Category: software

Quicken switching to subscription model

I guess this was inevitable: Quicken has switched to a subscription model. They’re charging $45/year for Deluxe, which is the version I use. Here’s an article about it, from MacRumors. (Weirdly, I found several articles about the change on Mac web sites, but none on Windows sites. The change applies to both Mac & Windows, and the pricing is pretty much the same for both.) You can currently buy a 2-year subscription from Amazon for $90, which isn’t really saving you any money, but they include an additional three months, so I guess that helps.

Lately, I’ve been upgrading Quicken every year anyway, but I think I’ve usually only paid about $30 for it, getting it from Costco or Amazon. So this change looks like it would make it a bit more expensive for me. (And I’d lose the option of skipping a year, if I didn’t want to upgrade that year.) So that’s something to think about.

I’ve been using Quicken for a long time. The first version I used would have been under MS-DOS, back in the early nineties, I think. Switching to something else would be a big change for me. And there’s not much else out there that compares well to Quicken. Moneydance, maybe. That’s a one-time $50 purchase (though I could probably get a discount on that). I’m not sure how often they release new versions or what their upgrade pricing is, but it would probably work out to being a little cheaper than Quicken.

I’ll probably bite the bullet and buy that 2-year Quicken subscription from Amazon. I’ll wait a bit, though, until I get a chance to run out to Costco and see if they’ve got it cheaper. (I’ve been paying for Office 365 by getting it from Costco, and that’s saved me a few bucks over buying it directly from Microsoft, so maybe they’ll have something for Quicken too.)

iTunes vs Swinsian

My nit-picking complaints about iTunes 12.7 (see here and here) have led me to start experimenting with Swinsian (on my Mac) and MediaMonkey (on my PC). I’ll get to MediaMonkey in a later post, but I thought I’d write up some notes on Swinsian.

As you can see in the screenshots below, Swinsian does fix my current gripe with iTunes: the browser at the top of the window shows a perfectly reasonable number of rows, by default (vs. iTunes: 3 rows). That browser is also very customizable in Swinsian: you can have between 1 and 3 columns, and you have several options as to what you display in them. The screenshot below shows two columns, for artist and album. You can easily change that to show genre, artist, and album, similar to iTunes.

Another thing I appreciate is that Swinsian has a “large text” option. The default text size was a little too small for my tired old eyes, so I turned that on right away.

Pulling in my music from iTunes to Swinsian was easy. It imported everything, including play counts and playlists. There are a few ways you can set things up, but (for now) I’m leaving my music in the iTunes library and folder structure, and letting Swinsian re-scan the library on startup. This allows me to add music in iTunes, which should then show up in Swinsian the next time I start it up. That arrangement probably makes the most sense for someone like me, since I still want to be able to sync music to my phone from iTunes. (Swinsian can sync to older iPods, but not to iOS devices.)

I only have a few issues with Swinsian, and they’re mostly related to the necessity to keep iTunes going. (If I could abandon iTunes and let Swinsian manage all my music, things would be smoother.) Probably the biggest one right now is that Swinsian doesn’t really distinguish audiobooks as a separate category, the way iTunes does. So all of my audiobooks are intermixed with my music. I’m not sure how to get around that one, or if it’s really that big a deal. If I was fully committing to Swinsian, I’d just leave the audiobooks in iTunes and move the music to Swinsian, and everything would be fine.

I’m also not sure that I like the way it handles “album artists” vs “artists”. It’s got some flexibility on that, but it’s not completely consistent. You can see the issue on the McCartney box set shown in the screenshots below. In iTunes, the track list correctly shows the track artist (sometimes McCartney, sometimes Wings), while in Swinsian, it’s always showing the album artist in the track list (though it does show the correct artist in the detail pane on the right). That’s not really a big deal, but it would be nice if they fixed that.

Going back to my gripe about the top browser view in iTunes, I found a discussion thread related to it on the Apple site today. It kind of sounds like they might recognize it as a bug and fix it in the next release. Here’s hoping!

Equifax, iTunes, and some alternatives

There are a number of links I could post as follow-ups to my post on Equifax, but I’ll stick with just one: You Can’t Protect Yourself from the Equifax Breach, from TidBITS. The headline pretty much sums things up.

And an unrelated article from TidBITS on iTunes 12.7. Everybody is talking about removing support for apps and ringtones, but nobody is talking about the annoying change to the genre/artist/album browser in the “songs” view, which I mentioned in a previous post. Since then, I’ve found that it’s happening in both the Windows and Mac versions of iTunes, so that pretty much confirms that it’s intentional, rather than a bug. (And I guess it doesn’t bother everyone else as much as it bothers me…)

This one little thing is finally pushing me to seriously consider iTunes alternatives. Which got me thinking about what my use case is for iTunes these days anyway, and how I could maybe rethink and rearrange things.

First, I do rely on iTunes on my Mac to sync my iPhone and iPad. It’s still useful to backup those devices, and to sync down a subset of my music library, some audiobooks, and other stuff. So I’ll definitely keep it around for that. I use it occasionally to listen to music or watch videos, but not that often really. I could consider installing a secondary app for playing music and managing my music library, like Swinsian, but it’s not really necessary.

On the PC, I keep what I consider my “master” music library in iTunes. It’s around 67 GB right now. (And the “TV Shows” folder in iTunes is 340 GB, while the Movies folder is 21 GB.) The Windows version of iTunes, for me, is slow to start up and a bit sluggish in general. Aside from using it to keep my music library organized, I also use it to play music (but only occasionally), rip CDs, and burn CDs. I rarely use it to watch video content; I generally use the Apple TV for that.

So I’m thinking about a few things on the PC side. First, I can probably just delete all the TV shows and movies in my iTunes library, if I want to clear up some disk space. In the old days, you needed to have a local copy of a video file to watch it. Now (for iTunes content) you can just stream it from the cloud to your Apple TV, and it’s fine. Second, I could probably remove some of the music from my iTunes library if I wanted to get that down to a more manageable size. I have a bunch of old tracks from these giant SXSW torrents that they used to do (about 3 GB from 2005 and 6 GB from 2009). It’s cool to have all those random tracks in my library, but it does make it a little harder to find the music that I’ve actually bought and paid for. So maybe cleaning up TV, movies, and some old music would help speed up iTunes.

Beyond that, if I want to try a different software program to manage my music on Windows, I could look at MediaMonkey, which comes in free and paid versions. It handles a lot of the stuff I need to do, like ripping and burning CDs, in addition to the main task of organizing and playing music. Or there’s MusicBee, which is free, and handles many of the same things as MediaMonkey (with the exception of CD burning). Or Clementine, which is free and cross-platform (but doesn’t have CD ripping or burning, as far as I can tell).

So MediaMonkey is probably my best bet. From what I’ve read, I can try that out without screwing up my iTunes setup at all, so maybe I’ll do that and see how it goes.

 

untangling 9000 cables

I’ve been spending some time recently working through a backlog of unread bookmarks on my Pinboard account. I don’t think I ever intended to use Pinboard as a place to stash a giant slush pile of “read it later” links, but at some point, it turned into that.

One of the articles I read today is this one, about CERN’s effort to identify and disconnect 9000 obsolete cables. That seemed somewhat apropos, though I’m not sure if I have quite that many unread links in Pinboard (though it kind of feels that way). I also read an article about Marie Kondo, which also seemed apropos. I feel like she would want me to discard any links in my Pinboard account that don’t bring me joy. (And the Kondo article I read isn’t the NY Times one I linked here, but now I can’t find the one I read…)

I did indeed discard a few links, but not that many. I’ve been thinking about what I can do to clean things up some more and maybe get some good workflows figured out, between Pinboard, Instapaper, and Evernote. I found this article from Diana Kimball interesting:

The Bookmark represents what we wish for. It’s the earliest indicator of intention, and the most vulnerable; by definition, the act of saving something for later means that whatever we hope for hasn’t happened yet. Bookmarks are placeholders for the future. By thumbing through them, we can start to see what might happen next.

That quote above is quite right. Today, I came across bookmarks about learning a new language (Portuguese or Latin?), 52 places to go in 2017 (Botswana!), and a whole bunch of bookmarks on interesting programming languages and libraries (very few of which I’ve actually followed up on). So it’s definitely an indication of intention, though often it’s purely aspirational intention.

She does a pretty good job of figuring out what differentiates services like Pinboard, Instapaper, and Evernote. And here’s another key observation:

But the most important feature of Read Later tools has never been the resulting queue; it’s the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, once you’ve saved the thing you stopped scrolling for, you’re free to move on.

I guess there is some peace of mind, though then there’s always that nagging feeling that I need to get back to the things I’ve “saved for later.” Oh well.

Getting back to the practical stuff, I’m currently using Pushpin on iOS to save bookmarks to Pinboard. It works pretty well, but the app has been neglected for a while. The developer seems to be interested in picking it up again though. A lot of people like Pinner on iOS. I’ve never tried it, but I might give it a spin one of these days. On my Mac, I just use the Pinboard web site, but I’ve been thinking about trying Spillo. It looks like it might help me get those bookmarks a bit more organized.

I’ve also been playing with LaunchBar a bit lately, trying to learn how to use some of its more esoteric features. I think that figuring out Pinboard integration might be worthwhile. There’s no built-in support for Pinboard, but there are some extensions available that add it in.

And now getting back to the more general topic, I’m starting to figure out some general workflows that I’m trying to stick with. One of them is to cut down on the number of places in which I bookmark stuff. For a while, I was bookmarking NY Times articles with the “save for later” capability built into the NY Times website and apps. But now I’m trying to stick with saving them directly to Pinboard or Instapaper. And, for stuff in Pinboard, if it’s simply a link to a book I might want to read, I usually try to find it in Amazon and add it to my Amazon wishlist, then delete the Pinboard entry. That does cause me to lose some context as to where I first stumbled across the book, and maybe why I was interested in it, but I can generally get that back if I need to.

My Amazon wishlist, of course, is also a gigantic graveyard of intentions. But I’ve found that there’s a lot of power in adding something to it. It really does clear my mind of the thing, and frees me to go on to the next thing. And any time I want to find something new to read, I can just browse though my wishlist and find something. And it’s much better than just buying a bunch of books that I’m not going to get around to reading. (I’ve got more than enough of those already.)

I also frequently do something similar with music, converting Pinboard bookmarks into Amazon wishlist entries for CDs, but I’m hitting a bit of trouble with that now, since I’ve been finding a whole lot of stuff on Bandcamp that I’m interested in, and that’s not on Amazon. So I might need to find some way to lasso a bunch of those Bandcamp bookmarks and do something with them, to get them out of the way. (Convert them into a list in Evernote maybe?) Really, if I were to purchase all the music I’ve bookmarked in Bandcamp over the last couple of years, I’d be spending hundreds of dollars and downloading more music than I could ever listen to.

One more wrinkle in all of this that I’m thinking about pursuing: maybe using IFTTT to tie some of my bookmarking into Day One somehow. Or at least find some way to get a bit more insight into my bookmarks, from a chronological standpoint. I’m not sure how much value there is in that, but I think it might be interesting to know stuff like “a year ago on this day, you bookmarked three articles on JavaScript via Pinboard and read an interview with Neil Gaiman on Instapaper.” Or maybe that would be pointless noise. I don’t know. I’m getting exhausted thinking about all this stuff now. I wrote this post to try to get some of this stuff out of my head, but it’s still all rattling around up there!

1Password subscription thoughts

I seem to be blogging about subscription software a lot lately. Recently, I’ve been considering switching over to 1Password’s subscription service. I paid for their apps (macOS, iOS, and Windows) some time ago, and I’m not really having any trouble with them, but I’ve been somewhat dissatisfied with the Windows app, and the new version of that (version 6) has only been available for people using their subscription service.

The subscription service has a few differences from the old model (where you keep your vault files in Dropbox and sync them that way). For one, the old system supports both tags and folders, while the new only supports tags for some reason. I asked, on their forums, for some detail on that, and got a friendly, but fairly disappointing, answer. I’m using both folders and tags. And it looks like folder information isn’t migrated at all; I’d have to manually fix that before migration. And they no longer support “smart folders” at all anymore. Smart folders are basically just saved searches. (They mention that you can still run advanced searches, but don’t say anything about being able to save them.)

So that kind of puts a damper on things. I don’t know why I’d want to move to a paid subscription when I have more functionality in the old software.

They have also just announced that the next major version of their Windows software (version 7) will support “standalone vaults,” meaning that it will work for non-subscription customers. (And it will be a paid upgrade for non-subscription customers.) Of course, they haven’t said anything about a release date for that, and it seems like they’re still not done with version 6 yet, so that could be a way off.

So, the situation is kind of muddy. There are a few things I like about the subscription model, including the nicer Windows software, and the elimination of my current reliance on Dropbox for syncing. But I’ll be able to get the nicer Windows software eventually, apparently, and Dropbox isn’t really a problem, just an inconvenience.

TidBITS has had some good coverage of the back and forth on 1Password subscriptions. And, in other subscription software news, Ulysses has moved to subscription pricing recently. I don’t use Ulysses, but I will mention that their blog post on the move trots out the old cliché, comparing their price to a cup of coffee: “The monthly subscription comes at only $4.99 – that’s pretty much a coffee to go.” No, it’s not, unless you’re buying really expensive coffee!

Ulysses is also available as a part of Setapp, a $10/month subscription service that gets you access to a bunch of Mac apps, and that one also uses the coffee comparison: “Setapp is only $9.99 per month: about as much as you spend on coffee per day.” Really? How much are you people spending on coffee per day? For me, that would be five tall dark roasts from Starbucks. And if I was going to drink that much coffee, I’d buy beans in bulk and brew it myself. (I’m not saying that $10/month isn’t a reasonable cost for Setapp, only that it’s not a reasonable daily cost for coffee consumption.)

One more bit of subscription news: the Pushpin app for iOS, which has languished without any updates for awhile, is probably going to a new model: “ads + subscription to remove.” That seems fair, especially since he’s talking about $1/year. I use Pushpin enough that I’d pay that.

Subscription software, books, and comics

I found out this week that Day One is switching over to a paid subscription model, much like other Mac software has done over the last few years. (TextExpander and 1Password come to mind.)

Day One has said that they’ll continue to support users who have previously purchased the software, and not require that anyone switch over to a subscription, so that’s cool. (1Password did much the same thing. So did TextExpander, though they kind of stumbled into it after some backlash.)

I gave up on TextExpander, for various reasons, not long after they introduced subscriptions. I’m still using the non-subscription 1Password, and I’m pretty happy with it, though I’m thinking about switching over to a subscription. As to Day One, I guess I’ll keep using it for now. I definitely don’t get enough use out of it to justify a subscription. At some point, I may give up on it and just add a “journal” notebook to my Evernote account. I’m already paying for Evernote Premium, so that’s probably a good idea.

Meanwhile, it seems like subscription-based software and services are really getting pushed by a variety of companies. I got an email from O’Reilly today, saying that they’ll no longer be selling books directly, and pushing their Safari subscription instead. It’s still possible to buy their books from Amazon, so that’s good, but their own site was a pretty good place to buy ebooks, since they offered DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats (PDF, Mobi, and ePub). Oh well. It’s not clear from their FAQ if the ebooks you’d get from Amazon are DRM-free or not. Kindle books usually aren’t, but they can be. And I guess there’s no way to buy a DRM-free PDF of an O’Reilly book now. PDF is really the best format to have, if you’re using a book for reference.

Packt still sells DRM-free ebooks, but they also push their Mapt subscription service. The same goes for Apress: they still sell directly, but also push Apress Access, their subscription service.

On a semi-related subject, I think I may have accidentally signed up for a trial of Comixology Unlimited. I was trying to use the Comixology iOS app this weekend, and it was acting a bit funny. At some point, I briefly saw a screen saying that I’d activated a 7-day trial. I hadn’t purposely clicked on anything that should have done that, and I think the app crashed right afterwards. My account page says I don’t have a subscription, but I’ve noticed that eligible titles now have a “borrow” button underneath them, instead of an “add to cart” button. So, who knows? I have enough unread purchased comics in my Comixology account that I can’t really see myself ever needing Comixology Unlimited. I’ll just have to keep an eye on my account and make sure that, if I do actually have a trial, it doesn’t convert to paid.

Speaking of borrowing comics, I’m currently reading a well-worn copy of The Return of Bruce Wayne, borrowed from my local library. They have a pretty nice selection of graphic novels. And the Bridgewater Library (not far from here, and in the same library system) has an even better selection. So I could probably give up on buying comics altogether and just rely on the Somerset County Library System, if I wanted to.

Thinking about email services

Seeing the changes to OtherInbox Organizer this past weekend got me thinking about email in general. I’ve been using Gmail for more than ten years, and I’ve been using Organizer since 2011.

Every once in a while, I consider switching from Gmail to a non-free alternative. I last looked into paid email services in 2014. Not much has changed since then, but a few things have. Generally, the trend seems to be towards offering more space and charging a little more.

FastMail is probably the best example, and the likeliest candidate, if I were to switch. Their basic account is $30/year, for a 2 GB mailbox. That’s probably not enough for me, since I currently have about 2.3 GB in my Gmail account. (Of course, if I switch, I don’t need to bring all of my old mail over, but I’d like to, if I can.) Their standard account is $50/year for a 25 GB mailbox, which would be more than enough. That also includes the ability to use your own domain. (When I last looked at FastMail, a few years ago, the standard account was $40 and included 15 GB of storage.) They’ve got pretty much all the features you’d want in an email service: a nice web interface, IMAP support, an iOS app, two-factor authentication, calendar/contact management, and support for importing old mail from Gmail (or wherever).

I signed up for a free ProtonMail account back in 2014, when the service was still in beta. At the time, I found it to be too limited to be really useful. Looking at it again now, I see that it’s improved quite a bit, and it’s seriously worth considering for use as my main email account. The main selling points for ProtonMail are security and privacy. So if those are your main concerns, definitely take a look at their service. They have a pretty good web-based interface (much better than it was during the beta), and an iOS app (that I haven’t tried yet). They don’t support IMAP, though, since that just wouldn’t work with their secure architecture, so you’re stuck with either their web interface or app. You can’t hook your account up to Apple’s mail app, or Outlook, or anything like that. Free accounts have a 500 MB limit. Paid accounts are $5/month for 5 GB. One other downside with this: they don’t support any easy way to import mail from another account. (And since they don’t have IMAP, you can’t use an IMAP-based migration approach either.)

I host this blog at 1&1, and I have access to 1&1’s mail services as part of my hosting account. Occasionally, I think about switching from Gmail and just using my 1&1 account for mail. There would be a couple of advantages there. First, I’m already paying for it, and second, I can easily use one of my own domains, which are all hosted with 1&1. The included mail service gives me an IMAP account with 2 GB of storage. They have a web interface, which is OK but nowhere near as good as Gmail’s (or ProtonMail’s or FastMail’s, from what I’ve seen of them). And they have an iOS app, though I don’t think I would ever use it. The 2 GB limit is a little low; you can up that to 50 GB by signing up for a “business” account at $7/month. They also have Exchange 2013 hosting for $10/month, including a 25 GB mailbox, which is kind of interesting.

Of those three options, FastMail is the only really good one for me, I think. The 1&1 basic mail account has that 2 GB limit, and bumping it up costs a bit too much. And their web interface isn’t great. The ProtonMail service is pretty cool, but without IMAP support, there are too many things I just wouldn’t be able to do.

Well, I guess I still haven’t talked myself into switching away from Gmail. At this point, the one thing that might push me into doing it would be if OtherInbox Organizer becomes a problem. Then, I might be able to talk myself into switching providers, as part of an effort to switch to SaneBox or some other system for organizing my mail.

 

Pocket acquired by Mozilla

Well, this is interesting. Mozilla has acquired Pocket. I blogged recently about Instapaper, and their acquisition by Pinterest. Now, their one big competitor has been acquired too. That’s a little disappointing, but maybe not unexpected. Though I wouldn’t have guessed that Mozilla would be the one to buy them out.

I’m still using Instapaper. They’ve restored all the data that was lost in their big crash a few weeks ago, and their site has been working fine for me ever since. So I’m hoping that they’re doing OK.

Twitterrific, Overcast, and Ted Leo

Twitterrific is my favorite iOS Twitter client. (But also, honestly, the only one I’ve used other than the official one, so that’s not saying much.) I appreciate the fact that Twitter even still supports third-party clients. Facebook never really did, and Twitter’s support has wavered quite a bit over the years. But anyway, I get a lot of use out of Twitterrific. I bought it back when it actually cost money. (Now, it’s free with ads and various in-app purchases.)

I also used to use their Mac client. But they stopped development on it quite a while ago. I now just use the Twitter web page and occasionally the official Twitter Mac client (which really isn’t bad). But Twitterrific is looking to fix up their Mac client, and have put up a Kickstarter to fund new development. I’ve managed to avoid Kickstarter up until now, despite being tempted by a few things I’ve seen there in the past. But I finally gave in for this, and registered a Kickstarter account and pledged $30. That seems reasonable. The project isn’t fully funded yet, but it’s doing well, so hopefully they’ll actually do it.

And, since I have a Kickstarter account now, I’m tempted to go in on the Kickstarter for Ted Leo’s new album too. He’s one of my favorite artists, and it’s been a while since his last full album. I am worried now about getting sucked into the whole Kickstarter thing and spending money on stuff I don’t really need. There’s no reason that I can’t just wait until Ted Leo’s new album is out, read the reviews, then make an informed decision to buy it or not. And that’s probably what I should do in most cases.

Getting back to the subject of iOS & Mac software that I use a lot, Marco Arment has just released a new version of his podcast player, Overcast. This is another iOS app that I paid for the old-fashioned way at some point, but is now a free app with ads and in-app purchases. The new version is a pretty major redesign. I was pretty happy with the previous design, so I wasn’t really looking forward to this. But it’s a pretty good redesign. I’m getting used to a few things, like swiping left (or is it right?) to get to the episode notes instead of swiping up. Reading through Marco’s blog post on the redesign, it’s clear that he thought about it a lot and put a lot of work into making it as easy to use as possible. So it’s still my favorite podcast player out there. (I kind of wish he’d create a Mac client too, but I can understand why he hasn’t.)

Instapaper Outage

I was a bit preoccupied with the snowstorm yesterday, but I did notice that Instapaper was down. No big deal, really, but I see that they’re still having trouble. And now they’re saying that they won’t have their full archives restored until February 17.

When they went free a few months ago, they mentioned being “better resourced” since their acquisition by Pinterest. The current outage likely has nothing to do with Pinterest or going free. But it’s not a good sign that, not long after they stopped taking my money, they’re having such a major outage.

Instapaper, of course, isn’t really a critical service. If I lost access to GMail for that long, I’d be in a lot of trouble. And, now that I think about it, I have enough stuff in Evernote that losing access to that for a week would be pretty inconvenient too. (I’m assuming that I’d still have access to my local Evernote files on my hard drive if Evernote had an outage. But I’m honestly not sure about that.)

Anyway, earlier this week, I had bookmarked an episode of Canvas that talks about “read later” services. I should listen to that. I don’t plan on switching to Pocket, but it’s worth looking into.

And maybe I should think about ways to back up my Instapaper articles and Evernote notes. (I’m already backing up my GMail account on a semi-regular basis.)