Click on the links to go to each product’s home page.
Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional
Adobe Acrobat is the PDF management tool I use the most. If it had better support for pen input, it would be the only PDF tool I would need. There are cheaper alternatives out there, but none of them seem to handle the creation and management of PDF files as well as Acrobat.
What I like:
Acrobat has optical character recognition (OCR) built right in, supports custom stamps, and the two others I use most frequently, such as highlighter and typewriter. There are tons of advanced features still to be learned.
Adobe Acrobat is also available for Apple computers (OS X).
What I don’t like:
The price! If you are paying full retail price ($550), Acrobat 9 Standard ($350) is likely all you will need. On the other hand, if you have a faculty appointment, or student status, the academic price for Adobe Acrobat is outstanding ($80 for Professional).
The license allows you to install the program on a maximum of two computers. To move an installation from one computer to another, you must first deactivate and uninstall on the old computer, then install and reactivate on the new computer.
Alternative:
Foxit Reader 3 Pro can do almost everything Acrobat can, except the built-in OCR. It’s cheaper and faster and easier to install/remove. The interface is bland however, and I don’t find the quality of the PDF files produced on par with Acrobat. This is the program I install on “all my other computers” that are used primarily for work.
Like Acrobat, pen support is limited and inadequate for tablet use.
Bluebeam PDF Revu 7 Standard Edition
Like Acrobat, PDF Revu lets you view, create, manage, and annotate PDF files.
Unlike Acrobat however, PDF Revu has excellent pen support, and is the PDF manager of choice for many tablet users.
What I like:
Annotation and file management tools rival Acrobat, with stellar pen support. The toolbars are highly customizable, which becomes especially relevant for pen navigation in tablet mode.
What I don’t like:
The license only permits one installation. Worse than Acrobat. Ridiculous.
Alternatives:
PDF Annotator by Grahl.
Like PDF Revu, PDF Annotator has great pen support and annotation tools. I miss the Typewriter tool however. Installing/moving the program is easier and less restrictive than Acrobat and PDF Revu. Affordable.
AutoInk Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat by Evermap.
I am currently trying out this plug-in. When it works, it adds proper pen support to Adobe Acrobat, making the AutoInk + Acrobat combination a total solution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes inking is delayed, stutters, or doesn’t work at all. Stay tuned. If I can find a fix, this will be my preferred solution.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.1 Preferred Edition
I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) since 1998, version 2.0. Watching the hardware and software advances over the last 11 years has been exciting. With the release of version 9, Dragon finally released a product that I could recommend to clinicians who are not computer enthusiasts. Version 10 is that much better again. And now, an update to version 10 enables compatibility with 64-bit Windows systems. This is important because 64-bit systems can address more than 3 GB of RAM, and Dragon Naturally Speaking loves RAM! It is now possible to purchase a fast enough processor, and enough RAM, to really make Dragon Naturally Speaking fly.
There are several versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking, the two most relevant for physicians being Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Preferred Edition, and Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Medical Edition. In the past, there was little reason to spend the extra money for the Medical Edition, other than obtaining a preinstalled medical vocabulary. A psychiatrist, I found it easy enough to build my own vocabulary of frequently used terms.
With the release of version 10 however, Nuance (the makers of Dragon) wants to “encourage” users like me to purchase the full Medical version by making the Preferred version incompatible with some EMR systems. And, they have increased the retail price of the Medical Edition substantially to US$1600.
I have been using DNS 10 Preferred at my own expense since it was released last year. My employer will be purchasing DNS 10 Medical for me in the weeks ahead (thank you!). I will then be able to compare the Preferred Edition and Medical Edition of version 10 head-to-head, just like I did with version 9. Stay tuned, and watch my Speech Recognition page for an update.
For Apple OSx users, check out MacSpeech Dictate.
PhraseExpress 6 Professional
I discovered PhraseExpress a few years ago, and now I can’t live without it. Whenever I try to type progress notes or e-mails on a computer without my custom PhraseExpress setup, I feel like Bart Simpson in detention, writing longhand on a blackboard. There are a number of alternatives to PhraseExpress out there, some of them free, but I prefer PhraseExpress because it does more than just automatically expand abbreviated text. It allows me to assign shortcut keys to simple macros and scripts that accelerate my workflow considerably. The project remains under active development, with regular updates and improvements.
For Apple OS X users, check out TextExpander.
ritePen 3.1
RitePen was developed as an alternative to the Windows Tablet Input Panel (TIP) for handwriting recognition. Instead of writing in a prescribed area, the user can write anywhere on the screen, with text appearing wherever the insertion point resides. RitePen also allows for some navigation commands as well. This is what first got me excited about ritePen. With Windows Vista, and now Windows 7 however, the Tablet Input Panel is much improved.
With the release of ritePen 3.1, “writing anywhere” is not the only attraction however. RitePen 3.1 now supports macros, allowing me to automate logins and boilerplate text with my pen. This is a real help for logging onto Novell, Citrix, Meditech, etc. while in tablet mode. This feature alone is worth the price of admission. I find myself toggling ritePen on and off, and alternating between ritePen and the Windows 7 TIP, depending on what kind of text entry I am engaged in.
SlickRun
SlickRun is a program and website launcher that I started using with Windows XP. It’s a fantastic little program for quickly launching URLs, documents, or programs from the keyboard.
With the new Start Menu in Windows Vista and Windows 7 however, and the ability to assign keywords to URLs in Firefox, I don’t rely on SlickRun as much as I used to. If you’re still stuck with Windows XP, like I am at work, you may want to check it out. When I can make a screencast, I’ll post a link to it here.
For Apple OS X users, check out Quicksilver.
SnagIt 9
SnagIt is a powerful and flexible screen capture utility. I frequently come across information on my computer that I would like to store or share with others, but I do not wish to print it out and waste paper. Instead, I simply grab the image from my screen and e-mail it away, or store it on my hard drive. SnagIt can save the contents of the display as image files or PDF files. It’s just one more way to store information in a paperless manner, but it’s not a strategy commonly employed.
Lifehacker.com recently took a survey of favorite screen capture utilities, and SnagIt came out on top.
Instant File Name Search Pro
Instant File Name Search is another little gem I discovered and used dozens of times every single day. There are a number of free desktop search tools available, such as Google Desktop Search and Yahoo Desktop Search that index files on your computer for rapid retrieval. They will even index the contents of your files. If you have accumulated as many files as I have however, the number of “hits” is too many to sort through.
Over the years, I’ve developed a system for naming my files that allows me to search quickly and effectively by filename only. So, the basic search feature built into Windows should be good enough, but it’s too slow. Instant File Name Search fills the gap in the middle. I tell it which folders to watch, and it keeps an up-to-date index of file names only. There is another handy utility that does this, called Everything from voidtools, but it won’t index network drives. If you don’t need to index network drives, check this one out too.
Firefox 3
I use all of the major browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera. They each have their strengths, and each one just keeps getting better. With so much work being done on the web now, I find it handy dedicating specific browsers to specific tasks, just to keep things organized and identify the buttons on my taskbar more easily.
If I could only have one browser though, it would be Firefox for two major reasons. Firstly, it is truly “cross-platform”, meaning I can run the same program on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux. Secondly, its functionality can be extended and customized without limits due to hundreds of “add-ons”. If there is a specific task that you wish your web browser could do, there is probably an add-on that will do exactly that.
Firefox Add-ons
Google Chrome
Clippy
Clippy has nothing to do with that annoying paperclip character from earlier versions of Windows. Rather, it is a utility that can reformat the contents of Windows clipboard.
My primary use for this utility is copying and reformatting the title of an article that I’ve downloaded from PubMed.com to be used as the file name for the PDF file on my hard drive. Most journal articles have a title that is more than one line long, and they frequently contain a semicolon. Clippy removes the hard returns and replaces the semicolon with a hyphen, allowing me to paste the entire title as the PDF file name.
There may be other utilities that do this, but I’ve had no reason to look for an alternative. The original developer’s website no longer appears to be active, but Clippy can still be found in software repositories like this one.
