iTunes CyrFix: уточняю

Получил удивительно большое количество вопросов по iTunes CyrFix. На удивление, почти все вопросы одиннаковые и читаются приблизительно так:

..."попробовал(а) сегодня вашу версию iTunesCyrFix, но там нет .exe. Как запустить программу?"

Поэтому хотел бы уточнить. Да, эта программа исключительно под Mac.

Говнокамера и шлепбук

Решил испытать маленькую USB камеру от какого-то говнокитайского производителя. Так говно полное. Но видео получилось. На видео тестирую smackbook. Отличная вещь показать друзьям и заставить их обсыраться от зависти, но реально работать наврядли получиться.

Quick update

My laptop has came back home from AppleCare and, finally, I've got a chance to complete numerous things that were waiting for me. Not much to write about, just a boring routine.

Recently, I've found the good travel bag for car seat and decided to give it a try. My wife and my little son are going to have a trip shortly, so having a good travel bag would be a smart move, I thought.

While I'm completely satisfied with Amazon, I was not sure that they would be able to make it within the next few days. So I decided to try local stores for it. What a bummer. Some stores even don't have an idea what is that, and those who know, they don't carry any in stock and never did. Everything is sold exclusively online.

Well, as you know, some things can be pretty unpopular and it might not be wise to have them in retail stock, however, such a small thing like a travel bag should be a good enough choice to keep "just in case". Besides, travel accessories sometimes to be purchased in the last minute and Internet is pretty wrong choice for that.

P.S. Don't say a word about local shopping sites. I've tried them, no one really works. It looks like the most of them are trying to become yet another shopzilla.com, but decided to call themselves local.

Downgrade from Visa to XP on Sony VAIO

A friend of mine got stuck trying to downgrade his pretty new Sony VAIO VGN-TZ150N from Vista (it sucks!) to XP. While I was able to to find all drivers for him (they're available for free at esupport.sony.com), he couldn't get through the "blue screen of death" when trying to boot from the Windows XP Pro installation CD. Neither did I. Finally, it worked out to be impossible to install the WIndows XP Pro, unless you're using a bundled installation CD that comes with SP2 already.

It took a huge portion of the day, but finally, I got the CD and the installation went fine. Installing all drivers took the rest of the day, but now everything works flawlessly and much faster (Vista sucks!).

Alternatively, you can always order a Windows XP Recovery CD from Sony at https://www.qdirect.net/Sony/VistaDG.aspx (well, not actually always but before the 6/30/2008) and look for a free shipping promotional code at http://www.sony.com/business/downgrade (at the moment of writing this post it's Q93R7). However, a lot of customers report this to take a lot of time, if ever happens.

New personal finance startup idea

On the grounds of my last post about money management online, I came up with an idea of new personal finance Web application.

So here is the deal:

1. Make a clone of popular desktop application. Either one would be okay. Rich features of the browsers allow you to do almost everything nowadays. Keep in mind, that the most of people have Checking, Savings, Credits and Loans, at least one, for the car. Don't give up on any of these just because you think people don't need it.
2. Keep the style sticky, don't go far in the "ergonomics" and UI and UX design. The people are already stick to some specific ways of handling (and thinking!) of data. Let them stay with it.
3. Use the Google Gears or anything of this kind to let your software work offline.
4. Provide a number of communication tools to your software, like widgets, IM, SMS (text messaging from the cell phones), Web or good old e-mails. Make your software as easy as Twitter is for sending and receiving updates.
5. Don't go far in reports, you're not developing an executive software. But be reasonable in your limits. There some things that everyone wants to know. Make sure you give them a tool for that.
   
6. Give your site an iPhone application, both online and offline. Everybody wants iPhone nowadays. ;) Don't forget about other smartphones. However, it could be a simple e-mail and Web gateway.
   
7. Start with the basic features, be very responsive, provide an ultimate feedback for feature requests and their status, let people know the exact day when they'll receive the feature that they want. You know, this is just numbers, it doesn't take more then a month to add some fancy splits or CSV import. Make your (prospective) clients feel that they are part of the process. Let them know that they will get what they want. (But don't be afraid to say Sorry, but not, yet for ridiculous and unreasonable requests).
8. Make sure you have all features that let people the full visibility about their current financial situation. Don't make the wait for transactions clearance on the credit card, let them see the upcoming expenses, monitor the budget, let them stretch it for urgent needs by taking funds from other categories (for example, let people temporary save on restraunt expenses for the goal of buying a new laptop). Make this visual and straight forwarded. What you really need to deliver is a personal financial tool. People want to be in control and to be able to optimize their funds. Visual way of funds planning and optimization is the easiest way for the most of us.
9. Charge not more then 10 dollars per month (but not much less), don't mess up with different plans. I don't want to count how many accounts do I need to handle, how many transactions would be in each, etc. Give me a choice: get it free or pay for it. But make sure you give it for free. No obligations.
10. Once you're up and running, let the social networking to work. Let people give advices, mark events, whatever not. Develop content dependant advisory system. It'll pay off.
    

Yes, it'd be tough for a first three-five weeks to get the core up and running. After that you can become the next 37signals with a thousands of happy customers.

Online money management

I'm currently digging the Internet for a good, reliable money management online with full functionality on board. What do I need?

1. Accounts for Savings, Checkings, Credit Cards, Loans (different types of, as well as giving and receiving).
2. Ability to add transactions manually and sync them later through uploading any popular data format available by the Download function from the banks. Having system download the data automatically would require me to give up the passwords to it, so I am pretty concerned about sense for this function to me.
3. Split transactions (one transaction split into several categories, like Household and Food, for example). Categories management as well (custom, etc).
4. Schedule transactions and payments by loan, making sure that loan payments are also coming as a split transaction, separating the body of credit and interest.
5. Reports, not much of them, mostly Where did I spend my money during period of time?
6. Budgets, both monitoring and planning. Different budget templates are also a plus.
7. Adding accounts manually, but not only those that's got Internet access.
   
8. Notifications by e-mail and export to Calendar.
9. Import Quicken data would be a huge plus, I'll be moving from Mac Quicken.

I'm not stuck to free solutions, I'd be happy to pay for a reliable one. However, it sounds like it's too much for online money management tools that are on the market today. ;)

As for now, I'm going to give a try to mint.com, moneycenter.yodlee.com, budgetpulse.com, budgettracker.com, clearcheckbook.com, buxfer.com and mvelopes.com. I liked the concept of helpful guidance and tips from wesabe.com, but it's too different from the application that I'm looking for. I'll also try to evaluate expensr.com against my req's. After my last quick look it seemed to be the only one possible solution.

Wondering, why is it so hard to replicate Quicken for Mac, iBank 3 or Moneydance online? Sounds like an easy thing that can become extremely sticky as soon as you provide million of ways to get connected to it. This is a kind of a thing that can be done in a new way, easier and friendlier, and can rock the market.

mint.com can't add transactions manually, so it's out of my list. But it was pretty nice though. It's bad that it misses this functionality and it's very basic for me. However, people say that mint.com still in beta, so there are chances that they finally will decide to deliver this function. I'd be happy to take a look at it then.

moneycenter.yodlee.com looks like it can do everything for me, however, I couldn't pass through linking accounts to it. I couldn't find Bank of America Credit Card there (well, it is in the list, but can't get linked), and I couldn't add an account manually (while it advises me to, it never allows me ;). So, it's out of the list also.

expensr.com has no split transactions, poor account management, no loan accounts, like for a car, or a student loans. No transaction schedule or I didn't find one. I liked it, but still no-go.

budgetpulse.com has no split transactions, account management is manual only, no differentiation on account types (either Checking, or Savings, or Credit card or whatever not), transactions management is pretty weird. It's mostly like an application to monitor your upcoming expenses and incomes and keep the balance. It gives you a bigger picture, but not your day-to-day tool. Not the one that I need.

budgettracker.com looks like the one that really can do everything I need. It's free for basic functionality and extra features cost $2.95/month. Pretty acceptable, however, the interface is very awkward to me. I'm coming from Mac Quicken, so I was looking for something similar, at least, in concepts. Well, budgettracker.com is close on concept, but very overloaded. Keeping in mind the Web application needs to have fewer steps them the desktop one (just because it's Web and every step doesn't have the same response time as on desktop application), the budgettracker.com is too much overcomplexified. But I think it'll become pretty useful as soon as you get used to it. Two things I do not like about it. First, it doesn't seems very reliable and I don't know what is the future of it (it looks like a very minor player on the market). Second, I didn't like to get to know that it's advertised on For Sale By Publisher here. This might be a business model, but doesn't sound like a very solid one.

mvelopes. This one is very expensive comparing to all other choices. It has got three plan.

1. 2-Year Plan is $189.60, charged every two years and equals to $7.90/month,
2. 1-Year Plan is $129.60, charged annually and equals to $10.80/month,
3. Quarterly Plan is $39.60 and equals to $13.20/month.

All these options sound pretty expensive. But I decided still give it a try using the free 30-days trial. First thing that smelled bad was the termination policy.

Please note, due to security reasons, requests for cancellation can only be processed by chatting directly with a Customer Service Representative. As such, cancellation requests transmitted to us by any other means (e.g. email, voicemail, etc.) will not be honored.

This means that they will try to feed me to their sales people before they will let me go. I hate that. But let's go ahead. In overall picture, mvelopes looks like a pretty solid product with a lot of functionality.

However there is one thing that makes it pretty tough for me. Originally, it's not intuitive transaction-based budget system. They are starting from the side of spending categories, called envelopes there. They don't care about your transactions (actually, they do, but don't make it straight-forwarded), but they do care about how much did you spend on each category.

I should say that their budgeting system is pretty nice and one of the best that I saw ever (even in the desktop applications). However, I need to be able to easier see the direct connection between my every single transaction and spending categories. I want to apply budgets to my actual actions, but not to adjust my actions to the budget fields.

Well, you can get used to it though. Once their concept is in your head, you're cool. However, they don't have schedules (or I didn't find them). If there are schedules, they did the great job to hide them very well. Otherwise, it's even more surprising how they did such a solid system and have no schedules there. To my understanding, schedule of transactions is a very important tool to proper funds management.

Overall I liked the mvelopes the most, however, they miss the schedule and they are pretty expensive. They deliver a nice set of functionality though. I'll keep them in mind, however, their "envelope" concept is an awkward for me. I also need to see how easily they will let me go out of the trial. ;)

clearcheckbook.com looks nice and very simple. It has no loan type of accounts though. And interface is not very good. Its dashboard could be more effective and much more informative. Not that "linked", mostly manual tool. I liked it minimalism, but I hated it at the same time. Overall, it's a nice free tool, has Google and Mac OS dashboard widgets, some AJAX in a appropriate places, but can't make me stick to it.

Originally, Quicken Online sounded like a good choice, but it misses split transactions. A no-go for me, I have too many split transactions, to keep everything in order. They also miss budgets. Very important for me, almost no-go. The reports are very weak. Not a big deal for me, they have some other way for building charts, besides, this is not actually something that I'd really miss. One of the most important things is that there are too many complains in their forum for paying for incomplete product. Not a good sign.

buxfer makes me feel a little bit dumb with all its tags. It's also not very "automatic", so relies a lot of manual processing. The splitting of transactions is very weird process. It looks like it was done just check the box in the feature list, but nobody thought about people who'll be using it. As I already said, tags, words, groups: all these are very confusing jargon. I would prefer to stick to common sense ones or to be clear on the correct usage.

P.S. I'll try to keep my requirements list updated as soon as I'll recall more features that I depend on. ;)