Five things I recommend and one I don't
I am on holidays on the NSW north coast with many other lovely fangirls. I've also very cleverly gotten horribly sick for three days and then, after finally getting over that, breaking my toe this morning. So I'm sitting on the couch with my foot elevated and iced, and trying to get some long overdue LJ posts written.
Post the first: things I keep meaning to recommend and never get around to it.
OmmWriter
I'm writing this in OmmWriter. This is what my screen looks like:
It's a full screen text editor where there's nothing on the screen but your words.
Some other text editors have a full screen mode, but OmmWriter exists only in full screen, and creates a much nicer experience than any other full screen editor I've tried. It has a few different options for the visual look, all of which are very zen. It also has options for different sounds like wind chimes and waves, which I found a really nice addition once I got used to them. The user interface is quite confusing, but the fact is, you hardly ever use the interface. You open your file, you set your look and your sounds, and then it's just you and your words. It's very lovely and very effective.
If you want to do anything fancy at all, you can't do it in OmmWriter. But the thing that matters most - concentrating on words - is what it excels at.
f.lux
f.lux is a Mac OS X utility which helps you balance your love for using your shiny glowing electronic devices late into the night, and their habit of fucking up your sleep patterns and reducing your quality of sleep. It dims your screen gently as it gets later into the night, and removes the alertness-inducing blue light from the display. It's a set-and-forget app; very unobtrusive. For me, it makes enough difference that I get very sleepy at my proper bedtime even if I'm on the computer, and am more likely to put the computer down and go to sleep instead of staying up too late and messing up my sleep patterns. If you are wanting to improve your sleep in any way, I really recommend trying Flux. (It also has a very useful "disable for an hour" function for when you really need to get something done late at night.)
Socialite
If, like me, you are rather half-assed about your social media, you might like Socialite. You might also like Socialite if you are a full-on about your social media, but I'm not the person who could tell you that.
Socialite is a social media aggregator. It puts all your social media in one app (OS X). I use it for Facebook and Twitter. It also does lots of other things I am too out of touch to care about. It works as reader, but it is designed so that you can post as well as read, and retweet and like or whatever else it is the young kids do these days. It's a bit clunky at times, but it saves me having to go to different sites or apps for that stuff. Basically, Socialite saves me from ignoring social media altogether.
Caveat: the Facebook API is really crappy, so when you use Socialite (and anything else that depends on the API), you don't see everything you would if you went to their standard site. Or possibly I just don't understand Facebook well enough to get it to work properly, but that's another story.
Diagrammix
Diagrammix is an OS X app for drawing diagrams.
Here's the thing. In my experience, when you're drawing a diagram, you're trying to clearly communicate something that is both fairly important and fairly complicated. That's the reason you bust out the diagram. If it wasn't those things, you wouldn't bother with a diagram.
And most diagram tools, in my experience, suck for communicating those things. Visio is too bloody complicated and produces ugly diagrams by default, which means it's a tedious amount of work to create something that is an effective piece of visual communication. Photoshop can make things pretty and readable, but it is not easy to work with when you're trying to map the relationships inherent in something complicated. The latest Microsoft Word actually produces very nice, clear, readable diagrams, but it falls down as soon as you're out of basic hierarchical or linear relationships. And OmniGraffle… sigh. I have never been able to understand it well enough to produce anything worthwhile. To me it's just another Visio but work didn't pay me to learn it.
Diagrammix hits the sweet spot for diagrams. You can learn it in five minutes. The diagrams are clear and readable, and they have an optional "sketchy" style which is perfect for many of the communication tasks you most need a diagram for.
You can easily work with it to design and rearrange the objects and relationships you're trying to communicate. It's got a few advanced diagramming features and you can fine-tune stuff if you want to. It's no Visio in terms of complexity and underlying smarts, but to me it genuinely helps with the job of clearly communicating things that are both fairly important and fairly complicated. That's what I want.
ING Direct (the Australian version, anyway)
Banks have such a bad reputation, and as far as I'm concerned it's wholly fucking deserved, but I've been a customer of ING Direct for several years now, and it's surprising how happy I am about that. As a bank it definitely isn't for everybody, but I think it's awesome.
It exists almost entirely online - they have no branches and no ATMs of their own. You can do some branch-type functionality, like deposit cheques, at Australia Post. EFTPOS is free and if you withdraw $200 or more at any ATM, they refund the ATM fee. There's almost no fees for anything, and when they do charge (e.g. for international transactions) it's quite reasonable. They have very limited offerings for personal banking: the Orange Everyday, which is a Visa debit card, and the Savings Maximiser, which has no card at all, and you have to move money electronically to another account if you want to access it. I have two Everyday accounts and four savings accounts.
The thing that works for me is that it's simple and straightforward. You know what you're getting, and you get it. I remember shopping around when I switched banks a few years ago, and the reason I went with ING was because I could read and understand their terms and conditions in two minutes. Other banks had offerings that sounded good on the surface, but there were so many confusing conditions and so much fine print that I ended up veering away. I was like, I can't for the life of me tell how these accounts are going to screw me, but I can tell I'm going to get screwed.
One of the coolest features of their online banking is that you can name your accounts whatever you want, which means I can name my savings accounts for exactly their purpose - "Bills stash", "NY spending", "Tax bill paranoia". This is way more helpful than I would have expected. It means that if I want to take money out of a savings account, I know exactly what financial purpose I am taking that money from - I am literally taking it from my bills stash or my holiday spending money. I also really like that you can instantly create a new savings account online, which I've occasionally done over the years. It's been really handy when I've had too many different things I'm trying to simultaneously put away money for, and I'm losing track of how much I've saved for each. Now that I have four, when I don't need one for something any more, I just rename the account to whatever the next thing is I have to put money aside for. It's fucking awesome.
The minimum $200 withdrawal thing can be a pain, especially close to payday when there just ain't $200 to take out, but it's not nearly as inconvenient as I would have guessed. Recently I did get another transaction account at another bank, because I suspected that taking out money in $200 blocks was making me spend more than I otherwise would have, but I abandoned that in under a week. It was a real shock going back to normal banking, where you have to specifically use that bank's ATMs or else pay a fee. With ING, I got very accustomed to taking out money wherever I wanted and not caring about fees, and I can't go back from that. I also got surprisingly annoyed by the inability to name the other bank's account for what I was using it for. I also recently got a credit card at yet another bank, and I am just horrified at how primitive their online services are, and how many things you can be charged fees for.
Both of these banks had great customer service (Suncorp and Bendigo, for the record), but I got very rapidly driven up the wall by both - death by a thousand banky paper cuts. I think ING is a bit like Apple in that their offerings drop features that you would assume are important (CD/DVD drives, Flash, branches, ATMS *g*) in favour of simplifying the overall experience and really optimising a few things that really matter to your experience over the long term.
My main gripe about ING is that their iPhone app is a bit limited and can be slow and flaky, but that's definitely not something serious enough to make me consider another bank.
Finally, a very quick and heartfelt anti-rec: just say no to Vodafone. For the love of all that is holy, just say no. I went there last year, and then I spent two months and a complaint to the telecommunications ombudsman getting out of there. And then my sister did the same thing. Just don't do it, mmkay?
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth (
comments).
Post the first: things I keep meaning to recommend and never get around to it.
OmmWriter
I'm writing this in OmmWriter. This is what my screen looks like:
It's a full screen text editor where there's nothing on the screen but your words.
Some other text editors have a full screen mode, but OmmWriter exists only in full screen, and creates a much nicer experience than any other full screen editor I've tried. It has a few different options for the visual look, all of which are very zen. It also has options for different sounds like wind chimes and waves, which I found a really nice addition once I got used to them. The user interface is quite confusing, but the fact is, you hardly ever use the interface. You open your file, you set your look and your sounds, and then it's just you and your words. It's very lovely and very effective.
If you want to do anything fancy at all, you can't do it in OmmWriter. But the thing that matters most - concentrating on words - is what it excels at.
f.lux
f.lux is a Mac OS X utility which helps you balance your love for using your shiny glowing electronic devices late into the night, and their habit of fucking up your sleep patterns and reducing your quality of sleep. It dims your screen gently as it gets later into the night, and removes the alertness-inducing blue light from the display. It's a set-and-forget app; very unobtrusive. For me, it makes enough difference that I get very sleepy at my proper bedtime even if I'm on the computer, and am more likely to put the computer down and go to sleep instead of staying up too late and messing up my sleep patterns. If you are wanting to improve your sleep in any way, I really recommend trying Flux. (It also has a very useful "disable for an hour" function for when you really need to get something done late at night.)
Socialite
If, like me, you are rather half-assed about your social media, you might like Socialite. You might also like Socialite if you are a full-on about your social media, but I'm not the person who could tell you that.
Socialite is a social media aggregator. It puts all your social media in one app (OS X). I use it for Facebook and Twitter. It also does lots of other things I am too out of touch to care about. It works as reader, but it is designed so that you can post as well as read, and retweet and like or whatever else it is the young kids do these days. It's a bit clunky at times, but it saves me having to go to different sites or apps for that stuff. Basically, Socialite saves me from ignoring social media altogether.
Caveat: the Facebook API is really crappy, so when you use Socialite (and anything else that depends on the API), you don't see everything you would if you went to their standard site. Or possibly I just don't understand Facebook well enough to get it to work properly, but that's another story.
Diagrammix
Diagrammix is an OS X app for drawing diagrams.
Here's the thing. In my experience, when you're drawing a diagram, you're trying to clearly communicate something that is both fairly important and fairly complicated. That's the reason you bust out the diagram. If it wasn't those things, you wouldn't bother with a diagram.
And most diagram tools, in my experience, suck for communicating those things. Visio is too bloody complicated and produces ugly diagrams by default, which means it's a tedious amount of work to create something that is an effective piece of visual communication. Photoshop can make things pretty and readable, but it is not easy to work with when you're trying to map the relationships inherent in something complicated. The latest Microsoft Word actually produces very nice, clear, readable diagrams, but it falls down as soon as you're out of basic hierarchical or linear relationships. And OmniGraffle… sigh. I have never been able to understand it well enough to produce anything worthwhile. To me it's just another Visio but work didn't pay me to learn it.
Diagrammix hits the sweet spot for diagrams. You can learn it in five minutes. The diagrams are clear and readable, and they have an optional "sketchy" style which is perfect for many of the communication tasks you most need a diagram for.
You can easily work with it to design and rearrange the objects and relationships you're trying to communicate. It's got a few advanced diagramming features and you can fine-tune stuff if you want to. It's no Visio in terms of complexity and underlying smarts, but to me it genuinely helps with the job of clearly communicating things that are both fairly important and fairly complicated. That's what I want.
ING Direct (the Australian version, anyway)
Banks have such a bad reputation, and as far as I'm concerned it's wholly fucking deserved, but I've been a customer of ING Direct for several years now, and it's surprising how happy I am about that. As a bank it definitely isn't for everybody, but I think it's awesome.
It exists almost entirely online - they have no branches and no ATMs of their own. You can do some branch-type functionality, like deposit cheques, at Australia Post. EFTPOS is free and if you withdraw $200 or more at any ATM, they refund the ATM fee. There's almost no fees for anything, and when they do charge (e.g. for international transactions) it's quite reasonable. They have very limited offerings for personal banking: the Orange Everyday, which is a Visa debit card, and the Savings Maximiser, which has no card at all, and you have to move money electronically to another account if you want to access it. I have two Everyday accounts and four savings accounts.
The thing that works for me is that it's simple and straightforward. You know what you're getting, and you get it. I remember shopping around when I switched banks a few years ago, and the reason I went with ING was because I could read and understand their terms and conditions in two minutes. Other banks had offerings that sounded good on the surface, but there were so many confusing conditions and so much fine print that I ended up veering away. I was like, I can't for the life of me tell how these accounts are going to screw me, but I can tell I'm going to get screwed.
One of the coolest features of their online banking is that you can name your accounts whatever you want, which means I can name my savings accounts for exactly their purpose - "Bills stash", "NY spending", "Tax bill paranoia". This is way more helpful than I would have expected. It means that if I want to take money out of a savings account, I know exactly what financial purpose I am taking that money from - I am literally taking it from my bills stash or my holiday spending money. I also really like that you can instantly create a new savings account online, which I've occasionally done over the years. It's been really handy when I've had too many different things I'm trying to simultaneously put away money for, and I'm losing track of how much I've saved for each. Now that I have four, when I don't need one for something any more, I just rename the account to whatever the next thing is I have to put money aside for. It's fucking awesome.
The minimum $200 withdrawal thing can be a pain, especially close to payday when there just ain't $200 to take out, but it's not nearly as inconvenient as I would have guessed. Recently I did get another transaction account at another bank, because I suspected that taking out money in $200 blocks was making me spend more than I otherwise would have, but I abandoned that in under a week. It was a real shock going back to normal banking, where you have to specifically use that bank's ATMs or else pay a fee. With ING, I got very accustomed to taking out money wherever I wanted and not caring about fees, and I can't go back from that. I also got surprisingly annoyed by the inability to name the other bank's account for what I was using it for. I also recently got a credit card at yet another bank, and I am just horrified at how primitive their online services are, and how many things you can be charged fees for.
Both of these banks had great customer service (Suncorp and Bendigo, for the record), but I got very rapidly driven up the wall by both - death by a thousand banky paper cuts. I think ING is a bit like Apple in that their offerings drop features that you would assume are important (CD/DVD drives, Flash, branches, ATMS *g*) in favour of simplifying the overall experience and really optimising a few things that really matter to your experience over the long term.
My main gripe about ING is that their iPhone app is a bit limited and can be slow and flaky, but that's definitely not something serious enough to make me consider another bank.
Finally, a very quick and heartfelt anti-rec: just say no to Vodafone. For the love of all that is holy, just say no. I went there last year, and then I spent two months and a complaint to the telecommunications ombudsman getting out of there. And then my sister did the same thing. Just don't do it, mmkay?
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth (
comments).