worth? is a post from: Lawyerist

Mozilla is looking to set a world record for one-day software downloads with the release of Firefox 3, which should be released sometime today is available now at getfirefox.com.

I have been using Firefox 3 for a little over a month now, and it really is a better browser. Better than Internet Explorer by a long shot, and better than Firefox 2, as well. It is quick, lighter-weight, and really nice to use. My favorite feature, though, is the easy extensibility of Firefox with the use of third-party add-ons like Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer and del.icio.us buttons.

Download Firefox 3 today! is a post from: Lawyerist

“Free” has two meanings: (1) gratis, and (2) libertas. When I say free software, I mean libertas, although much free software is gratis, as well.

Choice

There are two parts to choice: (1) different software that does the same thing, and (2) the ability to modify software to do what you want.

Don’t like the way Word handles bulleted lists? Try OpenOffice.org. Or AbiWord. Or KOffice. Or . . .

There are many brilliant programmers developing free software, and you might like one better than what you are using now. For text documents, there are a ton of options, and most of them will open and edit your .doc files just like Word.

Cost

Most free software is low- or no-cost. This can be a huge savings, especially when you factor in the cost of upgrading your proprietary software every couple of years (or less).

Office Standard 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) costs $400 per user. And in a few years, you will have to shell out another $250 for the upgrade to Office 2009. The free software equivalents, OpenOffice.org and Novell Evolution, are no cost, including upgrades.

Support

It may sound odd to talk about support after mentioning that free software is often cheaper than proprietary software, but support can be a benefit, depending on what kind of support you want.

For those willing to fix their own problems, most free software projects have an active community of developers, contributors, and users, willing and able to help. Usually, a quick search on Google will give you the answer, since chances are good someone else has had the same problem.

For those who want to pay someone else to fix their problems, most well-established free software projects (including OpenOffice.org and Evolution) offer paid support. If you decide to go with a full free system using Linux, the major distributions like SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and Ubuntu offer paid support for the whole system, not just one program at a time. This can be a huge advantage, since you will not have to deal with customer service reps blaming each other for your problem.

Try these first

Firefox is a web browser that grew out of the now-dead Netscape company. It is fast, secure, extensible, and complies with international standards (unlike Internet Explorer). It is so good that Microsoft tried (unsuccessfully) to copy many of Firefox’s best features. You can get Firefox here.

OpenOffice.orgOpenOffice.org is a full office suite, similar to Microsoft Office. It contains a word processor, spreadsheet program, slideshow creator, and more. Get OpenOffice.org here.

TrueCrypt is a top-notch file encryption utility. If you want to make sure your clients’ files are secure, especially on a laptop or thumb drive you take with you, it is a good idea to encrypt them, and TrueCrypt makes it easy. Get TrueCrypt here.

GIMP is a powerful image editor, similar to Adobe Photoshop. Most amateurs will find that GIMP does everything they need when it comes to photo editing. If you are stuck using the stripped-down image editor that came with your digital camera, give GIMP a try and see what else you could be doing.

Contribute

While most free software is no-cost, if you wind up using free software, consider sending a little money to the project to help defray the cost of keeping the project going, such as website hosting, domain registration, and beer and pizza.

Why you should try free software is a post from: Lawyerist

Mike Kavis switched to Linux to prove that people can be productive at work without using Microsoft products. One year later, he has proved the point.

I have been Microsoft free* for a couple of months now, as well, using Ubuntu GNU/Linux as my primary operating system, with OpenOffice.org as my office suite. I have not used Microsoft Office in almost a year.

Why do I prefer Ubuntu? Primarily, because it is lighter and faster, more reliable, and more configurable. It has encouraged me to focus on open standards and programs that work equally well on Windows and Mac OSX, so that I can move my data freely between all platforms. It also saves me money, especially on upgrades, although I do believe in contributing to the software projects from which I benefit.

I actually like Windows XP just fine, and always have. But my laptop has a 60GB hard drive, so Vista’s 20+GB install size was a dealbreaker for me. I think Microsoft really went the wrong direction with Vista, but I will not rule out a return to Windows if version 7 turns out to be lighter and faster, instead of bigger and slower.

*I do run Windows XP using VirtualBox (kind of like Parallels or VMWare Fusion for a Mac) so that I can use Adobe Acrobat, since there is still not a good Linux alternative. I also prefer the Windows-only scanner utility for my Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500, since Fujitsu still refuses to support Linux.

One year with Linux in a Windows world is a post from: Lawyerist

Boyd Johnson has an ingenious way of tracking his time throughout the day. Just open Windows Notepad and, when starting a task, hit F5, which stamps the time into your text file. Make a note to help you flesh out the task on your billing sheet later, and off you go. Whenever you switch tasks, hit F5 in Notepad again.

I use three text editors in Linux: Gedit, Scribes, and Bluefish, but none of them have this handy feature, unfortunately. gtimelog does the same thing in a nice package, however.

Capturing More Time…And Keeping Your Clients Happy While Doing It [ABA Law Practice Today]

Track time with Windows Notepad is a post from: Lawyerist

According to InformationWeek, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency is advocating for removing Microsoft Office from the classroom in favor of open-standards compliant office suites like OpenOffice.org.

It is good to see this kind of pressure on Microsoft. If they would either open up their OOXML standard or else support the Open Document Format like nearly every other office suite, it would benefit everyone. Microsoft is already starting to lose money as agencies like BECTA start opting for free software like OOo instead of the costly Microsoft bundle, so it seems like opening up its platform would be in its best interests.

If only the legal system would follow BECTA’s lead.

Brits shying away from Microsoft Office is a post from: Lawyerist