I wrote a little while back about finance software. I’m still using Koku, which I was writing about, but I’ve changed the way I capture my transactions on the go. I was using a specific list in Listary that synced to Simplenote which I was copying my transactions from into Koku. I gave that up in favor of Omnifocus for iPhone. Omnifocus continues to be my fall back for almost everything lately. It doesn’t work any differently than my list in Listary did, except that I’m guaranteed to check Omnifocus. I wasn’t always checking Simplenote/nvALT. I know, if I put something into Omnifocus, I will process it. Because of this, I put information into Omnifocus whenever possible. That way, I know, for sure, it’ll get done. They say that the best camera is the one you have. Maybe the best finance software is whatever you’ll use.
Tag: productivity
I tried out Drafts this past week. I was skeptical of it because its developer also did Terminology, which I had heard was great, but didn’t really like. Agile Tortoise doesn’t make pretty apps. Drafts is also a bit of an eyesore. The original theme for Drafts was a mess of browns that looked like the inside of a toilet bowl after a large bowl of spicy curry. There’s a gray theme that isn’t much better looking, but at least it isn’t brown.
Drafts is a weird mixture of tweet composer, note composer and email composer. Drafts is definitely not a place to keep text. It’s a place to start a thought and then move it off somewhere else. You can send text to Omnifocus, Simplenote or any other app that utilizes the “Open in…” function in iOS. There’s a “Send to Dropbox…” function, but since you can only send text files to /Apps/Drafts, its use is limited for me. I want to be able to save to any folder I wish, and I know it’s possible, but the developer claims that Dropbox prefers you to use “/Apps/[app name]“. So for the sake of making Dropbox happy, you’re stuck with no options. Elements and Taskpaper let you use any folder, but Drafts will not. It’s pretty lame.
I’ve found it useful to use Drafts when I want to quickly get something out of my head though. Drafts automatically opens up a new note when you launch it. From there, it’s one tap to send it to Omnifocus’ inbox or create a note in Simplenote. I also like that it auto-tags new Simplenote notes with the “Drafts” tag. I’d like it even more if I could choose my own custom tag to be assigned, but I won’t hold my breath. I know I can accomplish these same things (minus the auto-tag) with Launchpad. Launchpad still requires you to open the app and then choose your macro you’ve created. It feels faster launching into a text window straight from the home screen.
Drafts could also be very useful for creating templates. You can keep a draft of something, and use actions like send to Simplenote, Tweetbot or email whenever. Unlike Launchpad which doesn’t allow you to have line breaks when you create “Create new note with [insert text]” macros, Drafts would allow you to create relatively complex templates. Of course, if TextExpander Touch allowed for fill-ins on iOS, you could do everything with TextExpander like you would on OS X. (Sad face.)
Drafts is an interesting application and it certainly has its uses. It’s not going to replace any app you already have, but it’s possible that you could find a way to use Drafts that augments your currently used applications.
I wrote a little while ago about OpenMeta tags and some software to implement them. I continue to be a believer in tagging. At every opportunity, I reduced the number of folders I use and consolidate as many files as I can into one folder and then tag them, sparingly. Over tagging files can be just as bad as having too many folders. Here’s an example of overtagging:
For a while, I was tagging work documents as ‘work’ and ‘COMPANYNAME’. It was overkill. I should know that anything that is tagged with my employer’s name is work. I shouldn’t need to tag those documents as ‘work’ too. Those files are already in a ‘Work’ folder in Dropbox.
Two updates to applications I had tried in the past came out last week and their new inclusion of OpenMeta tagging support has gotten me back into them. The first is Path Finder 6. I tried Path Finder out in 2007, I think, and while I liked it’s extra abilities over the Finder, it wasn’t ready to be a replacement for the Finder. Path Finder’s come a long way, and I think you can safely leave Finder behind. What I essentially do is run both in tandem, and I redirect all “Reveal in Finder” commands to reveal in Path Finder and Path Finder lets you hide the Finder’s dock icon. Finder can run in the background for Time Machine and you can use Path Finder exclusively. It’s pretty seamless.
Path Finder 6 also adds the ability to work with OpenMeta tags. You can edit the tags for any file, but Path Finder has these nifty “tag groups” you can set up and then every time you apply a “tag group”, Path Finder adds multiple tags that you’ve already assigned to that “tag group”. I still use Tags.app because of the ability to tag anything, anywhere rather quickly and Tags.app has a great search feature and tag browser that Path Finder doesn’t.
Oh, one more bad ass thing. Path Finder 6 can queue file transfers! No more grinding hard drives to a halt when you initiate multiple transfers at the same time.
The other piece of software is the new version of the MailTags add-on for Mail.app. MailTags now adds OpenMeta tags so the emails you tag with MailTags show up in Tags.app’s tag browser. I guess tagging emails is a natural extension of my newfound love of tagging files. Adding tags like ‘@action’, ‘@followup’ and ‘@waiting’ have made it easy to create Smart Mailboxes that help me get to certain types of mail quickly. I have a Smart Mailbox called “Priority Mail” that contains flagged messages, ‘@action’ and ‘@followup’. I check this once in the morning and I can quickly see what needs to be acted on or processed in some way.
Overall, I’m really happy with my tagging setup. I keep everything in Dropbox, my MailTags tags sync through iCloud’s IMAP system (or at least they appear to be) and I’m taking advantage of Smart Mailboxes and Spotlight Saved Searches to keep everything at my fingertips.
Simplenote has been a mainstay on my iPhone’s homescreen. I started using Simplenote at a time when Dropbox-enabled text editors were non-existent on iOS. Hell, I don’t think Apple was even calling it “iOS” yet. Simplenote was great because of its sharing functions. You could easily create tags that were associated with email addresses and share notes that could be editing by anyone that the note had been shared with. For example, I could tag something with “kernelpanic” and it would automatically get shared with Gabe Glick. I really don’t use this functionality all that often anymore, but it’s still a great feature. Sharing notes through Dropbox is not quite as easy, you’d have to create a shared folder for each person or group you want to share with, not something you can do from the iOS app.
Simplenote hasn’t gotten as many frequent updates as other iOS Dropbox text editors have gotten recently, but Simplenote is still pretty damn solid. Simplenote doesn’t utilize any fancy Markdown features, but the great thing about writing in Markdown is that you don’t need a lot of fancy features to make it work for you. What I really love about Simplenote is how it interacts with nvALT for OS X. All the tags I use in Simplenote’s iOS app get synced back to nvALT and nvALT interprets those Simplenote tags as OpenMeta tags back on my Macs. Inversely, if I assign an OpenMeta tag on my Mac, Simplenote adds a tag on the server too. And because it’s using OpenMeta, I can use smart searches in Finder or sort through the OpenMeta tags in the excellent Tags for OS X.
I use Simplenote for notes. It’s a notes app. For longer pieces of texts, like this one, I write in Byword or MultiMarkdown Composer, both for OS X.
If you’re looking for a super simple task manager that’s ultraportable, check out Atea. It’s a Java runtime that sits in your menu bar and gets all its data from a single text file. If you put the file in Dropbox or Notational Velocity’s data folder and sync with Simplenote, you can have a copy on all of your computers and your iOS devices. Just update the text file that Atea’s reading and the tasks in the menu bar applet will change as well. Add ‘[]”s to make something a project and just delete the row of text to delete the task. It’s lightweight and very cool. And it’s free.
File Management
This lynchpin in my new file management system is OpenMeta tags. In the past I used either a ridiculously deep system of folders in the Finder or more recently tried using database/document management software like DevonThink, Yojimbo and Paperless. Of the three, Paperless worked the best (for me) but it had trouble with syncing between multiple computers over Dropbox, which made it impossible to access files from my iPhone. Yojimbo has an iPad app but that’s not useful to me, and DevonThink has a universal iOS app, but it’s so buggy and underpowered that it as well was worthless.
I finally settled on the notion that the only way to future proof my data and make it accessible from my iPhone was to stick to the folders in the Finder. The problem with that is, drilling down through folders can be tiresome, and sometimes you forget you had a folder for something and you wind up creating the same folder in more than one place. My plan was to use a system of shallow folders (no more than three deep) and tag consistently but sparingly.
Spotlight
So now that I had my game plan in place, I did something that I never did much, I used Spotlight. I was so used to just remembering where everything was in my myriad of folders before Spotlight (herein: B.S.), that I didn’t bother to get used to Spotlight when it came out. But even now that I understand the power of Spotlight, I still don’t use the Spotlight menu. The real power of Spotlight is saved searches. Combined with OpenMeta tags, I’ve got saved searches for “outbox” (all the things I need to send out), “receipts”, “schedules” (for work) and even a “Recent Files” one which kind of makes apps like Fresh unnecessary.
Spotlight Tip
⌥ – click the + button to get advanced options like “match all, none or any”.
Tags
So, if I’m going to be relying on tagging my files to find them, I better have a have a good way of getting tags into the metadata. A follower on Twitter pointed me towards Tags from CaseApps. Tags is most useful as a menubar app that you can use to tag almost anything from a hotkey combination. I set mine to ⌥ + Space and whatever URL I’m on or file I have selected will get brought up showing me what tags are already applied, my recent tags I can click to add I can type in any tags I want to add as well. Another feature I can hotkey into is Tags’ search bar. It will look up all the same stuff as Spotlight, but adds tags to the mix. I’ve turned off Spotlight’s hotkey and gone over to Tags’ search bar. Tags also has a tag browser you can pull up and you can drill down through tags there. You can see all other tags related to the files that you’ve drilled down to so far and you can keep going down till you’ve found what you want. The only oddity I’ve noticed while using the tag browser is that when you can only use the search bar that’s inside the tag browser to filter out results from tags you’ve clicked on. You can’t search tags from inside the tag browser. Not a big deal, but a little strange. Tags is available for $29..
HoudahSpot
I also took a look at a souped up Spotlight called HoudahSpot. HoudahSpot is a pretty powerful search tool. It’s also a little bit less user-friendly when compared to Spotlight. It’s got a ton going on in the UI and it took a little while to figure out where everything was. HoudahSpot’s got three main parts to it.
- The main window where you can build your search query and refine the Hell out of it.
- A search bar that sits in the menu bar and gives you access to quick searches with HoudahSpot and also lets you use search templates that make it easier to search the things you look for the most.
- A tray that you can put on the sides of the screen so that you **can pull up search templates from, shows your your favorite and most recently used tags, and a little drawer where you can drop files and then add tags and Spotlight comments to.
HoudahSpot has all sorts of hooks to run in the background and be a pretty complete search and tagging solution, but it’s got so much going on in the UI that it at times feels overwhelming. I would recommend it if you have a ton of data that you need to wrangle though. HoudahSpot is available for $30.
Default Folder X
The last utility that I tested out on my journey to get my files in order was Default Folder X. Default Folder X’s main job is modifying the OS X save dialog. DFX does a nifty thing where it wraps OS X save dialogs with buttons for currently open Finder windows, recently used folders, and folders you’ve marked as Favorites. Also, underneath the save dialog, there are entry fields for Spotlight comments, label color, and OpenMeta tags. With DFX, you can tag your documents as you save them instead of waiting to save them and then tag them with another app.
DFX also shows up in the menu bar and gives you quick access to all those folders that it normally shows around the save dialogs. It’s extremely handy for accessing your most commonly used folders and folders you previously used but you may have lost track of. Default Folder X is available for $34.95.
I have wrestled with finance software more times than I care to admit. I’ve tried going iPhone only, Mac only, and a combination of the two. After a while, I settled on the belief that only a software package that syncs over-the-air would be worth using, but none of them ever got me to keep my financial records in order. Then I stopped using finance software for months. I then had the notion a few weeks ago that I wanted my finance software to be as easy as a GTD app. By that, I mean, I wanted an inbox. In Omnifocus, I can just add a bunch of tasks to the inbox and it syncs back to my Macs and I can process them all later at home (or on the iPhone if I’m so inclined.) The point is, I don’t need to be able to do everything on my phone. And to be honest, I hadn’t found a Mac finance app that fit my needs either. MoneyWell had too much going on, Squirrel didn’t work out for me, and none of the other apps felt right. (Cha-Ching was the exception but the developer of Cha-Ching were a bit scummy. If you used Cha-Ching, you’ll remember they didn’t keep you up to date on the progress of Cha-Ching’s Mac beta, the iPhone app was buggy as Hell, and when they got bought out by Intuit, they pulled all the software down and customers were given the proverbial “middle finger.”) Then I remembered Koku. I had downloaded a demo of Koku and I liked the look of it, but I had written it off because there was no iPhone app.
With my new plan of keeping financial tracking down to an inbox on the iPhone, I was free to try out Koku again. I started keeping a list of what I spent money on and how much in Simplenote, which syncs OTA back to nvALT on my Macs, and when I had the time, I could fire up Koku, whose library file I’m syncing over Dropbox, and process all the inbox items. Once in Koku, I could date, title and tag all my transactions. Koku doesn’t have MoneyWell’s buckets and doesn’t allow for budgeting, but I’ve found that budgeting for things is a waste of time, for me at least. I wanted software that would keep all my transactions together, make them easy to drill down through, and tagging does the trick. Koku is also smart enough to know when one kind of tag is a sub-tag of another automatically without you having to actually create a hierarchy.
For example:
- train ticket tagged as travel, train
- hotel room tagged as travel, hotel
Koku will automatically associate both as travel items, but you can drill down inside of travel and you’ll find train and hotel on your distribution reports. Oh yes, there are reports. Koku does three kinds of reports: summary reports, which list balances on all your accounts, distribution reports, which create pie charts from the tags you’ve associated with transactions, and history reports which give you a bar graph showing income or expenses over time. For each kind of report, you can tell Koku which accounts to use, which tags to use, and what time period to use. For time periods, you can use day, week, month, quarter or year, including this…, last…, and in the last…. After tweaking the settings, I’ve come up with seven or eight really useful reports to see things like my daily spending for the month, what I spent money on this month, how much income came from my day job versus the private English lessons I teach in the evenings. I was shocked to see how much of my total income private lessons had become. It never dawned on me how much I was relying on them until I saw it in a pie chart.
One of Koku’s biggest selling points is its Direct Connect functionality. You can connect to American banks directly and import up-to-date financial data. Koku can do this automatically in the background once you set it up. It won’t work for non-U.S. banks though, so if you aren’t in the U.S., you’re stuck manually downloading and importing statement data at the end of your billing cycle. My Japanese banks of course won’t work with Koku’s Direct Connect, but my American accounts would, if Koku could work with two different currencies! The biggest gripe I have with Koku is that you can only use the currency that is the default for your Mac. This means that if you’re like me and want to manage a library for one currency and a second library for another currency, you’re S.O.L. I emailed Fading Red, the developer, but got no answer about when it would be possible to manage multiple currencies. I’d love to have a “Japanese” library and an “American” library with separate yen and dollar settings.
Some people might not like that Koku has no iPhone app. You can check balances or add transactions when you’re away from your Mac, but for the most part, I’m very happy with Koku. Should they create an iPhone app eventually, I hope it maintains the simplicity of the Mac app and I’d be very happy to see a “transaction inbox” included. Koku is just $29.99 in the Mac App Store.
I remember my teachers always harping about us needing to create outlines before we started in on reports in school. I had it in my head that I was a good enough writer and that I could just sit down and go to town and I’d pump out a great piece of writing. About halfway through, I’d realize that I had meandered off-course and had no idea where my report was going. Then I’d tell myself that I should’ve created an outline. Even in today’s world of advanced text editors and word processors, outlines are still a necessary evil (or joy, depending on how you look at it.) In my efforts to write more and better, I’ve found that I have to create an outline for anything more than 500 words. Unless it’s me ranting about something, an outline is going to make my words more coherent. I took a look at two outliners. In the blue corner is the reigning heavyweight champion, OmniOutliner Pro. In the red corner is a fresh lightweight, Tree. Each have their strengths, and weaknesses.
OmniOutliner Pro 3 is a powerful outliner. Version 3 brought many new features that put it out in front of the outliner pack. OmniOutliner 3 lets you add file attachments to your outlines. You can add photos, videos, links, clickable email addresses and in the pro version you can record audio directly into outlines from the menu bar. OmniOutliner lets you add multiple columns to your outline. You can add as many as you need to make your outline work as you need it to. And similar to Omnifocus, there’s a clipping service (currently not available in the MAS version, but installing the demo from the Omnigroup Web site seemed to circumvent that for me) so that you can grab data from other applications and throw them into an outline.
For me, one of the biggest advantages that OmniOutliner has is its ability to mix file attachments with outline text. It’s extremely handy to throw screenshots you intend to use in a review directly into the outline that you’re working on. You can get a rough idea of what the flow of the review is going to be, images and all. If you’re doing an outline for business, OmniOutliner can let you add contact details to outlines so you can easily see (and get ahold of) people who are in charge of different things represented in your outline. And the ability to record audio is a huge addition to note-taking. I used OmniOutliner years ago in college for note-taking, but if I had been able to record the audio from my professor’s lectures and add my own notes to them along the way, that would’ve been amazing. Imagine going back through your notes and anytime you don’t quite know what your note is referring to, you could listen back to the audio and quickly find out. If you’re worried that audio files will start eating up your hard disk, OmniOutliner lets you tweak the compression of the audio files from Apple lossless all the way down to whatever the worst sounding thing could possibly be. A lot of iPad apps have attempted to do similar things, but having the ability to adjust audio quality, have a real keyboard, and have a fully featured outliner beats a silly iPad app with a notebook paper-stylized UI any day.
Unlike every other outliner I’ve used before, OmniOutliner Pro 3 lets you create multiple columns in your outline. You can designate them as different types of content too. You can tell OmniOutliner that the column will be used for checkboxes, rich text, dates or currency. Telling OmniOutliner what will be in the column will then make it easier to work with the data later and sort it. In a lot of ways, OmniOutliner Pro has replaced Numbers for me. I used to use Numbers to make schedules and draft budgets, but OmniOutliner Pro does the mostly the same things.
Another nifty feature of OmniOutliner is its clippings function. The clippings service allows you to take links, text, and photos from another application and import it into your outline. If you’re using OmniOutliner as a note-taking tool or researching a large project and want to organize your data as you go along, using the clipping service is a great way to collect research information and have it all in one place, ready to be reference when you start writing a first draft. OmniOutliner has a default clippings template, but you can create different layouts to suit whatever project you’re working on.
My only complaint about OmniOutliner Pro is that sometimes the sheer power of the application is overwhelming. There’s so much stuff to tinker with that sometimes you might spend more time adjusting settings than working on your actual outline. My advice to tinkerers would be to create templates for different types of outlines you’ll want to create. I’ve created a class schedule for one of my schools, and while it’s pretty basic in style, I saved it as a template so I can go in and make changes as they arise and I can even filter out checked off days so I can print fresh schedules throughout the month that include changes but exclude past days that I don’t need to see anymore.
The other outliner I looked at was Tree from Top of Tree. If OmniOutliner Pro is a the power user’s outliner, Tree is the everyman’s outliner. It’s a clean, simple, and easy to use outliner. I found myself taking to Tree faster than I did to OmniOutliner Pro. The UI feels a bit more modern, it has a menu bar button for quickly adding color labels to items and the keyboard commands felt a little more natural. The basics of OmniOutliner’s inspector tab, like labels, colors, and fonts are right in the toolbar in Tree. Things like file attachments, multi-column outlines and a clipping service are all missing from Tree though. At first I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but after having them in OmniOutliner Pro, I really missed them in Tree. Tree is very simple, and for a lot of people who just want a basic text-only outliner, Tree will do the job. If text-only is a problem for you though, you might want to pass on tree.
The biggest selling point of Tree is its “tree-like” branching outline mode. While Tree has a normal vertical outline mode, it has an interesting horizontal tree mode as well. When you invoke tree mode, Tree starts looking a lot like a mind-mapping application. You get to see how your outline spreads out and it takes on a much different shape than a standard outline. I think the best way to use tree mode is to write out your outline in the standard mode, and then switch to tree mode to view and edit. From tree mode, it’s very comfortable to drag parts around and adding color labels helps a lot as well.
While Tree is a good outliner, it doesn’t have the power features that OmniOutliner Pro has. If you want to add files, columns or use its clipping service, OmniOutliner Pro is your best bet. If you’re a more visual person in the way you think, you might get a lot of use out of Tree’s “tree” mode. I myself prefer OmniOutliner Pro in most cases, but for creative projects, I’ve found that visualizing where a story’s going and how it’s spreading out from the opening scene helps me get a better idea of how it’s going to play out.
It stood there, mocking me, for over a year. This suitcase became a symbol of my clutter. My sloth. My rut. I bought the suitcase in mid-2004 just prior to my first trip to Japan. I went with my mother to K-Mart to look for luggage and we bought it, not because it was good, but because it was cheap. My mother convinced me that I didn’t need, or better yet, didn’t want more expensive luggage because it would just get beat up. It would just get stolen if it were nicer. I said, “OK.” and went along with her on the idea. I used the luggage five times. On my first trip back to the US during my second stint in Japan, I started using my ex-girlfriend’s luggage. It was bigger and sturdier. When I broke up with her, I was forced to buy some new luggage. I bought nicer luggage. My mother couldn’t figure out why I’d do such a thing. But then I told her I got it for half-off. “Oh, then that’s OK.”
But then I didn’t need the old suitcase. I don’t remember how I managed this, but the old suitcase wound up back in my Japanese apartment instead of being left behind in America. I live in a small place, so I don’t have a lot of room. The place in my closet that my old suitcase occupied was now being occupied by the new suitcase. The old suitcase was homeless. But it was still usable, so I couldn’t bear throwing it away. So I let it sit in my apartment. Not tucked away in a closet or even a corner, but out in the open, dormant in a slanted position somewhere between my kitchen counter and a bookshelf. It served no purpose. It was unmoved and unused for 14 months (except for as a rack to dry bath towels on).
Every day, I’d look over at it, and feel helpless. I knew I didn’t want it. I knew I didn’t need it. I knew I’d never use it again. But it wasn’t unusable. So I kept it, and allowed it to hold me hostage for over a year. This suitcase became a symbol of my inability to remove unnecessary things from my life and to get out of the rut I’d been living in since last year. I ordered a new vacuum on Friday night, and something about this new vacuum, a new symbol of hope got me motivated to get rid of a lot of old stuff. I threw out old clothes I’d never wear again, memories of ex-girlfriends, and finally, my old suitcase. My apartment feels less cluttered, more open, and less stifling. For the first time in a long time, I feel renewed. All because I got rid of my old suitcase.
I’ve been trying to go paperless for a while. That’s a lowercase paperless, mind you. It started years ago when I eschewed mailed credit card statements for email notifications that a statement was available on the lender’s site. After I got an iPhone, I attempted to keep track of my finances by entering receipt information into different finance apps and then pitching the receipts. That never really worked though, because inputing all that data was a pain. What I needed was a way to make a digital record of paper documents in a way that required little manual input from myself. I finally shelled out for a Fujitsu Scansnap a few months ago. (The s1300 model, to be precise.) The Scansnap software included with the hardware allows you to “Scan to Folder”. For the first couple months, I was using an elaborate but often confusing, even to myself system of hierarchical folders saved to Dropbox. The system worked, but searching was a bit of a hassle, and it didn’t feel like a cohesive archive.
Then I stumbled upon Mariner Software’s Paperless (uppercase “P”). Paperless is a document manager with support for Scansnap scanners built right in. You can scan in single sheet documents or drop a whole bunch of them in your Scansnap and have each page scanned in as a different document. It’s great for opening up your inbox and scanning in all the week’s statements and receipts. You can start a scan session and forget about it. When you get back, you can go through Paperless’ inbox and edit all the titles and metadata.
The app comes preset with iTunes-style smart lists like “Today,” “This Week,” “This Month” and “This Year”. It’s easy to create new smart lists or static collections too. They’re handing for keeping similar documents together and quickly accessible. I have only been using Paperless for a few weeks so far, but as of now, I have smart lists for utility bills for each different type, documents from my company, and from there, I use the sub-category metadata to have another smart collection that keeps schedules from the company together as well. I can then tag different schedules depending on what location the schedule is for.
An interesting aspect to Paperless, (which I haven’t fully explored yet), its apparent ability to function as a finance app. It’s not going to replace something like Moneywell, but there is metadata available for amounts. You can also create charts. What or how you make the best use of these charts is not immediately obvious. Your mileage using them may vary. I certainly haven’t found them as easy to pick and go with as a dedicated finance app. The chart function is probably best left to creating reports based on monthly statements, and not day to day cash flow.
If you are looking for software to wrangle your mess of documents (and especially if you have a good document scanner), Paperless is a great solution. Buy it from the Mac App Store.