Apps I Use: Pocket

(This is part 2 of my ‘Apps I Use’ series. Click here to see part 1 and read about Budgt.)

Pocket: Read Later, Read Better

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly relying on my phone as my first source for news. Sure, I still glance over an analog newspaper now and then, and sometimes I read news on my laptop, but I consume the majority of my news on my phone via apps like Pulse and Flipboard (which I will review later on in this series).

I do a great deal of my news reading in short bursts—during quiet moments at work, commercial breaks when Mad Men is on, or other brief spare moments. Because of the limited time I allot myself to read the news, much of my ‘reading’ is actually browsing. If I actually open an article, I usually just skim it for the relevant points rather than reading every word. Sometimes, though, I’ll stumble across an article that I want to read completely but that is too long to fit into one of my little news breaks. Enter Pocket.

Pocket is a great little app that simplifies your online reading experience by allowing you to save articles and pages to read later. It’s basically like DVR for online reading. The best part about Pocket? It integrates with all of the apps you already use. Twitter, Reeder, Flipboard, Pulse, and over 300 more—and you can even email things to Pocket or save things from your mobile browser. It’s so simple. With one touch, you can save an article. No more emailing yourself or favoriting tweets just to remember the links. No more trying to remember in which app you saved which article. Pocket makes everything easier by compiling the articles and pages you want to save in one convenient place.

Pocket - Main Screen

When you’ve got some extra time and you’re ready to read some of the articles you saved, just open up Pocket and start reading. Pocket syncs across devices, so you can read from your phone, iPad, laptop, or e-reader. If you choose to read from your laptop’s browser, clicking on one of the articles will send you to the original link. If you read on the mobile app, Pocket strips out the original styling of the article and presents the content in a simple, text-focused design. This is really handy on small mobile devices like the iPhone where styling often works against legibility (there is an option to view articles in their original format, but I never use it).

Pocket - Article

Pocket even gives you some basic choices in terms of styling. You can set your preferences for font size, serif, screen brightness, and display color, but I haven’t touched those options. Pocket’s defaults work just fine for me.

Pocket - Style Options

When you’ve read an article, you can either tap the trashcan to delete it or tap the check mark to archive it. Deleting an article removes it from Pocket completely; archiving it removes it from the main feed but saves a copy in the archive in case you want to view it again later. If you really want to get crazy, there are also options to favorite, tag, and share articles.

Pocket - Folders

Pocket is particularly useful for saving longer feature articles, like those you might find in The New Yorker or Longreads, but it also works well for saving web pages, videos, and photos. Pocket does have competitors—Instapaper, for example—but I have not used them, so I cannot speak to how Pocket’s features rate in comparison. But I do know of one area in which Pocket wins unequivocally: price. Pocket is free, while Instapaper will set you back a hefty $3.99. I don’t know about you, but I’m not big on spending money on apps if I can find a similar app for free.

Overall, Pocket is a great app. I’m definitely a fan. Come to think of it, I can’t think of one complaint. The app does what I want it to do in an efficient and beautiful manner. Who could ask for more? I’d recommend it to anyone who does a lot of online reading, especially if they regularly use one or more of the 300+ apps with which Pocket is integrated. Give it a shot. You’ll love it.

 

Apps I Use: Budgt

I’ve owned my iPhone for about a year and a half, so I’ve had quite a bit of time to download and experiment with many different apps. I’ve finally settled on a core few that I use regularly, and I thought it might be nice to share my thoughts about them with you. So, without further ado, I present to you my new series: Apps I Use.

Budgt: A Simple, Well-Designed Spending Tracker

I spent a lot of time looking for a decent money tracking app. I wanted something that would allow me to track my income and expenses on a monthly basis, and I wanted it to be simple and user-friendly. I’m not big into apps that are busting at the seams with features. I just want an app to do what I need it to do as simply and efficiently as possible—preferably in a visually pleasing manner. Because I currently live with my parents who generously don’t charge me rent (yeah, yeah, cue jokes here), I don’t have a lot of monthly expenses, but I wanted to be able to see a breakdown of where I was spending my money.

I did some googling and read a bunch of reviews, and all signs pointed toward Mint. So I downloaded it, but soon discovered that because I bank at a small local credit union, I couldn’t set up my banking information. So that was a bust. Next, I tried using Lemon for a while but never quite got into it. It seemed unfocused, overly-complicated, and poorly designed. Then I found Toshl, which I used quite happily for a while before it started crashing every time I opened it.

Finally, I found Budgt. I don’t remember the sequence of events that led me to this lovely little app, probably some suggestion on Twitter or recommendation by the App Store, but I’m glad I found it. It’s lightweight, simple, extraordinarily user-friendly, and beautiful. Let’s take a look.

You start off by setting up your monthly budget, which is organized into income and expenses. You can set items to either be recurring or one-time-only. As you can see, I’ve entered my monthly bills as recurring (indicated by the circular arrow). Because I am paid on an hourly basis and my paychecks vary from week to week, entering a recurring item for my income wouldn’t make sense, so I enter my income as one-time-only items when I receive my paycheck (which I have not yet done for the month of May).

Budgt Budget

Once your budget is set up, all you have to do is enter your daily expenses and Budgt will do the rest. It divides your budget by the number of days in the month and shows you how much money you can spend that day. When you enter an expense, you have the option to tag it in predetermined categories such as ‘Food’ or ‘Clothes,’ or you can also make your own categories. If you forget to add an expense on the day you incur it, you can simply use the calender to go to the correct day and enter the expense.*

Budgt Day

Budgt also has a handy month view that allows you to see how much you’ve spent so far this month, how much you have left, and also what you’ve spent it on.

Budgt Month

Budgt Month Categories

And that’s it really. There are more options in the settings menu that allow you to export CSV files or set reminders. And Budgt also had a travel mode that converts currencies and a month overflow option that adds or subtracts your leftover money from the previous month into the next month’s budget, but I have not used either of these options, so I cannot really speak to them.

Overall, Budgt is a great little spending tracker app. I would recommend it to anyone who has relatively uncomplicated finances (few monthly expenses) but wants to keep track of where she’s spending her money.

*My one qualm with Budgt is that you cannot go back to the previous month to add forgotten expenses. Your editing capabilities end at midnight on the last night of the month. When I figured this out, I was mildly annoyed, so I actually sent in some feedback requesting that they change it to allow previous months to be editable. A couple of hours later, I received a lengthy note from one of the app developers explaining exactly why they don’t allow this (it has something to do with the way the app calculates the budget; the math would get screwed up if they made previous months editable). I was amazed that he’d taken the time to respond to me. It made me love the app just a little bit more.

I Haven’t Forgotten About This Blog

As the title of this post indicates, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. I’ve been focusing my energies on another (secret) writing-based web project for the past month or so and have not had time to write here. I’m pretty excited about this new venture; I think it has the potential to turn into something very neat. But I can’t share it with you yet. Having just launched on April 1, my co-author and I would like the site to get its sea legs before we present it to the masses to read and destroy.

I’m still figuring out the difference between this blog and that project. They are rather similar, so I need to decide what content is appropriate for which site. I will probably be writing more on the other site for now, simply because (a) my co-author is expecting me to and (b) the nature of that project demands regular attention. That being said, I haven’t given up on this blog yet. I just need to let the other project grow a little bit before I can determine what I want to write about on this here blog.

In the meantime, keep an eye out on this blog and/or my portfolio for an announcement about the secret project sometime later this spring.

P.S.- Want to know what else I’ve been up to recently? I just added a new project to my portfolio: a reel of my favorite clips from my trip to Africa. Check it out.

The Impostor

I have a love/hate relationship with Netflix. Most of the time, I hate it. Half of its recommendations for me are are things completely unrelated to my interests and the other half are programs I have already watched. Whenever I am looking for a specific movie, Netflix inevitably does not have it available to stream online. But sometimes, sometimes Netflix pulls through for me. In those rare moments when it succeeds, I forget all the hate, the pain, the frustration, the monthly question of ‘why do I give my hard earned money to this stupid service,’ and I realize that Netflix can be a beautiful thing. In those rare moments, I love Netflix.

About a year ago, I read an article about a film called The Impostor, a documentary about a twenty-something Frenchman who duped a Texas family into believing he was their long-lost son, Nicolas, who had vanished without a trace when he was thirteen. The film was a smash at Sundance, not only for the fascinating true story it told but also for its beautifully photographed reenactments and masterfully woven narrative that reads more like a film noir than a documentary. I looked around for the film on Netflix and other places around the Internet but couldn’t find it. It was a small independent release, so my hopes of finding it in an Omaha theater or video store were slim. I wrote it down on my ever-expanding list of films to watch and resigned myself to the fact that I’d probably never find it.

Then, yesterday, I stumbled across this article on Flipboard and saw that The Impostor was available to stream on Netflix. So I watched it. And even though I already knew the story, watching it unfold was something else. There is something eerily magnetic about the interviews with Frédéric Bourdin, the impostor, who is at times incredulous that his act succeeded so well for so long and at times almost gleeful at the memory of it. It is fascinating to hear the thought process behind his longest and most successful con. However, the man is a serial impostor and a compulsive liar, so you can’t help but wonder if he is telling the truth or if the whole documentary is another one of his cons. Did he really get swept up by a series of small lies that snowballed into something larger than himself? Was it really all just a whim that got out of control? Or was it an elaborate plan?

The more I think about it, the more amazed I am at the questions raised by the film about the nature of truth and reality. How could a family misidentify their own son? How many of our actions are justified by our desire to see what we want to see? Do we shape our reality to fit our own ideas of the truth? Can we trust our own beliefs about reality? What is real? What is the truth? Can you trust a liar to tell the truth? Can you trust a liar to lie? Can you trust a liar?

Life truly is stranger than fiction.

(Netflix, I take back all the bad things I said about you. We can be friends again. But if you screw up one more time, I swear, I will think very hard about cancelling my subscription. I will. I will think about it. Very hard.)

What Isn’t There

You may have noticed that this blog does not feature many of the trappings of modern blog design. There’s no sidebar, no archive lists, no comments, no share buttons, no tags, no ads. The post design is uncluttered, featuring simply a title, a date, and the body of the post. Color is used sparingly. Categories do exist, but they are tucked away on individual post pages. Why, you ask? Why ignore so many of the traditional elements of blog design? Well, I didn’t ignore them. I deliberately chose not to include them. Everything about this blog – the things that are there and the things that are not – was a deliberate choice.

Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by clutter in every aspect of my life. I was frustrated by the clutter in my closet, so I inventoried it, cleaned it out, and gave a bunch of clothes away. I was frustrated by the clutter on my bookshelf, so I assessed my collection and got rid of two shelves worth of books and notebooks. I cleaned out my desk and my bulletin board and my other bookshelf. I labeled and organized and inventoried my inbox. I had some posters and photographs on my wall that I had taped up, not because I particularly liked them, but simply because I had them and putting up posters on blank walls is a thing people do. I took them down. I’ve always been a meticulously organized person, so to an outside eye, my room probably doesn’t look much different. But to me, it feels much lighter. And I don’t miss anything I gave or threw away.

The problem with clutter is that it is a burden. Clutter represents failure. It signifies everything you have not done. “I’ll read that book someday.” “I’ll make that recipe someday.” “That dress still fits; I’ll wear it again someday.” Someday, someday, someday. Even if you don’t actively think about clutter, it’s there in the back of your closet, the drawers of your desk, the bottom of your bag – little reminders of your failure to read more, cook more, be more fashionable, more intelligent, more connected and well-rounded and healthy and educated, etc. etc. etc.

This is true for physical clutter as well as digital and design clutter. Had I included comments on this blog, they would have been un- or underused, serving only as a reminder of my lack of audience. The same goes for share buttons, which likely would have lain unclicked. A monthly archive would have been a symbol of my failure to write regularly, a category archive a sign of my failure to write widely. Why subject myself to such burdens? Was the weight of these features/failures a necessary evil in my quest to create a successful blog?

To answer these questions, I first had to define ‘successful blog.’ What is success? Is a certain number of posts per week? Is it a large consistent readership? Is it a certain average number of likes, favorites, and shares? Is it a thoughtful, engaged comment section? Is it a certain amount of money earned from ad deals and sponsorships? Is it writing a post that goes viral? Is it fame? I think a successful blog could have many of these things or none of them. Perhaps the more pertinent question that I needed to ask myself was this: what do I want to accomplish with my blog?

In thinking about this question, I decided that my primary goal for this blog is to get myself to write. Just write. About anything. With thoughtfulness, care, and some regularity. I have always enjoyed writing because, for me, I do my best thinking when I am writing. Since graduating from college a little over a year ago, I have written less – and thus, thought less – than ever before. I miss writing essays. I miss critical thinking. I miss reading (by which I mean ‘reading’ as defined by an English major, more to do with thinking than consuming). Internet culture is obsessed with consumption. Content creation is king. Virality is the measure of success. But I’m not interested in creating content to be consumed. I’m not interested in getting a bunch of likes or going viral. I’m not interested in audience. I’m interested in writing and thinking about the things that interest me. Sure, at some point, I’d love to have an engaged audience – who wouldn’t? – but right now my primary goal is simply to write.

So yes. I do not have a sidebar or a comments section or archives or share buttons. I deliberately stripped them away to allow myself (and my nonexistent readership) to focus on the most important aspect of this blog: the writing and the thinking behind it. Design is about choices. It’s about deliberateness. It’s about defining what is important, figuring out how to make it work more efficiently, and eliminating the rest. The same goes for other art forms as well. Writing, music, film, painting, and photography are as much about editing as they are about creating. Art is as much about what you choose not to include as it is about what you do include. Knowing what and when to cut is the most difficult part of any art creation, but it is also the most rewarding because it forces you to dig to the heart of things and recognize what is most important. And for me, right now, here on this blog, that is quite simply, to write.