Week two of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.
Visit http://www.blogable.eu/project-365/ or http://www.flickr.com/photos/blogable to find out more.
Week one of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.
Visit http://www.blogable.eu/project-365/ or http://www.flickr.com/photos/blogable to find out more.
Since I started using a Mac, my mouse (Logitech G9) didn’t work as well as I was used to when I was still using a PC. The reason was the inability to use and / or configure the mouse buttons. I tried to install Logitech’s driver but that didn’t end up well. (Maybe because there isn’t a dedicated driver for this mouse.) Directly after I restarted my machine, I had the feeling that it isn’t running smoothly. I uninstalled the software and lived without features such as going back one page by clicking a mouse button within Firefox.
Luckily I found an app called SteerMouse. This fine piece of software allowed me to set the mouse buttons up the way I like them to work. Now I can not only go forth and back within Firefox, I can also zoom in and out. This finally allows me to use my mouse the way I was used to and even gives me features (zooming, switching between apps) that I wasn’t used to, but that make my daily life a lot easier.
This should work with most mouses (or mice – to find out more about that topic read this) and help you to get all the features you would expect from a mouse that has all those buttons that await to be used. 
Owning an iPhone, other mobile phones take a back seat in comparison. Nevertheless, I like HTC and their effort to make Windows Mobile work in a nice way, as far as that is possible. Their newest release is the HD 2 and John Hermann wrote a good review on gizmodo.com.
In my opinion the article highlights well, how HTC continuously releases really good mobile phones, which – unfortunately – are mostly shipped with Windows Mobile. I’d like them to go a step further than adding Android phones to their range and offer their own operating system. Maybe that is too far fetched, but if they continue to work with Windows Mobile, I wouldn’t wonder if they would lose a lot of their hard earned market share in the future.
During my pre-Christmas cleaning I decided to sort my Mac mini as well. I really like it clean and fast. A nice article at lifehacker.com may also help you if you find your Mac sluggish, or if you simply are a neat ‘freak’ like me. 
The article describes how you can find programs that take a lot of your system resources, and how you can make your Mac start faster by disabling programs that start automatically when you switch on your system. On top of that, software that will delete unnecessary left-overs from uninstalled apps and system checks is introduced to you. While the article isn’t the newest, the hints offered are still up-to-date.
The usage of finance applications always sounded dull and boring to me, never mind how much I liked the idea. The major reason for it was the inability to easily create a transaction on the go. This is mostly due to the phones I owned before, that didn’t provide easy to use apps or actually non at all. Alternatively, I could have just collected receipts and typed the content into a program on the computer. That seemed too much an effort. As a result, I never really used finance apps.
An alternative title for this post could have been: How spending money can actually save you money. Why? Because spending $… for an application that enables you to track your expenses makes you think twice about purchasing something. While reading this, keep in my mind that I only make use of a finance app to keep track of my expenses and income. But let’s not beat about the bush and get down to business of comparing Cha-Ching and Money.
After entering a security pin to access the iPhone app, you will be presented with a clean and stylish interface. It has a brown finish, like papyrus. Tabs provided are: Accounts, Budgets, Bills, Reports and Settings.
Accounts can be set up for your banks, cash, credit cards and even investments. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not using this to run a business, so I stick with the first three. Once entered, the accounts current balances will show up every time the app is started. Tapping on an account shows the last transactions, sorted by date. A new transaction can easily be created with the help of a + button. This is vital to me. Standing in a shop for 3 minutes in order to add $15 for a new book really isn’t efficient. Once you got used to the system, it’s easy and quick. Even if not quite as quick as Cha-Ching (read on to find out why). The app comes with many categories preset. I mainly use these, as they are quite handy, although it’s really easy to add further categories to your liking. Payees are sorted by name and also very easy to add. A flaw, that I find midly annoying: adding a new payee doesn’t automatically add it to the transaction you’re just creating. Instead, you will have to select the just created payee out of the payee-list.
Budgets can be helpful for, let’s say iTunes’ App Store expenses. (For everyone who used the App Store Expense Monitor, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. ) Budgets basically help to keep track of your expenses before they actually happen. A bar highlights the overall status, while the sum you spent and the remaining amount are shown.
Bills are very easy to create as well. I use them to keep track of bills that don’t change, such as my gym membership. Being able to choose between a frequency of every day until annually and having the option for numbered recurrences will give you a lot of freedom. Once a bill is created, a simple touch with your finger will mark it as paid.
The Reports function is a major plus over Cha-Ching. On the iPhone it will show you the Top 5 Expenses/Income and put them side by side in comparison to the last month. Not much to say about this feature, but I like to make numbers meaningful (just like C. Gallo suggests in his book ‘The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs’). Choose between a summary (as mentioned) and bar/pie charts for a report you can create yourself.
Last but not least Settings. Create payees, categories and your currency of choice. To be honest with you, I don’t even know half the currencies available.
Once the passcode is entered, Cha-Ching also offers a clean interface. In comparison, this one feels more Mac-like, as the colors used are blue, white as well as grey and black. While this sure is nice, I prefer Money’s interface – even if it took me a while to get used to. Tabs provided are: Accounts, Budgets, Scheduled, Payees and More. If you might have realized, there isn’t a reports feature.
Accounts include Checking, Savings, Credit, Online, Loan and Cash. This is a different approach compared to Money. One I don’t really like I have to add. If you wish to create many different accounts, this may be very useful to you though, especially as you can enter the account number and more information. Even a default account can be selected. To me this is just clutter. I’m not really able to explain it, but it doesn’t feel as clean as Money. For example, your cash account requires a bank name or it will show ‘Bank Name Not Set’ in the accounts list. This sure isn’t a major flaw, and most likely some may not even have noticed or cared about it, but it destroys the clean look and feel for me. Once created, accounts can be sorted to your liking which is really nice and doesn’t limit the list to the alphabetical order.
To add a transaction, choose an account, tap it and an information screen for the account will open. (This contains submenus that show recent transactions and a history.) Tapping the + will open the payees list and the feature that made me pay for this app: nearby payees. Once a payee was created, you can set a location for it. Say, you go shopping at the grocery store around the corner. Once there, open your app, allow it to use the location service and a location for that shop will be created. This (and the fact that payees will have to be sorted into one category each) allows really quick entries of new transactions. If the speed for new transactions is crucial to you, Cha-Ching is way faster than Money. How much faster you wonder? Weirdly enough there isn’t a big difference in terms of steps, but choosing the category and the payee will take more time with Money, as Cha-Ching will search for nearby payees (that have a set category).
The Budget function pretty much equals Money’s.
The Scheduled tab, in comparison to Money, isn’t as rich in options. A weekly frequency is the shortest available and a limitation to a set number of recurrences also doesn’t exist.
Payees are sorted alphabetically but can also be favored. Let’s not forget about the ability to set locations to payees. This really is a neat feature.
The last tab called More includes the settings to set the passcode and lets you choose what due soon means to you. Searching for and creating flagged transactions are also features ‘hidden’ in this tab.
Conclusion:
While trying to stay as neutral as possible during the writing of this post, I have a clear winner – and I’m happy with it. I decided to use Money for iPhone and recently purchased the Mac version of the software ($39; review following soon) although I already paid for Cha-Ching for iPhone ($2.99). As many things as I may have forgotten since my studies, knowing that a decision made in the past (never mind if it resulted in a win or loss) shouldn’t influence a future decision, saved me much annoyance. If you wonder why, I’d suggest you read what the community writes on Cha-Ching’s website. It gives me the impression that they don’t really care about their customers. And honestly, paying $40 for the Mac software – which is still beta! – doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
Numbers and facts in short:
Money is a finished piece of software both for iPhone and Mac. The iPhone version is free of charge, the software for Mac costs $39. Cha-Ching for Mac is still beta at the time of this writing. The iPhone version is $2.99 and the Mac version sets you back $40.
If that isn’t enough a foundation to build your decision upon, Money offers graphs while Cha-Ching has location services for payees.
I bought a Time Capsule (an AirPort Extreme is essentially the same, just missing the harddisk) and it’s working flawlessly, after a little work on setting it up. The following article should make it clear how to set up the router (Siemens) that is provided by the German DSL provider Alice (Hansenet).
To set up the TC, simply follow the explanation given in the setup guide. If you can’t be bothered to read that – and I assure you I know that feeling – just plug in your ethernet cable and install the software that came with your device, as weird as that may seem. I didn’t install it in the first place but was warned that I have an older version currently running. After installing it, I went to:
Applications -> Utilities -> AirPort Utilities
Just click yourself through the process. If you should encounter issues or have questions, this may help (and eventhough it’s quite old, it sure helped me). The most important thing to set up is DHCP. Even if you have PPPoE in mind, just use the suggested option. Now your internet should be up and running (because you Mac will still connect via your entered PPPoE network settings, as the cable is still attached).
Now log in to your Siemens router that Alice sent you, by visiting the following IP with your preferred web browser:
192.168.1.1
Then set up your login details:
Username: YourTelephoneNumber@alice-dsl.de
Password: YourBirthdate (ddmmyyyy)
While you’re at it, set up a password for your router, if you haven’t done so already. Nothing is worse than setting up a secure network and leaving the router open for others to change the passwords. Simply save your configuration and you’re basically good to go. Basically. You will also need to log in to your own, just created wireless network with your Mac. Now you can plug out your ethernet cable if you made the initial backup already. Otherwise I’d suggest leaving it plugged in until you finished that. I then restarted my Mac, but it should work without doing so.
As you can see, there isn’t much to it. I expected it to be either really difficult or impossible, after reading many discussions about this online. If you still encounter problems setting it up, or if you have further questions, please leave a comment and i’ll get back to you a.s.a.p.
Using iTunes as my main – and most likely only – media player started off quite badly. Not only that I had to change every single video I have into a *.mov-file, I also found *.mp3-files that would neither play on my iPod nor within iTunes. Trying to add these files via iTune’s automatic adding function would move them to the not added folder instead.
The MP3 Validator for Mac OS X neatly solved this issue for me. Just download the software and open it, before you can simply drag-and-drop your mp3-files into the program. It will show which failure persists and repair it. Just checked my whole library and found quite a lot of failures on files which I didn’t suspect in the first place.
PS: Windows-user might be happy to read that MP3 Validator is doing the same for them.
PS:PS: Thanks to Trevin Chow for this helpful piece of information.
Since I started this new category, namely apps, I came across a cooking app, which I think is grand. Although it will take a whopping 400+ MB of your iPhone’s memory, it doesn’t offer almost unlimited recipes. Instead, Jamie Oliver decided to go a different route, which I think makes this app worth the money: he describes every meal with a summary, offers a shopping list and provides a step-by-step guide that includes pictures. Additionally you will get videos explaining different kitchen skills, such as Cooking the perfect steak or Top fish buying tips.
I’m not a great chef, or even close to that, but I’m looking forward to preparing some meals with the help of this app.
Since I got an invitation to Google Wave and didn’t have much time to test it properly yet, I decided to start a public wave for blogable.eu readers.
To find the wave simply search for:
with:public “Welcome to the blogable.eu reader public wave”
If you encounter problems (like not finding the wave) I’d like you to let me know, since I also just started testing it. The wave is supposed to let blogable.eu readers test Google Wave, experience the possibilities and share the experience with other readers.
Hope to seeing you there soon.
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