Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      Draw Your Own Conclusions
      Apparently I look so odd for a woman of my position?it's the cargo pants and Japanese jackets, I just know it?that people feel free to ask me how I got to be so techy. Or nerdy. Or geeky. The answer is that I never stopped taking apart my mother'swatches. What they don't ask (so I don't answer) is why I got into computers instead of, say, bridges or microscopes. (Actually, I like microscopes too.)
      I was nearing adulthood when I saw my first mainframe computer. It was one of those behemoths that communicated with the user by stacks of punched paper cards. I was a restaurant critic at the time. A while later, a friend who worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey showed me the personal computer he was building and told me it didn't use any cards at all (it used a monitor). He taught me how to program the thing to make an a, then a b, then a c, then ... so cool. I turned into a restaurant critic who knew how to make a computer display a d.
      I have a feeling you may not be as fascinated as I am with reminiscing about my beginnings (and besides, I'm younger than that now). But there is some value in looking at today's computer equipment and programs through the eyes of lawyers at the starting line. Would electronic filing fire their imaginations? Probably not. Does it fire up yours? On the other hand, a complete e-filing system?where you send your pleadings off to the appropriate court, without worrying about whether your e-filing provider uses formats compatible with the specific court management system (CMS) used in each court?now that would knock hours off your work week and lower your blood pressure by 20 points. Don't hold your breath, though. Although it is possible to e-file to some agencies and courts, each project is a one-off because the design of the program the lawyer uses must be tailored to the specific CMS of said agency or court. Tune in again in about 35 years.
      And yet, for certain kinds of programmers, getting e-filing right is a fascinating challenge. Working on one of the various Google projects probably would get them more conversation at cocktail parties, but for this kind of programmer, creating and updating a program with an easy-to-use interface and great depth of features probably holds the same fascination. One example of getting it right is SmartDraw 2007 Legal Edition. We're talking here about drawing for dummies, using the Lego approach to making large posters (or small, but what fun is that?) for use in trials, conferences, and client meetings, to name only one of its functions. The program uses a large library of templates and a big database of shapes to give you nifty, understandable accident-scene re-creations, timelines for testimony inconsistencies, patent-application flowcharts, medical illustrations of whiplash, organization charts, flyers, and way more other explanatory graphics than I could possibly recount. You should see the handy oversize poster I made to explain the correlation among oil drilling, ecological destruction, and crime rates in northern Wyoming. Given that I hadn't made a poster since high school, when we used poster board and tempera paint, my creation turned out very professional looking.
      SmartDraw's simple building-blocks interface disguises a powerful graphics program, but the program's first few screens, full of baby pinks and blues, look almost like a child's game. As soon as you get to work, however, you realize that you can resize images almost infinitely without losing any sharpness or detail. Click on a button and you can make all images the same size. Click on another button to align your images. Connect all your images with just about any kind of line or arrow and it will automatically follow the images it links, no matter where you move your objects. Tell your lines to hop over or under each other, and they will. Type wherever you want text to appear and SmartDraw will place it there, even next to or inside a graphic. Spell check your text using SmartDraw's built-in checker. Make just about any sort of table. Apply colors and graphic effects wherever you want to spruce up your poster. And when you're done, import your masterpiece into a Microsoft Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet, an email message, or a PowerPoint slide, or convert it to a PDF file. All this power and seeming simplicity took several years to develop and required ingenious solutions to stubborn problems. And, really, that's what computing is about for geeks like me.
      Of course, ingenuity doesn't come cheap. SmartDraw sells its products over the Web only, and the Legal Edition costs $297 for one user. The price per user scales down a little as you buy more user licenses (www.smartdraw.com).
      And, for you early adopters, SmartDraw Legal Edition 2007 works under Windows Vista too.
     

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