Macgasm

“Effectively manage and budget your finances.” Isn’t that one of the top 5 New Years resolutions every year? It is around my house.

This year, I’m trying something new. I’ve put aside the spreadsheet and hand drawn bar graphs and have decided to move into the digital era using Mint.com and their products and services to help make sense of the expenditures in and out of my household.

Mint.com is a set of personal finance tools that allows you to track budget and manage your money via the web or through their iPhone application.

The main advantage that Mint has over some of its competitors right now is that fact that it does not require you to enter your transactions, and it won’t share your purchase history/patterns with anyone (that’s part of the huge debacle that Blippy is going through right now). Instead, what Mint does is automatically sync with your banking accounts to get a listing of your balances and transactions.

In order to utilize the iPhone app you’re required to establish an online account at Mint.com first Setting up your account and profile is free and takes no more than a few clicks to get your first account connected and pulling valuable down to your Mint dashboard.

The main/overview screen on the iPhone app shows high-level totals for your Accounts, Budget, Cash Flow, and Investments. The Accounts section allows you to drill down to the individual transaction level to easily see what, when and how much money you’re spending at a given time.

The Budget section starts with an app created budget for individual categories, but you can go in and adjust those to your personal needs. As you move through the month, the app will show the running total and how much +/- you are from your specified limits.

There is also the ability to have alerts (either email or SMS) should a trigger happen; I’ve got the alerts set to send me a SMS message to my iPhone when a significant expense is incurred or when deposits happen. I really like the color coded visuals within the app (red, yellow, and green depending on the alert type).

Safety and security are incredibly important to me, especially when dealing with financials, again I’ll reference the misfortunes of the Blippy users. With that,, the first time you log into the Mint.com iPhone app there’s a nag screen that suggests you establish an access password. Easy to do, and very well worth it should your iPhone ever become misplaced or stolen. If that was ever to happen, you can actually log into the web-based Mint.com environment and deactivate iPhone access from your profile page. Check out the video below as Mint’s CEO, Aaron Patzer, describes Mint.com’s approach to security.

The only real criticism that I have of the app is that my particular auto loan merchants aren’t in their database I’m not able to track the payments and present value of my cars. You have to send an email to Mint to get unlisted merchants integrated into a future release of the tool set.

This app is developed by Mint Software, is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. The app is free and available in the App Store here.

Photo Credit: anemoneprojectors

‘Tis a sad day for music streamers to find out that the popular music streaming site Lala.com will cease to exist come May 31, 2010. The innocent step child of Apple, if you’re unaware, was a heavy competitor to it’s step-brother: iTunes. Lala offered a service that allowed you to “rent” instead of “purchase” music for a fraction of iTunes’ $0.99.

So what exactly does this mean for music streaming? Did Steve Jobs kill it by lethal injection to the source? Highly doubtful! There are still strong-willed followers of this idea that will keep this type of resource up and running. There is speculation that Steve Jobs (and Apple) acquired Lala just to try ridding itself of the “rental” competition. Others believe they acquired it to use it and just lost faith in the investment.

There is great anticipation to see where Apple goes from here. Did they take the service and strip it for what it’s worth just to learn the in’s and out’s of how it operates? Some (at Cohesionarts) believe that once we see OS4 drop later this year, we might see a style of subscription service like this for Apple and iTunes. I, however, am having a love/hate agreement with that speculation. Where at one point, it’d be good to have and spend less on the iTunes store, I’d end up spending more just to re-rent the songs over and over. I think Apple has the better service than that of Zune that let’s you download as many songs as you want for a monthly price. However, once your month or service is terminated, you lose those songs.

If however, this “cloud-based” version (web-based) of iTunes does arise from this recent termination, how would you react? Would you go about your music purchasing differently? Would you still shell out the $0.99 for that hot new track? Or would you “rent” the songs before buying?

via Cohesionarts

We have a great number of people to thank this week. We thought we should write up a post (hopefully weekly), letting you know the people and companies that are really helping us reach our goals.  If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do.  These companies clearly “get” it.

Site Sponsors:

MacKeeper

Hardware Sponsors:

Keeping up with the hardware on the market can be pretty expensive, so we rely heavily on companies to help us out  a little. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be able to show off all the awesome stuff that we do.

I just watched eight minutes of hilarious commentary on the whole Gizmodo iPhone 4G imbroglio, from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  He had me in stitches.  Checkout the video below, and you’ll be laughing so hard you will have to keep rewinding to just hear what Jon Stewart is saying.

Photo Credit The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Via The Daily Show

Going in to this app, I expected a little more than what I got. That said, I must admit that this provides for one completely viable iPhone app. My expectations were set a little bit high. At first, I thought it was literally “eye-to-eye”, meaning a video conferencing type app. However, that’s not the case.

What you’re going to enjoy with the application is an instant messenger app free from AIM & MSN and other programs. After creating a username and password, you can immerse yourself in threaded chats much like you can on your iPhone SMS texts. To find friends for this app you can look for more on Twitter and Facebook as well as searching directly for a username.

The best part of the app is the ability to set up the Push notifications. I enjoyed listening to music or watching a video and then seeing the little window pop-up saying that I’ve received a new message. Maybe for the future there can be some sort of audible notification like you hear when you get e-mail and an actual call/text.

All in all, I really loved this. It replaced quite a few texts that I’d normally send to people. There isn’t much of a delay on sending messages at all. You can practice by sending yourself some and see the barely 1-2 second delay. It’s amazingly fast compared to some cell phone providers. So, if you’re looking to lower your text limit, or just want to try out something incredible fun with some fellow iPhone or iPod touch users, this is definitely an app worth downloading!

Via Pinger, Inc.

We all expected Adobe to fire back at some point, but we weren’t expecting it to hit the airwaves so quickly today. Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Nareyen took some time to do an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

After a first read, I have to say I’m a little bit disappointed by some of the comments. They seem a little childish in my opinion. We don’t get any real commentary, and we certainly don’t get any good arguments from Narayen. He just toes the company line, and recycles the same arguments we’ve been hearing all along.

The highlight of the call is a huge facepalm moment in which the interviewer compares the feud between Adobe and Apple as the same between Jon and Kate Gosselin.

That’s not the only golden moment in the interview, though. Mr. Narayen blamed Apple’s operating system for the fact that OS X crashes a lot with Adobe products. In the same breath he then goes on to say that they’re dedicated to their products working across mobile platforms. He was probably making a direct reference to flash on mobile devices, but it’s hard to remove from the argument that the fact Adobe hasn’t been all that supportive of OS X or Apple products for a number of years now.

Besides, if Adobe was so open to ensuring their products were available on multiple platforms, why haven’t we seen it on any of the major Linux distros? Sounds like someone is paying lip service to the ideologies to me.

Here’s some golden nuggets from the article if you don’t want to read through the whole thing.  Feel free to debate these quotes in the comments below.

“Mr. Narayen says that the difference is that Adobe believes in open content. He says that their Creative Suite software was designed to work on multiple devices and that Apple’s “recent behavior shows that they are concerned about Adobe being able” to provide this product that works across multiple platforms.”

“Mr. Narayan says that Adobe has been “true to the position” with which it was founded and to the idea that it should help people deal with multiple operating systems.”

“The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are “really a smokescreen,” Mr. Narayan says.”

“Speaking about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is the No. 1 cause of Mac crashes, Mr. Narayan says if Adobe crashes Apple, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system.”

“Responding to a question about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is a closed platform, Mr. Narayan chuckles. “I find it amusing, honestly. Flash is an open specification,” he says.”

“We have different views of the world,” Mr. Narayan says. “Our view of the world is multi-platform.”

It’s no secret that Apple, Inc. hates buttons. If they could get rid of a button they would. They’ve taken heat over the years for the one button mouse, and now even that’s extinct with the creation of the magic mouse. Add in the removal of a dedicated button on the entire laptop line and you’ve got yourself a full genocide against buttons over at Apple, Inc.

A new patent filed by Apple, Inc. highlights some interesting concepts for next generation device control systems. The patent included “Micro-Perforations” that allow light to form the device control system.

Patently Apple suggests that the new system would work in ways that the current iPhone system doesn’t allow. Notably, the ability to activate the button while wearing a non-conductive glove. The patent also blatantly states that the new technology could completely replace the trackpad available on all portable Mac products.

If you thought Apple products were heavenly to begin with, you may be surprised just how heavenly they’ll look when they’re blasting ambient light at you.

Article Via PatentlyApple

The European Union forced Microsoft to display a “Browser ballot” to all EU citizens in order to avoid an Internet Explorer monopoly. I’m not overly fond of the idea of Microsoft being forced into doing this, but it does have the benefit of informing more people about alternate web browsers. I think we, as Mac users, can take a cue from this.

Every year or so, it is in our best interest to try out a couple of different browsers. For example, I wasn’t a huge fan of Safari when I first switched the the Mac, but when Safari 3 came out, I fell in love. I’ve been a full-time Safari user since then, but I still keep other browsers around.

Stainless is a really neat little browser that uses the same rendering engine as Safari. It started out as a technical demonstration of the multi-process model à la Chrome. Since then, it has become my secondary browser of choice. It launches in a snap, and it allows you to spin off multiple sessions for the same site. This is a showcase of what a small offshoot can accomplish.

Opera doesn’t get enough credit. There has pretty much been an arms race between the WebKit team and the Opera team to see who can make their web browser the most standards compliant the fastest. Mozilla and Internet Explorer are taking a laid-back approach in that regard. I commend the Opera team for aiming for the fences. Let’s not count them out yet, folks.

Firefox, in contrast to Opera, gets way too much credit from the nerd audience. Yes, it did help break away from the reign of IE 6. That was a great thing for us as a community, but there has been stagnation on Mozilla’s part. Firefox has become very bloated and slow in the last few years. It’s not too late to right the ship, but there are more problems than solutions out of the Mozilla camp lately.

To be fair, Firefox is hands-down the most easily customizable browser available today. You can tweak it ten ways to Sunday, but the major problems of performance and standards compliance still remain.

Speaking of overrated, Chrome has all sorts of adoration from the nerds because of the branding effort. One could make a very good case that Google took a very good rendering engine (WebKit), broke it, and then spent the next two years fixing it. We also have the issue of Google treating Mac users like second class citizens. Features have pretty much always launched on Windows first, and then slowly trickled to OS X and Linux. There are too many options out there for me to use a browser from people who think of me as an afterthought.

Whatever browser you choose, just make sure you try out a couple every once in a while. You’ll thank me later.

Photo Credit: indi.ca