Software I’m excited about using in 2014

software-2014.md

Date:	January 1, 2014 at 5:35 PM
Tags:	Blog
Location:	Barnes & Noble, Charleston, South Carolina, United States
Weather:	48° Rain
Starred

Software I’m excited about using in 2014

YNAB

Back in the day, I used to use Quicken to try to do some modicum of financial planning (although it was mostly without purpose and didn’t give me much in return). YNAB starts out with a very specific purpose (creating and maintaining a budget) and the other Quicken-like features (balancing your checkbook) just come along as a side effect. The fact that you can easily enter new items on the iPhone app means that I really don’t care about the ability to download transactions directly from my bank.

Day One

I have been a diehard OhLife fan since I first learned of it. It’s so simple; you get an email once a day and you respond to it. The problem with that, aside from the random outage they had a few weeks ago, is that it ends up feeling like a chore I have to do at the end of the day every day. I’ve somehow managed to submit an update for every day I’ve been an OhLife member (my first entry was August 18, 2010). I don’t know if you’d call that dedication or compulsion or both, but when I learned about how well regarded Day One is and how it does several things so well, I was very excited to put it through its paces.

Here are the things I think it does well.

• It encourages you to use it like a private Twitter (which reminds me, remember Chiplog?). That means no huge update explaining the entire course of the day (including, often times how I feel about the things that happened). I can add small updates throughout the day like the OCD completist that I am.
  • This also kind of serves the purpose of something like Moves or Foursquare.
• It stores your entries in Dropbox (or, alternately, iCloud). Being able to own my data is key. Also, said data is stored in some flavor of XML, so it’s likely got some longevity. Well, at least it’s plain text.
  • One of the things I like about OhLife is that your updates are email messages, so even if the service went away, I’d still have all my entries in the Sent folder of Gmail.
• It automatically adds cool things like your location and the current weather to your entries. I think that’s going to be fun to look at in the future. More context is cool, especially when you don’t have to expend extra effort to get it.
• The tagging feature lends itself to using Day One for multiple things. This blog post goes over some cool use cases.
  • Here are some ideas I jotted down soon after I started using it.
    • Work Logbook (think Chiplog)
    • Sparkfile
      • I’ve gone from using nvALT to WordPress. Now to Day One?
    • Ongoing project logbook
    • Draft blog posts (I’m writing this entry in Day One.)
    • Keep track of where I’ve been throughout the day (instead of Moves).

Wunderlist

I’ve yet to find anything near as good for sharing todo lists with other people. It leaves a lot to be desired with task management compared to OmniFocus, but it does sharing well.

OpenEmu

I freaked out when I discovered this yesterday. It’s so well designed and works so well. It’s like iTunes for old video game ROMs. I’ve played around with emulators in the past, but none of them worked anywhere close to this well. Here are some things it does well.

• Automatically downloads artwork (usually getting it right or very close).
• Automatically renames titles from the filename to something sensible.
  • Legend of Zelda, The (U) (PRG1) [!].nes to The Legend of Zelda
• It looks so good. Other emulators I’ve seen will look super blurry when you make them full screen. These old 8 bit games have never looked better than they do maximized on my 21” iMac display.
• Customize any gamepad you’ve got sitting around to work just how you want it for any given game system’s emulation.
• It’s open source, so hopefully that will mean a community will keep it alive and continue to improve it for years to come.
• You can keep your game library in Dropbox and use all your games from any of your computers. Here’s how:
  1. Drag your ~/Library/Application Support/OpenEmu/Game Library folder to somewhere in your Dropbox folder.
  2. Symlink it back to where it should go:

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/OpenEmu
$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/[wherever you put it]/Game\ Library .

OmniFocus

An oldie, but a goodie. I continuously find new and better ways to use this incredibly fiddly (in a good way) software. Kourosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus is still required reading.

I am cautiously optimistic about version 2.0. I tried using the beta for a while, but it’s all but useless to me until it can support custom perspectives.

You can also symlink in the other direction with Dropbox: ln -s /path/to/files/ ~/Dropbox/whatever will sync /path/to/files/ as if it were actually in your Dropbox folder.

At least last time I checked.

Never mind, I lied. It doesn't seem to work any more. 😔

I love OpenEmu too, but where is the option to have it rename rom files for you? Or are you talking about the option to have it display the game name rather than the rom file name?