Scrivener - Writers Software
So I’ve been trying some new writing tools for the thesis. Possibly a bit late in the game now but I’m still writing other things for various reasons, for example the UKAPU
newsletter editor and I’ve written a few magazine articles for the UK weekly computer magazine Micro Mart and not to mention I’m still writing academic papers.
So when I learnt of Scrivener , I thought I best give it a go. This app promised to be a great tool for those serious about writing so I thought I’d jump in. I won’t cover it in detail, others have mentioned it in other reviews online, I’ll just cover why it’s no good to me.
Impressions
Well I thought it looked good. Until I started playing with it and then quickly realised that it’s severely limited in terms of academic writing.
To write in LaTeX you need to either write it in LaTeX in the editor (and it’s not a great editor for doing that with I can assure you) and export the whole think as a text document or use Multi Markdown and then get that converted to LaTeX. Neither of which are done nicely in Scrivener (it lacks syntax highlighting, code completion etc).
it’s final nail is a lack of referencing software – referencing previous work is a cornerstone of academic research so this oversight is horrendous. It can be got around if you want to export your document to RTF format and use something like Zotero to reference your work (Zotero allows you to insert a reference citation field and then you can scan the compiled RTF document to add the references in).
Lastly, a lack of working Table of Contents system and ability to set headers/footers etc mean that for me, it’s a nice piece of software that goes wide of the mark. Perhaps for novelists it’ll be fine but for academic research, a few glaring omissions make it impractical.
Moneywiz - iOS Personal Finance
Is Moneywiz worth it? I’d say so. There we are, simple answer to a simple question.
However, those that don’t know what Moneywiz is might be scratching their heads at this point. What is it and why is it worth whatever it is?
Intro
Moneywiz is an iPad and iPhone app from Silverwiz . It’s a personal finance app designed to be powerful but yet easy to use. Since I’ve got my iPad (and Mac), I’ve played with various personal finance apps but never found one I liked until now. I’ve clung onto using GNUCash on the Mac until now. I’ve tried a few others, such as YNAB and Money but never found one that was as powerful or as flexible as GNUCash. Which is a shame because lets face it, GNUCash is ugly and at times, cumbersome. Data entry is a faff but to be fair, it gets the job done (yes, some of us still do manual data entry! – Though YNAB recommends this approach (as do I for the same reasons) because it keeps you keeping a closer eye on where you’re monies going.)
However, I thought I’d take a risk for the £2.99 that Moneywiz is on the app store and I’m impressed. Enough to probably say it will be my sole account method next tax year…
First Impressions
First impressions of the app are good. The interface is clearly laid out and responds well in portrait and landscape mode. The picture above shows the design in landscape mode which allows easy access to the Accounts, Budgets, Reports tabs etc. In portrait mode, these are nicely hidden away but easily access as dropdown (is that the correct phrase for the boxes that appear on iOS?) menus to allow you to change.
You’re first asked if you want to setup a syncing account – no dropbox syncing here unfortunately, a feature the developers won’t be adding. I had seen an explanation why somewhere but I cant seem to find it for you now! I believe it was for how the data is stored – as the screenshot above shows, date and times are added to each transaction. I therefore think that to avoid duplication or overwriting of the file, the files are merged, similar in style to using Git or another DVCS and which by having the time makes it a lot harder to duplicate transactions across different devices. (Dropbox would overwrite the file with the new version and if a conflict was detected, a new file would be created.) For those interested in reading about Dropbox and database syncing, the Silverwiz post I saw referred to this article for further reading. Anyhow, needless to say this isn’t to much of an issue as it still works fine and you don’t have to sync if you don’t want to.
Pros
The app is very nicely laid out, adding new transactions is quick and it records your payee’s so if you do a lot of payments to certain payee’s, it makes it much quicker to enter transactions (for example, I start typeing Sainsburys into the payee box and it gives a dropdown list of payees starting with S then Sa then Sai as I type. Selecting it also fills in the description of the transaction as well, which makes it ideal when I’m entering regular grocery shopping).
Accounts can be nested which works extremely well – I’m a fan of nested accounts as it means I can keep track of all car expenses in one main account etc.
As far as the reports go, I’ve not found another iPad app that offers the range and custimisation of reports. I’m able to set months, between two dates, this year, last year and more! It means I can easily keep track of my details as I go. It’s quick to calcualte as well, though this could depend entirely on the number of transactions.
Cons
Whilst Moneywiz is an excellent money tracking tool, it falls a bit short for those that also have shares, stocks or mutual funds (or non-UK equivalents). The available account options are as shown below.
As can be seen, there’s no shares option there. However, I got around this limitation by using Google Finance to check my portfolio. Using this, it gives me the value of each share and my index fund so I just correct my “shares” account with adjustments every time I update it, using the value from Google. Not ideal but it works.
Also, deleting an account deletes all transactions – GNUCash allows you to move them to a new account if you wanted. This might not be an issue for some people but I change bank accounts (normally savings) each year to get the best interest. In GNUCash it wasn’t an issue, I started a new file for each year but I can’t do that in Moneywiz. So I find that I’m unable to remove accounts without deleting it’s entire transaction history. There’s no option to hide accounts from view either (which I wouldn’t mind and could potentially be the best option).
Lastly, the app doesn’t allow exporting of the financial data – QIF and QFX files are able to be imported but currently you can’t export your own. Hopefully this might appear on the Mac app but in the meantime if you need to export the data, you’re stuck with it on the iPad in whatever form Silverwiz use for storing the data.
Overall
Overall Moneywiz is a fantastic app. If you want to use your iPad to track your personal finances, you can’t go wrong with it. For the money, it offers excellent usability and news of the Mac app being released in April is good news for those that use the Mac for finance tracking. It’ll be good to see how the program ports over but if it’s as good as the iPad app, it’ll be a very serious competitor for any of the current Mac apps.
It’s certainly worth looking at and at £2.99 is a bargain.
iPad Experiment
Ok, so I’ve had the iPad for a while now and it’s been a great help to me for work. Just being able to mark up PDF papers (I read a lot of academic papers and the ability to highlight corrections etc in my thesis drafts is fantastic), keep a copy of my notes beside my Macbook screen and be a small, easy to use, portable device I can easily carry around, easier than my MBP is terrific.
This past weekend I visited Leeds and managed to use the iPad as my main method of working/browsing the web/connecting to people and it performed pretty damn well.
However, tomorrow I’m going to try and last the day using only the iPad, based on an article I mentioned earlier last year (I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode ). So tomorrow, I’ll be attmepting to work solely from my iPad. Well, maybe note quite solely, I’ll be using the equipment below.
Equipment
- iPad 2 (16GB wifi model)
- Logitech Tablet Keyboard
- Mac Mini (running at home – connectable via VNC)
- Headphones and iPad Stylus
Based on that equipment, I should be covered for everything I need. I’ll be using iPad native apps where possible – ideally I’d like to minimise the use of the VNC connection as I know that isn’t an option if I don’t have a network connection (either where I am or if my home network craps out!)
Either way, I’ll be posting tomorrow (or Saturday) on how it goes!
Reasons Why I Hate Email
Email is a daily fact of life for most people. Whether it’s just getting the updates from web stores about special deals or swapping files for work, email plays a big part of our lives. And I’ve begun to hate it on the Mac.
This seems like an odd statement and especially as its aimed at just OS X and Apple. Don’t get me wrong, I use email a lot. It’s de facto communication method at work and I use Gmail and iCloud like others but I’ve begun to dread sending emails for a variety of reasons which I’ll discuss.
Formatting
My first bug bear is formatting. Regardless of the email client I use on the Mac, I’ve not nailed this down right yet. It hadn’t been an issue until recently but now it really gets on my nerves. Mail.app seems to have a mind of its own with formatting. I set it to only send plain text emails, because then I can guarantee how it’ll appear in the other persons window (subject to whatever font they use). Simple. Until you start adding attachments and this is where Mail.app appears to go mental. Adding an image will instantly convert your message to HTML. Even if you select to put the file at the end of the message and have windows friendly attachments. Enable the settings to put the image in as an icon only and when sending you get icon sized images in Gmail and Outlook Online (I assume it’s the same in Outlook but I’m not opening it to try… Urgh!) Overall, Mail.app really sucks here.
I been sending HTML emails for years with no issues but would always get annoyed when emails would come back with writing to small to read due to a mess up in settings between different applications and settings. Sparrow seemed to reduce the number of emails I got like this and made it nice and simple to send emails and for a while I used it (until I moved my email to iCloud and then Sparrow initially had problems with it – all sorted now though) but its time had passed – it’s lack of various options annoyed me and it was never clear if I was sending plain text email, no support for mail certificates etc. Mail’s handling of converting any file with an attachment to HTML just made it worse – I never had problems with people reading emails in Outlook but when you viewed the emails in a webmail client, things looked ugly (what’s this ATT00001.htm file that got sent with it?) Things weren’t good so I tried Postbox and then Thunderbird which led to the next few niggles that I didn’t realise I had at the time!
The use of Postbox managed to get me around some of the formatting niggles – it seems to obey my commands in terms of sending text emails with attachments etc. however, it doesn’t seem to also obey my settings in displaying emails sent from others. I can overall this and force all emails to be displayed in plain text only but that’s a bit ugly for newsletters and emails with pictures. Say what you like about Facebook and Twitter but at least the styling is consistent and that your words and images will look the same on their screen as yours, providing they’ve not overwritten the default CSS layout of those sites (so non geeks probably won’t!).
Signatures
Signatures are a basic part of email. But why, oh why, will Mail and Sparrow continue to send them in replies? Often replies can be simple yes/no answer and I don’t want to manually remove an email signature that’s longer than the email body itself! The signature is helpful to those people you’re emailing who might not know your full details. If they’re emailing you, at least they know your email and have a point of contact! Thunderbird and Postbox seem to handle these well and let you turn signatures off in replies but I’ve no idea why Mail and Sparrow can’t do this.
I quite like having random signatures for my personal accounts. Mail manages this, the only app I’ve found that does! I assume Thunderbird might should I find a plugin for it but then I have to hope its a cross platform one.
OS X Integration
Mail and Sparrow manage this fairly well (Sparrow probably better than Mail!) Postbox makes a valiant attempt but Thunderbird falls flat. I know it’s cross platform but so is Postbox and they manage it quite well! I’m on about Growl notifications, contact pictures and contact emails etc etc. The latest version of Mail doesn’t work with the latest Growl (without a plugin) so gets somewhat annoying. Postbox is good but it wouldn’t hurt to display the senders image in the notification, rather than the Postbox icon. Thunderbird is just nasty – doesn’t even show the contact pictures in the app.
Ease of Setup
Sparrow and Mail win out here – incredibly easy to setup. Mail just worked, Sparrow I had to change a few folders for access when accessing an IMAP server but it was straight forward. Postbox and Thunderbird required some considerable effort to send deleted emails to the right trash folder, the right archived messages to the right archive – this being on IMAP, iCloud AND Gmail. Once done, it seems ok but it was just hassle. Sparrow, however is hit from a lack of settings. As a minimal email client, I can see why it does it but it’s a bit of a pain.
Overall
Overall at the minute, I seem to be enjoying using iOS for email! On the iPad the layout is quite nice, the fonts always seem to be the right size, it all seems to work incredibly nicely. iOS even supports S/MIME email certificates which makes it better than Sparrow (which doesn’t). I know certificates aren’t widely supported but I like to use a program that does so that they might become widely known about and used.
At the minute, Postbox has replaced my default email software of Mail. Mail works but it’s such a pain now in terms of formatting that I can’t attempt to use it – I don’t know how my emails are appearing on iOS devices (something I have to consider as my supervisor does a lot of work from his phone).
As far as I’m concerned, there currently isn’t a Mac email software that meets my needs exactly. Sparrow seems to be trying to bring iOS email to OS X but it’s lack of some of the more complex iOS bits means its lacking a bit where I’d like. However, both Sparrow and Postbox seem to be improving so it’ll be good to follow further developments on both.
5 Mac Apps I Can’t Live Without
So for the second part of my 5 items I can’t live without, I’m focussing on Mac applications. I use a Mac at home and at work (I’m lucky – basically I bought my work laptop myself!) so I’ve a fair few apps that I’ve tried for various tasks, both at home and work. However, the best tools will be the ones that are used in both locations.
Alfred
Alfred is one of the most used apps on my Mac. Think of it as a supercharged version of Spotlight. Not only can it sort through your files, folders and web search, with the extra powerpack, you can expand it to run applescripts, shell scripts and hotkeys at will. It’s a fantastically useful tool. I’ve even designed a few extensions for it myself which you can find at my Github page.
The extensions and powerpack really make the tool worthwhile – otherwise it’s a slightly expanded Spotlight.
Total Finder
Total Finder is a plugin for Finder that lets you have a tabbed interface. When I first discovered this, I didn’t think it would be worthwhile but after testing for a while, I realised it made far more sense and worked very well. In fact, I miss it a lot if I have to use Windows for any length of time now (and Total Commander that it’s based on isn’t as good as this) It allows you to use one Finder window for two folders, ideal for comparing two folders of work or if you’re moving files around. Simple, unobtrusive and incredibly helpful.
TextExpander
TextExpander is a program that expands small text snippets into either full sentences, runs Applescripts or more. It’s incredibly handy to be able to type a small abbreviation and have it insert a full sentence for you. I use if for all sorts – I have it able to convert a few three letter acronyms into my email addresses for me (which are case sensitive), I use it to insert LaTeX code automatically (in a restricted number of programs – i.e. only those programs I use for LaTeX coding) and I use it for inserting dates from a simple two letter abbreviation using an Applescript. Other features mean you can have it expand a text clip and ask for an input as well (I use this in my Markdown codign for example, where I have a tag to insert a HTML centre tag pair but a pop up box asks me what I want to go between the start and end tags – saving me editing the expanded snippet when I’ve input it)
It’s incredibly powerful and get used daily. In fact, you can see how well it’s doing for me from the in built statistics it records.
As you can see, it’s saved a fair bit of time so far (that’s since I bought it last month!). It also syncs with Dropbox and can be used on the iPhone and iPad with the iOS version of TextExpander (on that, I use a mixture of the new iOS text replacement (as that works everywhere on the phone) and TexTExpaner for apps that have TextExpaander support).
Divvy
Divvy is a window management software that lets you move and rearrange your windows with hotkeys or via a pop up menu and grid. It’s fantastic for setting windows to use half the screen left and right so you can have two windows next to each other (better on larger screens like my 25” monitor at home) but is also helpful for making apps screen full screen (on my 13” MBP). Again, it sits out the way until it’s needed and does what it’s supposed to do and does it well.
Tracks
Tracks is a primarily an iTunes search program that sits in the menu bar and lets you search your iTunes library. However, the reason I paid the (small) program cost is that the software gives Growl desktop notifications of what’s playing in iTunes and scrobbles all played tracks to Last.fm. As an avid Last.fm, that was great news as it means I didn’t have to use the blaoted and annoying Last.fm software to do so! Whilst the Last.fm software also did Growl notifications, it annoyed me it didn’t have album art in them, which Tracks does show – it’s a small point but something I wanted.
Summary
So there we have it, a list of my daily used bits of software that cover a broad range of my day to day workflow. I think there are a few others I feel I could have added here but I’ll briefly mention them below – I don’t think I use them on a day to day basis to warrant their inclusion above but they’re worthy of a mention.
- Type2Phone – It bugged me there wasn’t an app that let me send texts from my iPhone via my PC (Android has them and my old Motorola managed to do it). This fantastic app lets me use my computer as a bluetooth keyboard for the phone, letting me send texts quickly whilst I’m at my desk!
- myTumblr – A fantastic Tumblr client for the Mac that lets me type up posts in Markdown and send them to Tumblr without an issue. Cheaper than MarsEdit as well!
Blown Away by OS X Again
So the Mac has managed to blow me away again today, almost as much as when I first started using it, about this time last year. How you might ask?
Well I found out today that you can create custom keyboard shortcuts.
As a self confessed keyboard lover (I love shortcuts and desktop launchers, like Alfred ), I really missed some of the keyboard shortcuts in Mail that others such as Sparrow and Postbox have, such as the ⌘ + Enter shortcut key to send email. This was a complete pain to me (turns out the default Mail one is Shift + ⌘ + D which to me doesn’t seem right). Anyhow, it appears that with Mac, you can create shortcut keys for any application or remap them to whatever you want!
It’s all done in System Preferences, using the Keyboard option. On opening, select the Keyboard Shortcuts option and select Application Shortcuts. Clicking the + sign lets you choose what you want to add as shown below.
This lets you add whatever you want just by putting in the name of the menu item you want to change/add a shortcut for, so I added the ⌘ + Enter key that I wanted and when I restarted Mail.app, it was there ready for me to use (it looks like if the application was running, the application needs to be restarted for it to be picked up properly).
The fact that you can do this for any app blows me away somewhat – I don’t think Windows has anything like this (or at least, not so eaisly accessed and changed) which means that this is another of those features that Mac has that make it better for the user than Windows!
iTunes Match
So I took the plunge this week and purchased iTunes Match. After using it for a bit, I thought I’d make a quick post about it.
Background
iTunes Match is a cloud based music system built into iTunes and iOS devices that allow you to upload your music to iTunes servers and lets you download it to up to 10 iOS and OS X devices. It’s primarily a music storage service, rather than a streaming service like Spotify as when you listen to the song on an iOS device, it downloads the music to the device, whilst playing it as it downloads (streaming would then wipe it from the device to clear space, this doesn’t). It also only lets you access music you already own, not letting you stream different music from a catalogue, so it’s useful for those with an already large library. In the UK, the services costs £21.99 a year and you get unlimited use over that period. Note, iTunes automatically sets itself up as recurring, yearly, payment.
How it works
As mentioned above, it only works with music you already own and have in your iTunes library. If you don’t use iTunes, iTunes Match isn’t for you. When you sign up, iTunes match analyses your library and matches all the songs you own to those in iTunes database. These songs are then instantly “uploaded” to your account (in theory, they’re already in the cloud, iTunes just let your AppleID access them). Those tracks that aren’t in the iTunes library (I have some obscure Russian rock in my collection for example…), iTunes then uploads them to it’s servers to allow you download them to your other devices.
Overall, the system is fairly quick – I did have to leave it going over night but then with 7,532 songs to analyse, it’ll take a while. iTunes managed to find ~5,000 of my songs in it’s database so I did have to upload 2,000 but it seemed to go quite quickly and when I woke, it was all complete. Enabling Match on my iPad was a simple case of enabling it in the Settings > Music. It then deletes all music off the device and lets you see all the stored music in the cloud (though you can set the device to only display local songs if you don’t want to browse your entire library all the time).
Advantages
I must admit, the main reason for me upgrading to Match was not the fact I could have instant access to my music wherever I was (though it’s nice to see the iPad being even less reliant on syncing with a PC) but the fact I now have a cloud backup of my music. If I delete it off my hard drive or I have a hard drive failure, I load up iTunes and redownload. Boom. Simple. And for £22 a year (for upto 25,000 non iTunes songs!) It sort of blows the cloud backup services out of the water (in terms of pricing and ease of use.) Considering I was only paying for backup space to backup my music, it no longer makes sense for me to keep paying for a cloud backup solution for my media files.
Another benefit it that some of music is 192kbps MP3 (or less) files. iTunes lets you download the better sounding 256kbps versions to replace them. Macworld have a fantastic guide on how to accomplish that here . It may take me some time though as iTunes finds over 4,000 songs under 256kbps! This does replace your MP3 files with Apple .aac files. However, these are DRM free and should play in most desktop players and non Apple portable music players, even if you decide to not continue with iTunes match next year.
Disadvantages
Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to iTunes Match – the big one I’ve found is that some songs wont upload because they’re under 96kbps which is what iTunes limit to be uploaded to it’s servers. I think the most annoying thing about this is that some albums I have are VBR encodings and one or two tracks won’t upload from that album. However, according to my install, I have 35 songs that either aren’t eligible or there are errors uploading to iCloud in some way (it turns out the main reason for this was that the files were no longer on my computer but iTunes hadn’t detected them as missing). I found this by creating a smart playlist using the criteria in the image below.
That’s less than 1% of my songs so I must admit, I’m pretty impressed overall. And to be fair, most of the songs that are below the threshold bitrate are songs I’ve ripped from Youtube videos (or acquired from disreputable means, which thanks to an eMusic subscription, no longer occurs) in the past so it’s a good way for me to either delete them or go back and purchase the songs.
For those that use non Apple phones or tablets, you’re out of luck – you can’t use iCloud on it (though if you use iTunes on different computers, you can use it in iTunes). This obviously restricts the users to those of Apple’s products but this is a very much a business move that Apple are used to taking so should come as no surprise.
Overall
Overall, the iTunes Match experience is pretty damn good. The ease at which it searches through your library and finds the tracks you already have and then matches these to the iTunes catalogue is amazing. As I said, the amount of songs I have which were picked up was staggering – a 99.5% success rate. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a resounding success.
I know it’s not marketed as a music backup service (as Apple reserve the right to remove any items from the iTunes store at any time), but it it makes a really cheap service that’ll allow you to redownload your music, should a disaster occur and your hard drive die/wiped/eaten.
If you are fully entrenched in the Apple eco system (like I am), then the £22 for the year is an easy choice to make – it’s reduced my offsite backup cost by 50% this year as I no longer have to spend so much on space for my music collection – I’m trusting it to Apple’s servers and my ability to store it on a portable drive at work. The ability to change the tracks on my iPad without being near my PC is also a good point (as you can now delete tracks from iPod and iPads in iOS 5). £22 for these benefits, to me is a price worth paying. And don’t forget, I can update those old sounding tracks upto the newer, better 256kbps tracks. Which is worth £22 alone!
Transferring Preview Signatures
An excellent guide on how to move the encrypted signatures from one Mac to another. Just came in useful. Thanks to the author!
5 Online Services I Cant Live Without
Those that are members of UKAPU will know that one of newsletters monthly articles is a 5 Items You Cant Airsoft Without. I thought I’d add a similar feature to my site.
I toyed with what software but decided to make the first one an article on online services I cant live without. So without further ado, I give you my list of services in no particular order. You might be able to argue that some of these are software services as well, which may well be the case but I’ll class them as online services here!
So everyone should have heard of the excellent Dropbox service by now (if not, have you been hiding under a rock?!).
Dropbox is an excellent, simple syncing tool and it just works. No hassle, no problems. In all the time I’ve been using it (probably nigh on over a year), I’ve not had an issue. Conflict with syncing files? It creates a conflicted copy and tells you and lets you choose the conflict. No internet connection? No problem, Dropbox will reconnect when it can and upload the work.
Built into a lot of mobile applications (such as the excellent Writing Kit and Day One now as well, mean that’s it’s use is firmly set in my daily work flow.
I’ve briefly paid for a 50GB account but currently I’ve dropped down to the free account. The price is worth it but at the minute, my referrals and extra space mean I have an account that is currently 8GB and I don’t need to sync my music so much that I’m willing to pay (though if they brought in a smaller service or started charging for the space I’m currently using, I’d happily pay as the software is invaluable)
Spideroak is another online hosting/syncing/backup service (well, mainly backup when compared to Dropbox). Initially I tried to run one service or the other but came to the conclusion that I couldn’t. Why? Various reasons.
- Dropbox is primarily syncing – it does it well. However, to keep changes to files for more than 30 days, you need to pay extra. Spideroak does that in it’s price.
- Spideroak’s syncing is a bit hit and miss. It’s difficult to see what has finished syncing and stay on top of what’s been uploaded etc.
- Spideroak gives a lot more space for the money, double what Dropbox offers.
So after trialling Dropbox and Spideroak together, I came to the conclusion that I’d use Spideroak for the excellent and cheap offsite backup – I backup all my documents and my music, as well as some odds and ends, such as my eBooks that I purchase from the Black Library and my GPS tracks recorded when cycling and running.
The lack of being built into mobile applications isn’t really a concern thanks to Dropbox but it’s nice to know that this is constantly updating my offsite backup of my files. Teamed with Dropbox, I’ve got a tool that will sync all my important documents to all my devices and then back them up to the cloud safely.
Evernote is a note taking program. Any notes added to it are synced to the Evernote servers and then to all your devices, be it PC, Mac or phone so you can have access to the notes anywhere, anytime. You can also add images, files and other items to it (if you have a premium account) and can store items for offline use on your phone.
Very quickly I paid for a premium subscription to this. $5 a month is a small price for the indexing, searching mind space that is Evernote. Dropping a thought into Evernote means I can pick it up at a later date and time. It’s a massive help to my PhD and all my notes are stored within it on the papers I’ve read, my thesis plans and ideas and my research notes. Extremely helpful.
iCloud is a new addition to the list and replaces the Google services. As a Mac user, with iPhone, it made sense to move to Apple’s offering, rather than Googles, especially as the new Google themes and updates have basically killed the service for me (the new theme is utter terrible and trying to use Google Reader without the use of desktop software like Reeder is a painful process). As such, it seemed to easy to move over to iCloud.
Since doing so, I’ve had no issues (other than my documented attempt to try and use Sparrow with iCloud here which is still occurring). Being able to sync all my calendars, contacts, reminders, bookmarks and emails to all my devices is a great help and fits nicely into my workflow.
I’ve yet to pay for the service as the current 5GB seems plenty for my current use (I don’t use photostream or the Pages/Numbers/Keynote storage).
Last.fm may seem like an odd one but over the past year, it’s been a fantastic source of insightful information on the music I listen to (I guess I like VNV Nation a lot!! ) and for finding new music based on what music I already like.
This ability to find more of what I’m interested in is great and the ability to listen to a radio station based on similar artists to what I’ve already scrobbled is great for times I don’t have access to my music but do have access to my Last.fm account.
That rounds up the 5 best online services I cant live without. However, there are a few that probably deserve a mention here that didn’t make the top 5 for some reason.
Imgur
This service is a great phot sharing service. I spent ages considering how I could spend money on some hosting to get a Imgur style site for personal use and decided I’d just pay the Imgur hosting price for the benefits it gives me as it’s so easy to use that I couldn’t replicate it elsewhere. It’s how I host images for this blog!
Tumblr
The host for this blog, Tumblr has been an excellent online service, allowing me to write this drivel and share images of cats. The ease of customisation and the ability to add your own domain name for free is a nice touch. Thanks Tumblr and keep up the awesome work!
Wordpress
Ok, so a competitor to Tumblr that I left for this site. However, it’s main use to me now is that Wordpress acts as my OpenID identifying service. Which I use on a fair few sites (normally, all that allow OpenID!) so I have to give a shout out for that.
So there we go, my top 5 online services. Hopefully that’s given people an idea of what’s out there and of the different services.
