/devel

Three months ago I received an invitation to try and review Toshl, a mobile expense tracker developed by ThirdFrameStudios. I also received code to get  Pro account free for first year to help me test it, which saved me a modest amount of 20 euros. It is also not a secret that I know people working at 3fs and admire their work.

As influences go, that’s it. I received neither threats to pets I don’t have or contributions to a bank account I do have. Also a complete absence of nudges means that this post took longer than planned and that all opinions are mine. Too make them less ignorant I decided at start to give Toshl a proper test and use it for couple of months before passing judgment.

Toshl, as mentioned, is a tool for keeping track of expenses. You are obviously sensible enough to know why this is wise, if you are still reading this, so I won’t bother explaining. It comes as a free application for Android devices and Maemo based N900. I heard rumors of an iPhone version, but Symbian or BlackBerry owners are out of luck (for now). Using web based companion and synchronization is free too, but you have to pay for Pro account if you want to add expenses through website or need a more flexible export of your data.

I tested Nokia N900 version of Toshl and liked it. I don’t want to go into details since they quickly become boring and there is no better test than your own (remember, it’s free). I was impressed how well it handles decimal separator for me, since I sin by using both comma and point.

Entering expenses is easy and quick, especially if you have entered similar recently, since you can reuse tags just by clicking on suggested. You also see already entered expenses sorted by time or tags. There is still room for improvement (like adapting tags suggestions based on first entered), but not much to fault.

I believe Toshl’s goal is to be as simple and fun tracker of everyday expenses as possible. You can do basic add and removal of expenses, export inserted data, categorize each entry with tags and see few different reports. That’s it. There is no integration with banks, currency conversions,  or even a notion of income. Reports are basic and I am not a fan of those included.

I usually used more than one tag on each expense and had difficulty wrapping my head around graphs where same expense could be shown multiple times. I failed at judging how much impact do some expenses have overall without at least some tweaking of graphs. I am certain that Tufte would call it chartjunk, but their implementation certainly is fun to play with.

And that’s where Toshl’s main strength is. A fun way of doing something that most people find incredibly tedious. You might overgrow it one day and switch, but it will help you develop a necessary habit of recording your expenses.

Being simple and fun doesn’t mean powerless. Tags free you to your own categorization and multiple export options give you an opportunity to massage that data further in tools of your choice. It might not be as trivial as clicking on a graph is, but doing it in Excel is not much harder.

I will not continue to use it because I am that sort of person who gets off on double-entry bookkeeping. I’ve been using GnuCash for years and there is no easy way to sync data with it (probably shouldn’t be either) and few reasons to input every expense twice. I do recommend anyone who isn’t tracking yet or is not satisfied with his current approach to give Toshl a try.

And if you are happy with free version, then buy a Pro account. It costs little, gives you features as polished as rest of service and it help secure your apps future.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Toshl expense tracking app is web connected and I love it for that! (intomobile.com)
• Personal finance software – Free download the ultimate Gnucash (techblissonline.com)

I love using N900, but there are applications or features I miss. This post is a reminder to me on what I might do if I find more time. Since list is too long for me to do everything (unless I suddenly win lottery), feel free to pick an idea you like and run with it. Just let me know afterwards where I can see results of your work or participate in development.

Offline Wikipedia. When I am not behind a computer or reading, I like to be outdoors and even though cheap always available Internet was supposed to be here any day now, I regularly find myself information hungry in places with a very slow or no Internet connection. N900 with SD card could pretty much store everything I wanted and building an app that process and display information from Wikipedia dumps doesn’t look like a too difficult task.

Better dictionary for Maemo. QStarDict port is great and it has become one of my favorite applications. However its user interface suffers from being a direct port of a desktop version one and could be improved with one that wastes less space and is orientation aware. Reading dictionary is one of few things I wish I could do in portrait mode.

Web platform for Maemo. Wouldn’t it be great if you could build Maemo applications with web technologies? QtWebKit is a great place to start and I am certain I could expose new functionality through addToJavascriptWindowObject of QWebFrame class. Beside exposing this stuff I would also like to create tools and interfaces for developers and users alike with which they can easily package a web application as a standalone Maemo application or in case of users, turn a website into an application (I know you can add a bookmark to a website but it is not quite the same thing).

Caffeine for N900. I would like to pick “Switch profile to silent for <x time>” and know N900 will turn back normal profile when that time period expires. I always forget to turn ringing back on after I leave cinema.

Monitor unknown calls. I don’t want to pollute my address book with every phone number under the sun, but I would appreciate if I could get a hint if I ever talked or called the number in question. Bonus points for using public phone books to fetch name for given number and parsing number for clues (which country or part of it is call coming from).

This is not a complete list of things I want, but rest are mostly feature requests (except email client which currently really kind of sucks). For example I wish calendar had support for CalDAV or PDF viewer for screen rotate, search and fit to width.

I am aware that Maemo should be called MeeGo now, but a habit of years can’t be changed in few weeks. I searched for above applications and didn’t find them, but if you know of any I missed, then please let me know.

Title says it. A month is enough time to get a better understanding of the device and to get asked repeatedly about my impressions. Many have wrote theirs, so I doubt I will be telling anything really new. Before I go on, a short disclaimer, since my writings on this blog stay around longer than might be sensible.

I wrote this post at the start of February 2010. I believe everything I write about technology to be hopelessly out of date after 6 months, but I expect this article will be obsolete even sooner. So by the time you got around reading this, most of my gripes might not even be true anymore.

Nokia N900 is an uncut diamond. A wonderful thing made by talented designers that has quite a few rough edges, not all of them in device. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people, but to some of you it might become your favorite computer. It goes with me almost anywhere.

If you want a rock solid phone, then this device is not for you. I was unlucky to be in minority of people who experienced constant reboots. By constant I mean few times every hour.  My Nokia also lacked a 2GB partition, which meant I was constantly running out of space in which to install applications. Both of this problems have since been fixed. I still have a problem with GSM connection occasionally completely dying, which I can fix only by manual reboot. I’m personally not bothered since I don’t use it as phone.

On the other hand updates to software are regular, with one major firmware update already, that fixed some of my problems (reboot). Annoyances of today might literally be gone by tomorrow and thus my disclaimer.

I know how much effort goes in good software and don’t want to be too negative, but email really does suck for IMAP users. Not only doesn’t it cache headers, so if you have a slow connection and a big Inbox, get used to waiting. You also can’t set sent mail, drafts or trash folders which makes it useless to me for anything but reading email. Even worse, it creates its own folders (like iPod touch) to make a mess in your account. I am all for simplicity and avoiding needless configuration options, but it could at least get a list of folders and compare Levenshtein’s distance to common names (Sent, Sent mail…).

Gecko (Mozilla) based browser though is great, in my opinion much better than iPod’s and I completely switched my mobile browsing to N900. I am biased since unlike many I never was fond of constant zooming in and out (with pinching). My opinion might have been different if my eye-sight was poorer and I needed to zoom more.

If you are a Linux user or appreciate freedom, then it’s difficult to find a better mobile device. N900 is a Linux machine which happens to also be a phone and you have complete access to everything. There is a store (Ovi) and app manager, but you can install and run anything willing to run without permission from anybody. Terminal is loaded by default together with tools needed to prod into the system and root is one package installation away.

I dislike fixed space of iPod. N900 is only slightly better. You can expand it with SD cards, but you have to open battery cover. It looks so fragile that I don’t intend to actually do this unless absolutely necessary. Speaking of storage, as a programmer I can understand why applications can use only 2GB of it, but as user it simply looks daft.

Pair of contact and conversations applications is absolutely brilliant. Instant messaging, Skype and SMS are superbly integrated and they also feed contact application with information about your buddies found on those networks.  Install Hermes and you can update it with data from Twitter and Facebook.

Screen has higher resolution than iPod’s, but physically same (small) size, which means I’ll keep reading PDFs on my 770. Since it’s resistive instead of capacitive, it needs more pressure than iPod’s, but works better at -12 degrees centigrade (this picture was taken with my gloves on).

Maemo has a very active and generally supportive community, but some members can also be needlessly unfriendly. Just because you know where everything is and have seen certain faux pas 100 times before, it doesn’t mean either is true for a new N900 owner with a problem.

N900 RUNS PYTHON, which was my main reason for preferring it over an Android phone. Documentation is a bit all over the place, not always current and I still haven’t found information about how to control built in cameras, but I am an optimist that this will be sorted out soon and that documentation will improve as well.

I compared N900 with diamond, but maybe a better comparison would be a sports car. If you want a polished, sedated experience then N900 is certainly not for you (yet). But if you are a tinkerer who doesn’t mind rough edges in exchange for freedom to make it do almost anything, then you should give it a spin.

There is so much more that could be said, but big picture wouldn’t change much. I haven’t talked much about UI since I simply couldn’t do it justice in few sentences. On the whole it works fine and multitasking is really great even though I think iPhone/iPad’s switch-to-where-you-were model is in my experience rarely a problem and wouldn’t be surprised if it was here to stay.

If there is anything about it you would like to know, then please ask and I’ll try to respond to it promptly.

Last year I read Aaron Swartz’s review of books and thought it was a great idea that I should copy. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe to better track how much I actually read. Or using a goal to promote more reading when I felt I haven’t read enough. Maybe it was just to learn what topics drew me particular year.

Who knows? Probably all of these reasons played a role.

My private goal was to read a book every fortnight, so about 26 in total. I read 37, some of which admittedly very light in content or girth.

Time to present the books, listed in chronological order. I linked those I liked and set in bold those I recommend. Unlinked were either bad or intended for someone I can’t relate to.

DISCLAIMER: Most links point to Amazon and include my affiliate ID meaning if you buy them after following these links, I get few cents that might eventually lead to purchase of another book.

1. Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. Surprised to see how many of them I discovered independently through years.
2. The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis. Fantastic short history of cold war.
3. The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams
4. The Non-Designer’s Type Book by Robin Williams. Like previous one probably useful only if you know absolutely nothing about design.
5. Business Cards 2 More Ways of Saying Hello by Michael Dorrian, Liz Farrelly. Worth a look before you make your own.
6. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Astute and interesting, but might be redundant if you already follow Clay’s writing.
7. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
8. Sticky Graphics: Create Memorable Graphic Design Using Mnemonics and Visual Hooks by Jessica Glaser, Carolyn Knight. WTF?
9. Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde. Fantasy series for book lovers. Enjoyed more if you’ve read a lot.
10. Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott, Theresa Neil. Components of modern web applications. A book that should be on the shelf of every web interaction designer.
11. Reader by Bernhard Schlink. Excellent book, haven’t seen the movie.
12. The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider. Timeless portrait of German separation.
13. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield. Really late to the party with this one, but still a good and fairly unbiased treatise on intelligent tools and environments and problems related to them.
14. Always Building: The Programmable Environment by Jim Long, Jennifer Magnolfi, Lois Maassen. Optimistic thinking and examples of adaptable environments by people from Herman Miller.
15. Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. Concise but informative description of good parts of Javascript useful for most programmers.
16. Stardust by Neil Gaiman.
17. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. As good as people say.
18. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. In my opinion still the best book by Terry.
19. A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. Worth reading if you want to know what makes games fun and what to expect in future.
20. Aid and Other Dirty Business: How Good Intentions Have Failed the World’s Poor by Giles Bolton. Excellent when looking at facts of aid “business” (first 4/5 of the book). Weak when it comes to solutions with seemingly unlimited faith in globalism and power of a consumer.
21. The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling. Interesting and occasionally excellent, but a bit of a let down compared to some of his other work.
22. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton. Excellent book about sketching and its role in design. A must read for practitioners.
23. The Buddha: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Carrithers. Buddism seen through life of the Buddha.
24. Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn. Fun.
25. The Four Steps to Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to anyone starting a new venture. Absolutely a must read.
26. The First World War: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Howard. Short, but good.
27. Everyman by Philip Roth. Facing old age and death, a book I liked more than my wife.
28. Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Stallabrass. How contemporary art (world) functions and less what it is.
29. Judaism: A Very Short Introduction by Norman Solomon.
30. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano. Discovered by method of pulling random books from shelves in book store. Absolutely superb.
31. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein. A book about history of risk management made only more relevant by last financial crisis. Fun and very informative.
32. Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa. Modern history of Nepal told through personal experience. Recommended if you are interested in Nepal.
33. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Lawrence Sterne. Hard to believe that 250 years old novel can feel so modern.
34. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. I might be biased, but I would put it among his best novels.
35. Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel. I never got around writing review of this book. Definitely worth a read for practitioners.
36. Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi. Aimed at designers, but learned few new things anyway.
37. The City: A Global History by Joel Kotkin. Sort of a short introduction to history of cities with everything good and bad that format entails. Excellent starting point for those interested in its subject.

I wish I read as much as Aaron (latest review), who seems to devour about hundred books per year, but I don’t think I’ll ever manage that. My goal for this year is going to be about same, 25 books before bells toll midnight on 31st of December. It still is an ambitious goal, since these days I seem to have a penchant for buying tomes at least 600 page thick and want to read more of other people’s code.

It’s been six months since I wrote my gloomy outlook and unlike most things I wrote, my thoughts keep coming back to it and issues I talked about. My view hasn’t changed. 2009 is indeed shaping to be a great year for me and an awful one for world in general.

If a problem like over-fishing, that is both well-understood and has known and relatively cheap solutions, seems to be beyond our willingness to solve, what chance do we have then to find and implement solutions for problems that require enormously more effort and resources?

Game over indeed.

I don’t see our civilization surviving this century even if no giant rock crosses our path. There are many reasons for this, but none original or interesting enough to dwell upon. At the same time I do think this is not the last century in which humans live.

If we are all indeed descendants of a tribe that at some point numbered only 2000 individuals, as I’ve heard in a lecture once, then it doesn’t take much to imagine that out of billions enough people will survive to continue our species existence. Not even me imagines a world completely void of water, plants or small furry animals.

Alas civilization needs more than mere presence of humans. Inspired by Irish post-Roman example a question occured to me recently: “Which 100 books would you try to preserve if you wanted to preserve our civilization?”

Point being that if things go the way of Dodo and people have to fight for survival, it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect enlightened person or small groups to preserve many more books than that. And books are still the best way to preserve knowledge in long term. Other forms are either too transient or can pack information far less densely.

I quickly realized two things. First, that I have no clue which books I would pick. And second, that there are more fundamental questions.

Can a civilization fluidly metamorphose from failing to a new, thriving and likely different civilization or does the new one need to start anew from ashes of previous ones?

Question matters, because I imagine that civilizations are in a way like companies. Establishing one is quite different than keeping one going and hence knowledge needed is probably different too. Most historical examples I know of persuaded me that scale of a problem and length of time before its full consequences are felt are inversely proportional to likelihood of our dealing with it before it is too late. However I am not a historian and could well be wrong. Still, you do with what you have and this seems reasonable enough assumption for further inspection.

Assuming this, what does it take to establish a civilization?

One thing that comes to mind is a high enough density of people who don’t spend all of their time procuring food. This means they can’t be hunter gatherers and some agricultural knowledge needs to survive to successfully plant and grow existing crops or tame new ones.

It would also be helpful if all technological knowledge isn’t lost either. Electrical gadgets will be hopelessly obsolete, but creating and fixing a good plow or knowing how to preserve perishable goods for longer periods of time will not be something to sneeze at. World might be full of decrepit remains that might be reused, but there is no good reason to leave it just to human ingenuity to discover how and to what purpose.

Another way to increase number of people living is to stop them dying needlessly. Hence preservation of most effective ways to stay healthy and low tech remedies for most common diseases and injuries would be helpful too. Most drugs will be gone for centuries, but it’s remarkable how much can be achieved with what will hopefully still be found in nature.

Mathematics is also an underpreciated, yet necessary underpinning of every developed civilization. Calculus will not be needed from the get-go, but just counting doesn’t get you far either. There’s hardly a plan that couldn’t be improved with a sensible application of mathematics. Related to this, basic economics should be preserved too.

“There is no such thing as society,” said Margaret Thatcher, which of course is rubish and why it is not enough to learn how to live in complex social structures, but also why and in what ways. Therefore sociological and philosophical texts should also make cut. I find it difficult to imagine titles, because I don’t think culture is something you can implant. It is nurtured and developed not only by circumstances and challenges society faces, but also with choices it makes. It is unlikely that next round would follow our footsteps but optimist in me would love to leave something that inspires and gives something to aspire to.

All these knowledge would be dead ink on paper if person holding a book doesn’t know how to read or what words actually mean. So alphabet learning book and a dictionary should also survive even though most of modern dictionary will probably be fairly useless by then and rest might be unhelpfully terse.

Last I would add a book about ecology trying to explain complexity of the world around us and why it would be wise to be careful how we try to change it. There is probably no better definition of stupidity then repeating same mistakes and expecting different results.

So what did I end up with?

An alphabet book, a dictionary and books about medicine, agriculture, mathematics, economy, sociology, philosophy, some basic technology and ecology. There are no titles since I don’t believe such books have been written yet. We have lived in a world full of books and knowledge for so long, that we simply never saw or had a reason to write a book premised on the idea, that it might be one of few books around.

In any case, even though I have spent more thoughts on this then is probably reasonable at this point, I am sure I haven’t thought of everything. What else have I missed?