your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

switched to using Scratch for quick notes over SimpleNote a while ago, works pretty well

Feel a little guilty that I never really use the Omni apps as deeply as I could because they are great

omnifocus one of four apps i have permanently open (chrome, terminal, mail)

Is there any overview of what these note apps can/can't do? Are any of them usable for writing down maths?

obv they can take in latex, the only reasonable way to write math(s)

can't make the code but that's just window dressing

there's one that renders the latex math, I'm almost certain

Sure I can just type in latex as text, it can get a bit unreadable though.

xp that sounds good, I guess I can search around

So you can get Latex rendering in Evernote by using (initially wrote "yousing" wth!) eat.ags. Not committed yet to using fancy hoonja-doonjas but I'll give it a go.

Got sick of sync issues with Simplenote, finally extracted myself from it (which was not trivial, btw - contact me if you want to do this and are having problems. One of the reasons I left was that some of my notes created in Simplenote simply never made it to NV, so I had to export all my notes as JSON, then parse them, then etc etc.)

Now on NV+Dropbox+Notesy and having ... sync issues. Can easily work around so far but FFFF.

i think u guys should just get a notepad and a pencil

but I have an iphone

i use wunderlist as a todolist / note app (just stick 'em in todos). syncs between phone/computer/web.

i also have anywhere from 3 to 8 random textedit windows open at any given time, for stuff i'm not worried about syncing.

not a brilliant system, but i used to write notes in like halves of the cardboard wraps for bubble-packed gum and stuff, so this is an advance for me.

omnifocus "free" license apparently expires in like seven more days. feh. can't imagine actually spending ~100$ on any sort of planner app.

Asana is fantastic for todolist type stuff. Web based

http://app.asana.com

do you need to tag? is search not enough?

― caek, Friday, February 1, 2013 11:21 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

Not quite - i try to include keywords, but because of my addled brain end up using things like 'poetry'/'poems', 'books'/'lit' - it's handy to have the list tbh.

but i have just found you can tag in NV (ctrl+shift+t), so that's cool.

anyone use a finance app? don't really want to drop any coin on it : /

seems like options are ynab, moneywiz, money, ibank?

I've tried a few apps (because i am SHITE with money and need to be less shite) and just found the whole chore of keeping them updated stopped them being effective.

ended up constructing an incredibly complicated (for me) spreadsheet in google docs/drive, which I can just copy and paste my Internet statement into, and it does a load of calculations that tell me how much money I've got left to spend/save that month and it has completely changed my life. I've got money left over at the end of the month etc, can see clearly what I can and can't spend and what categories I'm spending on etc.

Sorry, that probably isn't much help, but I wanted to eulogise the power of financial planning (this may not be news to more prudent types I realise).

we use mint, which is free - my wife is the financial person so i can't say too much about how good it is but she seems happy with it

anyone use a finance app?

I'm on iBank, with the iPhone version as well, which is pretty nice. While I'm out I enter everything in the phone and sync it up later on, downloading transactions from the bank to see what I've missed. It's not pretty like Mint or whatever, it's more like OS9 Quicken. I like it, because I want more of an accounting ledger than a budget pie chart. But I wish it was prettier. Simple looks reeaaaaaallly nice.

ended up constructing an incredibly complicated (for me) spreadsheet in google docs/drive

I ended up doing this with two accounts - one is the discretionary 'allowance' account, the other is the expenses one that the automated bill payouts are drawn on (which is everything except rent for me). The expenses acct gets the direct salary deposit, and I just move X amount from that account to the allowance account, and that's the debit card that I carry around to pay for lunches, etc with. The amounts that are allowed to exist in either account are set by a fairly simple spreadsheet that lists monthly liabilities that I revise a couple times a year. This way I never overdraft, never overspend, it's nice.

But going back to apps, iBank is your thing if you were into Quicken before they completely lost it. I would be into Mint if I wasn't creeped out by shoveling all my transactions at some third party online. I have reservations about Simple too since they're effectively an inserted middleman between you and your bank, they're not the bank themselves.

don't use one but some friends say v. good things about mint.

I just signed up with mint and added my student loans and holy shit I'm depressed now

mint not available for britishers : /

afaict this sort of software never really got going in UK/europe because we don't use cheques any more, so reckoning/balancing consists of looking at yr bank statement

i wrote a cheque once. never forget.

lol checks

are credit cards a big thing in the UK?

more debit cards. also for bills direct debits (don't know what the US equivalent is -- basically you agree that eg the electricity company can ask for as much as they want from your account on a certain day each month)

finding mint pretty useful since it categorizes all the transactions I make with my credit card; nice breakdown. otoh won't let me add a category for 'coke habit.'

def dealt with checks in France alas

debit cards are bigger in canada than the us, even! they all have those neat chips in them and a lot of restaurants have little remote swipe pads they bring to your table.

I have reservations about Simple too since they're effectively an inserted middleman between you and your bank

I feel more like Simple is a good business model because they're effectively a company that is completely focused on making your transactions as easy as possible and they're unconcerned with the backend money storage. A lot of the pain of traditional banks is their constant efforts to figure out how to deal with cash flow while making money off of stored cash. This way, you have one entity concentrated on the money, and one on the transactions.

debit cards are bigger in canada than the us, even! they all have those neat chips in them and a lot of restaurants have little remote swipe pads they bring to your table.

I am always amazed of how antiquated North America is on a few certain things compared to Europe

Think a lot of that is the inability to create/implement a revised protocol for cards in the US

yeah there's something called 'paywave' now but it doesn't even work half the time

I have several accounts for all my millions, I'd like to just see them all in one place & have some light budgeting

spreadsheet probably best option but it is not teh shiny

this is definitely teh shiny - wish leather stitching would die tho

heh, I'm spoiled now and can't bother with anything unless it has real-time account data that I don't have to export

oh you mean it doesn't hook up your real bank account yet? dang yeah that's a dealbreaker

Most apps never will. There isn't a real standard in the banking industry, just software packages configured differently and one-offs, as far as bank web sites go. The only companies with the resources to hook up to a myriad of accounts have been Mint, and uh, companies bought by Mint.

Wesabe was an awesome service with better category detection and data viewing, but mint buried them.

Fresh books is pulling from my bank, but its more so you can grab expenses for invoicing.

Following the soon-to-be-demise of Google Reader, should I go with Feedly or Taptu? Or something else?

(want a web version or Mac app to be available, not mobile-only).

do you care about syncing with iDevices? y/n?

just signed up to feedly. Looks nice but really slow and weird. Also signed up with Jolicloud, which aggregates dropbox, facebook, tumblr, instagram, soundcloud, instapaper but not RSS. I sent in a feature request though. It's really slick looking and if it could interface with an RSS feed app, or be one, I'd be happy.

Reeder is a great feed reader for mac, but not free

i love reeder

I have reeder but it's totally sync'd to Google. I couldn't remember if it worked without it. Will have to figure out if it's easy to transfer the feeds, or will just have to do it manually. Google let me download all my feeds, but I don't see how to upload that to Reeder.

reeder requires a server-side source. Currently, it supports Google Reader, Fever (a self-hosted one that is decent, but not so great that I ever switched), and Readability, which isn't really an aggregator. Presumably their statement means they're looking at putting in support for other Google Reader replacement sites ASAP

Vienna is a great reader if you don't need to bother with syncing (though it's built in, if you wish to use it) http://www.vienna-rss.org