A Whole Lotta Nothing

SendTab: a great simple app for managing screens

For the last year I've been using my friend Ben's app Sendtab to manage all the different places I find interesting content. He originally built it as a way to send anything from his laptop to a mac mini attached to his home TV (he cut cable and was constantly watching online video). I started using it soon after it was built and it's become a killer app, as I use it every day on at least three devices.

I mostly blame Twitter for this very First World Problem, but I read Twitter each morning on my iPhone when I'm slowly getting out of bed. As Twitter has replaced tools like Delicious for link sharing, I've found friends sharing interesting links, articles, products, etc almost every morning. Whenever I think "wow, I need to check that out later on my Mac after I get up" I use Sendtab. Same goes for viewing Twitter on an iPad (especially if the link leads to some flash content I can't view right then and there).

Sendtab is a pretty simple thing, you just click a bookmarklet or copy a URL to an iOS app and you can save a URL to your pile to view later on other devices (and you can optionally direct it at a specific device). Why is this useful? For me, I can move anything interesting from my iPhone to my desktop computer and view it hours later. I've also got a GoogleTV attached to my living room TV so when someone points out an hour long lecture worth watching or a hilarious YouTube video I want to show my family, I save those to SendTab as well, pulling them up on my TV via GoogleTV's home screen bookmarks.

I know Instapaper is a good app for tracking articles among many devices, and Boxee enables you to "watch later" any video you find online, but I find SendTab is a nice simple silo for tossing everything interesting I want to check out on some other device. It's also handy for "I'm going out the door to the airport and want to keep reading that NYT article I'm halfway through" by letting you send links to specific named devices (the iOS app can fetch these and bounce directly to the URL). 

To date it's been a simple web app. Ben recently put out a real iOS version of it as well for 99 cents. I also use the Sendtab extension for Chrome that adds a nice big Sendtab button to my browser. If you read/watch the internet on a variety of devices throughout your day, check out Sendtab, it's good simple software that does exactly what it was designed for.

Warby Parker: the bees knees

 

The Internet's Pal Adam released this new commercial today for Warby Parker, the hip online eyeglasses company.

Four short years ago I wrote a guide to finding cheap eyeglasses online, and one of my principal takeaways was that for most cheap eyewear sites, you have to wade through hundreds-to-thousands of options trying to find something cool. My tips certainly help, but it's still quite a bit of work to find something good and you are risking a few bucks on an unknown.

A couple years ago, a friend (can't remember who, perhaps Lane Becker? Anil Dash?) said the next big wave in business was "becoming the Zappos of anything." What they meant was even though there may be a crowded market for whatever is sold online, the market is ripe for someone to come in and provide the absolute best experience possible backed by great customer service.

I tried out Warby Parker last summer and loved it, buying two pairs of glasses I wear to this day. I've been meaning to write up my experiences with it ever since. Adam's commercial reminded me that I should write it up.

Buying cheap eyeglasses online is challenging for the following reasons:

• there is too much selection at most sites
• you never know what you are going to get sight unseen
• it takes a lot of technical knowledge to figure out the sizes of temples, nose bridges, etc
• at most sites, stupid glasses you would never wear are right next to cool looking ones, which are surrounded by 200 ho-hum options 

It's as if the people behind Warby Parker looked at every weakness in the online glasses buying process and came up with a solution, turning the whole thing into a positive.

The selection feels (I hate to use the word, but it is apt) curated. Instead of offering 500 options, there are about 25 and they're all pretty cool looking. The 5 pair try-it-on offer is terrific, letting you pick from all their styles to see what actually fits your face before you commit to buying them. The try-on is also free, which is incredible. Finally, when you do buy a pair, it's a decent price about half to one-third of what a nice eyeglasses shop would charge, and you get great customer service in the form of personal emails to you letting you know when they are made and shipped, and they check up on you after get them to make sure you are happy. Every single bummer thing about my original eyeglasses article is solved by Warby Parker, plain and simple (oh, and they donate a pair to charity when you buy a pair on top of everything else).

Last year I picked out three or four different designs I thought were all hits, but after I got the try-on pack, only one frame looked right and was the right size. It fit me so perfectly I bought two pairs in different frame colors and I recently scratched my favorite pair right across my normal eye path so I have switched to the second backup pair since. I would say in the future, I can't see buying glasses online from anywhere else (the added price of $95 versus maybe $40 elsewhere is totally worth it for the time-savings), especially since they started opening showrooms in a few select cities. The try-on pack was pretty fast, but it was a small pain to mail it back in, and I can't wait to try on every design quickly in their store.

Warby Parker didn't give me money to say this, didn't give me anything for free, and never even gave me a discount. I tried them on a whim last year and I've been nothing but satisfied ever since. They truly are the Zappos of eyewear and totally worth checking out.

Crap I love: The Tiko portable iPhone/iPad holder

Last fall, I bought a Tiko iPhone/iPod holder to prop up my iPhone while playing movies on planes, after hearing about it on Not Martha.

On my way out on the last trip, I decided to throw this barely-larger-than-a-business-card holder in my backpack in case I needed it.

After a cross country trip where I watched about five hours of video on my iPad, I'm happy to report that this designed-for-iPhone stand is barely heavy duty enough to work for holding an iPad on a airplane tray table.

Here's a shot of it holding my iPad on a desk. Best ten bucks I ever spent.

Crap I love: the Napoleon pocket

Love for the Napoleon jacket, originally uploaded by mathowie.

In the past few months, I've become the proud owner of two jackets with a new-to-me feature called the Napoleon pocket. Obviously, it's named after the dude and his famous pose of having one hand halfway obscured into his clothing and it's becoming more common on hiking and cycling jackets.

In traveling around I've quickly come to love my Napoleon pocket jackets to death mostly because it's the perfect place to stash an iPhone/iPod for the following reasons:

• If you stash one in the pocket and then wrap half of your headphone cord around your device, there's a perfect amount of headphone cord sticking out, but not so much that it gets stuck in everything. You can put on and take off messenger bags, you can fall asleep in an airplane seat, and you can stand in a super crowded subway car without ever getting tangled up in a huge cord.
• Stashing in a normal pant pocket risks scratches from change and keys, but up high it's usually alone
• The small chest pocket is a perfect size for an iPhone/iPod
• With the iPhone button on the cord, you can just stash the phone into your pocket and forget about it, pausing and advancing music with the cord control

I've also found the pocket handy when getting to an airport or grabbing a rental car because it's a great temporary pocket you won't forget about and that you can quickly find again without having to dig through other stuff. I don't know what I'm going to do this summer when it's too warm to wear a jacket as I'm getting daily use out of this feature.

Crap I love: Signal turns your iPhone into a really nice remote control

I've been hoping that someone was working on using the iPhone browser as a media controller and when I saw Signal, I decided to give it a try.

It works like this: you install the app and it runs an internal webserver that you connect to using safari on the iPhone. Whatever is running in iTunes on your computer shows up on the phone exactly as if it was in the iPod mode (with album art, controls, etc). So if you have an airport express hooked up to a stereo, you point your iTunes at the speakers and start playing some music, then walk away from your computer.

Once you pull up Signal in your phone, you can control your entire iTunes library remotely. You can pick playlists, set them to shuffle, change to specific songs, try different genres, even pull up podcasts and video. The interface on the iPhone is really what sells it -- it looks and functions exactly like a real iPhone app, but it's all in safari. It's really quite amazing and turns the phone into a whole house audio remote for me.

24 hours with the iPhone: my dream mini computer

After my initial problems, I got a new iPhone from my nearby Apple store and spent several hours using it. My first reaction is that it's very good, meeting the almost impossible expectations I had for it. Photos are fun and look great, movies are nice and will work great on planes, and the iPod functionality looks good.

The thing that really knocked my socks off was Safari.

I do almost everything in a web app, and even with my blackberry pearl I was stuck with a crippled browser that could only use about half the apps I need. It was a breakthrough over my last device (which was painful for more than 1 or 2 web page views) but I never thought having a full copy of safari on a phone would be so liberating (especially since I only use firefox on my mac).

I have a set of tasks I normally do to keep up on all the workings of metafilter, but I used to only be able to check email and read the front pages of my sites on the pearl. Typically that was the bare minimum and I would wait until I got to a desktop to finish the rest of my work. Last night while catching up on some fluffy TV, I used my iphone for about two hours and it was pretty close to what I do with a laptop. I could check the sites, use all my admin tools. Ajax effects worked throughout and I could finally check my bank balance from my phone (my bank's site requires javascript and locked out my last 2 phones).

Usually before I go to bed, I have to sweep through half a dozen sites and apps to make sure everything is on the up and up. I learned that I could do everything on the iPhone, and I could do it from anywhere on earth. This is going to be great for airports and other places where I used to feel bored, trapped, and in dire need of internet access.

So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop. Once I get more used to two-thumb typing, the last limitations that keep it from feeling like a real computer will be gone.

Crap I love: Wesabe

After working on my own for a year, this past summer I finally got around to examining my finances. I did what most people do: I got a copy of the latest Quicken, spent a week entering data into it, and then I stared at graphs wondering how on earth my spending always seemed to go up when my income went up, even though it didn't feel like I was going on new shopping sprees.

I quickly found Quicken to be a bear. The category system is a pain, and every charge can only have one category attached. Making new categories and arranging subcategories would frequently crash Quicken 2007 for the Mac, making me lose work in the process. Like every other time I've tried to use some piece of financial software, I eventually gave up.

About a month ago, I started using the Wesabe beta (co-founder Marc Hedlund is a friend of a friend). The app has lofty aim of helping you track spending, realize your goals, and share tips with everyone. There are also social effects, where people using the same merchant can post reviews, allowing you to surf around for a new mechanic or grocery store based on other members' satisfaction and spending.

For me, the main draw was simply having a powerful web version of something like Quicken, but flexible like flickr or delicious. Instead of categories, there are tags. And you can put any number of tags on something, and sort spending per tag. This is a really big breakthrough. A few things I discovered from doing this:

• I tagged every gas station purchase with gas and auto. With a single click, I could see how much I spent just on gasoline each month and I could also see how much I spent overall on owning cars (by tagging all payments and repairs with auto).


• Among the dozens of gas fill-ups I had this year I noticed some were for roadtrips, so I could tack on a tag for that single trip (and add the tag: travel), then tag every other purchase from that trip with the city name. One click on the roadtrip city name and I could see how much that trip cost me, and I could also see how much travel in general cost me each month.


• I've taken to tagging any purchase that is a gift to myself, or an extravagance, or any non-necessary thing with: extra. In a click, I can see how much money I waste each month on silly gadgets, bike upgrades, and wacky t-shirts. There was never an easy way to get that kind of data from Quicken.

The other smart thing Wesabe does is make data entry easy. My bank gives me some ugly metadata that usually just features the address of the business where a charge was made. In Quicken, I'd have to memorize 1590 Booth Bend road equalled Lowe's Hardware and I'd have to categorize every purchase by hand. Wesabe is pretty slick in that you put a description in once for a merchant, then the app finds each and every purchase ever made at that same chunk of metadata, and automatically copies the tags and description for the first one you marked. Thanks to this feature, I tagged and described an entire year's worth of purchases in about 90 minutes. Now, I do weekly updates from my bank data and it takes just a few minutes to keep everything up to date.

The app is still new, and about the only drawbacks I've found is that the history reporting and graphing doesn't feel completely built out yet (and I've heard lots more is to come in that realm). I'm used to Quicken's graph magic and Measuremap and Google Analytics where you can click on any bar graph and figure out what exactly caused a spike. At the moment, the bar graphs simply report your patterns in spending but lack any sort of "zoom" feature to get more detail.

It didn't take long for me to fall in love with Wesabe. At every point where Quicken stood in the way of my progress with ease-of-use roadblocks, Wesabe makes it painless. Now that it's open to the public, the Tips and Goals sections might get built out more and the social aspects will kick in, but at the very least, the accounting section of the app is truly killer and helping me finally get a handle on my spending.

Wesabe (free, probably paid pro options in the future)

Crap I love: Zombie Pumpkins

I've never used stencils to create a design on a pumpkin before, but after I watched a friend do it the other day while my freehand pumpkin came out looking like crap, I realized it was worth the time and effort, and wasn't too difficult.

I searched all over last night for good designs and I have to say Zombie Pumpkins wins hands down on stencil design quality. There's a paypal access thing (you can pay whatever you feel like from $2 on up for unlimited access for this halloween season) but after I chipped in a fiver, I got a password and could print anything I wanted. The site also has loads of helpful tips.

This was my first stencil, done in about 15 minutes:

and I was happy with the results. Then I tried something more difficult. It took about 45min and a lot more patience:

I can't say enough good things about Zombie Pumpkins. They have loads of cool designs and they're easy enough to follow that anyone could do them.