Financial Planning - November 2012

TECH TOOLS

Futuristic Roadshow
Several recent trade conferences show that advisory firms are
seeking more from their technology vendors.

By Joel Bruckenstein

Ispent a good deal of time during the past fewmonths on the road at various trade conferences, looking fortechnol- ogy trends and news. I found several worth highlighting.

Apple’s MountAin lion

Brian McLaughlin, CEO and chief technology officer at Redtail Technology, captivated the audience at the Business & Wealth Management Forum in Denver (of which I’m a co-producer) with an overview of Apple’s Mountain Lion operating system.

Among the key features McLaughlin talked up was AirPlay, a technology that allows you to wirelessly stream content to an HDTV from a Mac via Apple TV, a tiny, portable $100 device.

He also discussed the Notification Center, which resides on the right side of the screen and can be hidden when not needed. This is a unified center for alerts generated by such applications as Mail, Calendar and Reminders. Users need to modify their settings to customize Notification Center. They can also customize other features, such as the type of alert each app will use and the amount of alert history to be displayed. McLaughlin noted that Apple does not yet allow developers to integrate their own alerts with the Notification Center.

ChronoSync, a $40 program that can both back up files and synchronize them across multiple devices. McLaughlin also wrote his own app, which allows him to back up his files to Amazon S3, a cloud-based storage solution. He says that ChronoSync can work for advisors who want to back up to another hard drive or synchronize with it.

One advantage it has over Apple’s Time Machine is that backups created by ChronoSync are bootable, which means you can run a Mac directly from the backup. For those looking for a simple cloud-based backup solution for Mac, he mentioned Carbonite as a possible solution.

McLaughlin offered a host of other tips. Among them: Novices who have trouble locating an app can usually find it through LaunchPad, which displays all apps in a fashion similar to that of the iPad and the iPhone.

Also, Mountain Lion’s powerful search capabilities can be accessed by pressing the control key and the spacebar simultaneously, causing the Spotlight search window to appear. This window can be customized so that it searches only the file types you want to search. You can also change the order, so it first searches the file types you access most often. Spotlight can also perform math calculations and provide entry to Google searches.