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smartphones: the good and bad
Sep. 2nd, 2011 10:10 pmJust the other day a friend was asking me about the Android phone, asking, for example, "what apps can you just not live without"? And I'm like, seriously? I could chuck the whole thing when my contract is up. I carry my MacBook Air just about everywhere, and mooch whatever WiFi I can find, rather than peer at the tiny little screen on the smart phone.
Well, within the week, I now have 2 apps I might not be able to live without.
1) EEBA: virtual cash envelopes for personal budgeting. The envelope system is a brilliantly simple concept in personal budgeting. But, how do you manage when you don't carry around tons of cash, and do everything with the debit card? EEBA implements virtual envelopes. You label your envelopes, you put virtual cash into them, and then you record transactions, which remove virtual cash. The little smiley envelopes (so cuuuute!) even tells you how on-track you are with spending in each category, and how long to stop spending to get back onto track. This should be just the thing to impose some discipline on my casual impulse purchases of fast food and magazines as I commute to and from work. As I understand it, if there is money at the end of the month in an envelope, you can choose to transfer it to another envelope. This is a big incentive-- I plan to try to save on lunch bought at work by brown-bagging it more, and reward myself for under-spending in that category by then going somewhere nice to eat with the savings. This app should make it super-easy to track that and thus stay motivated.
2) The Droid version of Anki. istemi enthusiastically recommended Anki on the iPhone, so I'm trying it out on the Droid. Seems a lot better than StudyDroid. I love how it adaptively plans out your lessons. There are lots of great decks out there to download. I downloaded "German for Reading Knowledge", and I think I might have finally found a way to make progress on language learning in a fragmented way. The only quibble is that initially it was adding cards to my study set in alphabetical order, so I had a huge string of "ab" verbs all lumped together; but I seem to have fixed that by poking at something in the settings. (Oh, and that "German for Reading Knowledge", which has over 2,200 cards, initially took an age to load... probably at nearly 2 years of age, my phone is way behind in memory and power. :P )
Not that I wanted to develop a smartphone addiction. Just the other day, I tried to make a phone call, and the touch screen was spazzing out, making it difficult. Remember when phones were just phones, and it was not difficult to make a phone call? This might be related to the fact that the moisture sensor has tripped. I have no idea why: I have never dropped it into water, let it get rained on, or even sweated on the phone. I have merely been living in an area with the normal range of humidity for a hospitable climate. I think they design these to always trip so that nobody ever gets warranty service.
Furthermore... This is horribly heretical. I can't believe I'm saying this. But. If/when I get another smart phone, I might have to consider getting an iPhone (oh, no!) because the Driod still does not support Indian language fonts.
Well, within the week, I now have 2 apps I might not be able to live without.
1) EEBA: virtual cash envelopes for personal budgeting. The envelope system is a brilliantly simple concept in personal budgeting. But, how do you manage when you don't carry around tons of cash, and do everything with the debit card? EEBA implements virtual envelopes. You label your envelopes, you put virtual cash into them, and then you record transactions, which remove virtual cash. The little smiley envelopes (so cuuuute!) even tells you how on-track you are with spending in each category, and how long to stop spending to get back onto track. This should be just the thing to impose some discipline on my casual impulse purchases of fast food and magazines as I commute to and from work. As I understand it, if there is money at the end of the month in an envelope, you can choose to transfer it to another envelope. This is a big incentive-- I plan to try to save on lunch bought at work by brown-bagging it more, and reward myself for under-spending in that category by then going somewhere nice to eat with the savings. This app should make it super-easy to track that and thus stay motivated.
2) The Droid version of Anki. istemi enthusiastically recommended Anki on the iPhone, so I'm trying it out on the Droid. Seems a lot better than StudyDroid. I love how it adaptively plans out your lessons. There are lots of great decks out there to download. I downloaded "German for Reading Knowledge", and I think I might have finally found a way to make progress on language learning in a fragmented way. The only quibble is that initially it was adding cards to my study set in alphabetical order, so I had a huge string of "ab" verbs all lumped together; but I seem to have fixed that by poking at something in the settings. (Oh, and that "German for Reading Knowledge", which has over 2,200 cards, initially took an age to load... probably at nearly 2 years of age, my phone is way behind in memory and power. :P )
Not that I wanted to develop a smartphone addiction. Just the other day, I tried to make a phone call, and the touch screen was spazzing out, making it difficult. Remember when phones were just phones, and it was not difficult to make a phone call? This might be related to the fact that the moisture sensor has tripped. I have no idea why: I have never dropped it into water, let it get rained on, or even sweated on the phone. I have merely been living in an area with the normal range of humidity for a hospitable climate. I think they design these to always trip so that nobody ever gets warranty service.
Furthermore... This is horribly heretical. I can't believe I'm saying this. But. If/when I get another smart phone, I might have to consider getting an iPhone (oh, no!) because the Driod still does not support Indian language fonts.
