Folders

Many have desired a way to better organize apps on their device. When Apple introduced the App Store, it also gave us multiple home screens. Organization got a bit easier with iTunes 9 which allowed for organizing home screens directly from within iTunes. Taking the idea even further, device-wide Spotlight made it easy for users to find apps no matter which home screen they were on, or even if they couldn’t be displayed because of display limitations. When iPhone 4.0 launches this summer though, users can also organize their apps into folders.

As you’d expect from Apple, the process is quite simple. Just tap and hold an app until it starts to wiggle, just like you were going to move its location. Then drop the app on top of another app’s icon and a folder will be created. The device will use the genre of app (Business, Games, etc.) to define the folder name, but this is, of course, changeable.

Allowing organization within folders will mean that users can now keep many more applications on their devices than before. In fact, Apple says that you could, in theory, store over 2,100 apps on the phone now.

Mail

If there’s one thing that constantly seeing “Sent from my iPhone” has taught me, it’s that iPhone and iPod touch (and now iPad) users all love checking their email. The next version of the iPhone OS will bring some improvements to this much-loved app. The one I’m most excited about is support for multiple Exchange accounts (which is great since I have two at work).

Like Mail.app on the Mac, this new version will also support a unified Inbox, allowing you to see messages from all of your accounts in one view. It will also support threaded messages, making correspondence easier if you’re an email junkie. It’s also easy to switch between inboxes with “fast inbox switching.”

Finally, the new version will also allow you to open attachments that are associated with third-party applications.

iBooks

The success of iBooks on the iPad is unquestionable. With the iPad not even a week old and only available in the United States, Apple has announced that over 600,000 iBooks have been downloaded.

Just like it’s iPad cousin, the iPod touch and iPhone version if iBooks will allow you to browse and buy books directly from the iBookstore. If you’ve already been buying content for your iPad, all of that will sync up through iTunes to iBooks on your iPhone. In addition, your bookmarks and information on the last page you were on will be synced as well.

What do you think of these announcements? Some of these features may only be available to iPhone 3GS or third-generation iPod touch users. Is it time for you to upgrade? Share your thoughts in the comments.

iTunes

The first time you noticed a smart “anything with a purple icon” was probably in iTunes. Besides OS X, iTunes is the only piece of software to ship with several built-in smart items. You’ve seen them before, specifically the 90’s Music, Classical Music and Recently Played playlists, to name a few. If you’ve read our previous articles, you know how those work now (and can just right click them to edit their criteria).

But when it comes to iTunes, one thing that invariably also comes to mind is an iPod. If you have at least one iPod, chances are you probably have several iPods. As such, you can set each iPod to sync specific music, playlists or even smart playlists. But since oftentimes our music libraries are larger than the capacity of our iPods, Apple has built in a few unique twists in smart playlist support for iTunes to “shuffle things up.” Here’s a few ideas to get some unique use out of them. (Keep in mind, you can sync multiple playlists, allowing you to mix and match some of these unique smart playlists with your own favorite content.)

Random Tunes

If you have a small iPod, such as an iPod shuffle, you might try a smart playlist that just pulls a random sampling of your music.

Music I Never Listen To

As Apple (perhaps secretly?) wants iTunes to become the Google of your media collection, it has built in tracking of how often you listen to your content. You could create a playlist that showed you all items with a play count of less than 1 for a jam list of music you’ve never heard.

My Top 10

If you are one to tag your songs with star ratings, you could create a playlist of your all time 10 best tunes, based on rating and frequency of play.

iPhoto

The iPhoto equivalent is, as you might have guessed, called Smart Albums. Similar to iTunes, iPhoto provides support for specialized criteria for searching, including criteria based on camera settings and support for Faces and Places. Here’s some ideas for unique iPhoto smart albums.

Group Shot

Keeping track of family photos is easy with faces. If you want to easily see all the photos from your own family, create a smart album that shows pictures based on the faces of any of your family members. (Make sure to set this one to “match any” instead of “match all.”)

European Vacation

In addition to tagging your photos by location (or GPS, if your camera is equipped), you could create a smart album that automatically grouped any photos taken in the countries you visited.

Those Pesky Movies

Newer cameras support the ability to record film, and for lack of a better place to store them, iPhoto imports them right along with your photos. But they’re all mixed up in albums and there’s no simple way to pick them apart. Just create a smart album that looks for the usual video extensions in any text. This should find them by their filename and let you view them all in one place.

Holiday Photos

If you have lots of family and friends who all love to take and share photos, you could create a smart album based on the date photos were taken. For instance, all photos that are in the range of December 20 through December 28 are likely my holiday photos. As more people send you their photos from the event, provided their camera tagged them with the correct date, they will automatically populate the album.

Aperture

Apple’s high-end photo management application also takes advantage of smart file management. Similar to iPhoto, you can use criteria based on EXIF metadata (aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc.). Despite the fact that Aperture doesn’t support Faces and Places like iPhoto, there are a number of additional options that can make photo management even easier.

A word of caution with Aperture, however. When creating a smart album, Aperture will only search the root level of the location where you store the album. For instance, if I’m viewing my entire library and create one there, it’ll search all photos. If I am in a particular project, however, the smart album will only search photos within that project. As usual, remember that deleting a photo in your library will also delete it from the smart album. You’re just “reorganizing” the same content with smart albums and not actually making a duplicate. (This applies to all smart items: folders, albums, playlists, etc.)

Missing Captions & Credit

Aperture provides extensive support for IPTC data (the metadata you add to your photos after the camera is done with them). You can use this to create albums that show which of your photos are missing captions or copyright information, should you wish to make sure all of your photos are properly tagged.

Need the Ratings

If you’re a photographer who loves to use Apple’s star system to rate your photos, consider a smart album that is based on showing you photos without a rating. It’s a quick and easy way to find any of those photos that slip through the cracks.

Apple’s own apps are certainly not the only to take advantage of “smart” organization. 1Password and NewsFire are just two examples of a growing breed of third-party applications that really harness the power of OS X’s database infrastructure to deliver content organized on the fly by your rules. If you’ve found interesting uses of smart playlists in iTunes or Smart Albums in Aperture or iPhoto, share them with us below.

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Apple’s original implementation of “smart” file management isn’t just limited to the Finder, and in fact, you’ve probably seen it more often in other applications like Address Book and Mail.

Here are some ideas of how you can harness the power of these two applications using the same idea as Smart Folders.

Smart Groups

Address Book provides support for smart groups which allow for dynamic content, just like a smart folder. As new content is added that meet your guidelines, the group will automatically update.

Creating a Smart Group is as simple as going to File and selecting “New Smart Group…” or by clicking the plus icon (+) in the lower left corner of the Address Book window. Then give your group a name and set of criteria. As you add your second criterion, you’ll have the choice for your group to consist of any of your rules or all of your rules.

Here’s some ideas for useful smart groups.

Upcoming Birthdays

Interested in who might have a birthday this month? Set the birthday criterion to include entries that occur within the next month. (This will include all birthdays within a month of the current date or when you click to view the group.)

Missing Email Addresses

To see a list of people who you do not have an email address for, set the email criterion to include entries that are not set.

My Coworkers

Most companies offer their employees an email address that uses the corporate domain. If you created a smart group for “email” that contains “yourdomain.com” then you will have a group that is always updated with all of your coworkers. An extra bonus, these Smart Groups also show up and autocomplete in Mail.

Or Anything You Want

Since the Address Book allows for a “notes” section on each card, you can use this region to “tag” cards and then use a smart group to show results based on that information. (You could also repurpose one of the other standard fields for this use.) For example, throwing the word “family” into the appropriate contacts’ card would allow for you to create a smart group that just showed your family members.

Currently, Smart Groups cannot be synced to iPods or iPhones. While they also cannot be synced through MobileMe to me.com or Windows computers, they can still sync through MobileMe to other Macs.

Smart Mailboxes

Mail has its own flavor of smart file management too with the implementation of smart mailboxes. To create one, use the Mailbox menu or the plus (+) icon in the lower left of the message viewer and select “New Smart Mailbox.”

Give your smart mailbox a name and choose the appropriate criteria for your mailbox. With the ability to create criteria based on recipient, subject, mailbox, date, message, attachment and more, you can create some pretty powerful mailboxes to help organize your workflow. Here’s a few suggestions.

Recently Viewed

Most people process tons of email on a daily basis and frequently people have multiple email addresses for different purposes. With all of these messages, is there an easy way to find that email you were looking at last night?

Sure! Create a new smart mailbox and select “date last viewed” and choose “is in the last” and specify a number of days.

Recently Sent

If I wanted to quickly find an email that I had sent recently, I could create a Smart Group that showed me messages in the mailbox “Sent” that were “date received” in the past 2 days. Also make sure you tick the “Include messages from Sent” checkbox.

Emails from My Family

Remember the family smart group we made in our Address Book earlier? We can create a smart mailbox to show us all the messages from those family members.

Select “Sender is Member of Group” and then choose the appropriate group from the drop down menu.

Similar to Smart Groups, Smart Mailboxes do not sync to iPods or iPhones nor to me.com or Windows computers through MobileMe. They will only sync via MobileMe to other Macs.

Do you use Smart Groups or Smart Mailboxes? Have any tips you’d like to share? Share them in the comments.

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Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. One of these is the idea of “Smart Folders” and with a little primer, you can begin using them to make your Mac experience easier (and faster).

A Brief History

The idea of these Smart Folders are not unique to OS X. In fact, the idea started originally in the mid ‘90s with the now defunct BeOS. When Dominic Giampaolo, a software developer for Be, began working for Apple in 2002, some of the best elements of the BeOS made their way into Apple’s modern operating system. We know these features as “Smart Folders” and Spotlight, both of which launched in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, two years after Giampaolo began working for Apple.

A “Smart Folder” (or “Search Folder” as Windows Vista calls them when Microsoft introduced its version in 2006) is based on the idea that this folder is basically a “virtual folder” of its actual contents. This virtual folder doesn’t physically store copies of its contents inside but rather utilizes a database to store attributes about the files (defined either by the system or the user). This offers several advantages: they have a small file size, the ability for on-the-fly fine tuning of the criteria used to define the content as well as allowing the content to dynamically update as new files meet the criteria. Whoa. What does all of that mean? We’re getting there.

Smart Folders Save Time

In short, Smart Folders save you time. You basically give them a list of rules to follow and they automatically fill themselves with content based on the criteria you’ve defined. It’s important though, to realize that these Smart Folders do not actually represent copies of the content, but merely virtually link to them. If you delete a file out of a Smart Folder, you’ve also deleted it from its original location.

How To Make Smart Folders

Making a Smart Folder is quite easy. In fact, if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, several of them have already been created. You might recognize them due to their trademark purple folder icon (also used to serve the same role in other applications, but we’ll discuss that in future articles). In the left side of a default Finder window, you’ll see an area called “Search For” with entries for “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Past Week” and some more. These are built in smart folders that automatically search your entire system for files meeting those criteria. But we can do far more powerful things with Smart Folders if we make our own.

1. To get started, when in the Finder, go to the File menu and select “New Smart Folder.” You’ll have a Finder window that looks like a search window. (You can also start this process simply by searching from a Finder window.)
2. Next, using the bar beneath the title bar of the window, select the location you’d like this folder to search. The default options are your Mac, your home folder and Shared (any other computers you may connected to). If you’d like it to confine the search to a specific folder, simply navigate to that folder and use the Spotlight function built into the Finder window. (Type something into the field to bring up a search; you can then delete what you typed to move to the next step).
3. Unless you’ve specified some phrase or string in the Spotlight search region in the upper right of the window, at this point you’re not going to be seeing any search results. Let’s give it some actual criteria to search.
4. Click the round plus (+) icon on the right side of the window to show another bar beneath the search location. Where it says “Kind” and “Any” is your first search criteria. These work in pairs. You can change “Any” to documents, images, movies or anything you want. Instantly, you’ll see your search results start to populate based on your selection. Perhaps instead of searching by kind, you want to search by name, contents or date. Clicking “Kind” will allow these changes as well as a mystical “other” option which gives you tons of options for a plethora of different uses. Since OS X is media friendly, you can also select criteria that corresponds to metadata in your media files, such as aperture value of a photo, sample rate for an audio file, video bit rate for video files and more.
5. You can continue to add additional criteria by clicking the plus and adding another row of criterion. Each additional criterion further fine tunes your search. For an item to appear in the results, it will need to meet every rule you have created for it.
6. If you want to save a Smart Folder search, click the Save button in the upper right of the window. Your searches are saved in “Saved Searches” inside the Library folder of your home folder. There’s also a checkbox to automatically add your new search to your Finder sidebar.
7. Editing a Smart Folder is as simple as right clicking it in the sidebar and selecting “Show Search Criteria” or selecting the same option from the gears menu once you’ve double clicked a saved Smart Folder.

Again, the beauty and power of Smart Folders comes from the fact that once you’ve defined the rules, this folder will automatically continue to update as new files are created or saved that meet its criteria.

Folder Inspiration

Smart Folders sound great and once you’ve set one up, you’ll see the process is pretty simple. It’s also pretty powerful but, for inspiration, here’s a few examples of interesting and useful Smart Folders that you could create on your system.

Recent Documents: To view all your recent documents, set the kind to document and the last opened date to within the last 3 days.

Important Files: If you use Finder labels, select “Other” and choose “File label.” Then pick the file label that matches your desired results.

By Device: Have several cameras? You can use “Device make” and “Device model” to specify a particular camera (as well as any other EXIF data).

Do you use Smart Folders? Have any tips you’d like to share or comments on this post? Let me know what you think; I’d love to hear your feedback.

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With Apple’s music oriented media event right around the corner, everyone is abuzz with thoughts about new iPods, Apple TV updates, tablet rumors and more. The one thing we can all but guarantee besides new iPods is an update to iTunes. But what will this version bring? Social aspects have been rumored, but there is still room for improvement. So, here’s my Top 10 wish list for iTunes 9.

1. More Stable & Efficient On Windows

This particular point doesn’t apply to me, as I am a Mac user, but I do know that the Windows version of iTunes has suffered in comparison to its Mac brethren. Though some of the programming technologies in the Windows world are not as robust as their Mac equivalents, I do hope Apple will continue to optimize iTunes as it adds new features. Currently, it’s just a resource hog.

2. Better Audiobook Support

iTunes is a great application to manage your audiobooks and Apple’s partnership with Audible makes it even easier to buy them. What really strikes me as problematic though is how cumbersome it is to sync specific audiobooks to your iPod or iPhone. At the moment, it’s either “all” or “none.” When you consider that some audiobooks have multiple files and some users have insanely huge collections of audiobooks, it really seems like an issue Apple would have refined already. Due to their length, most users listen to one or two audiobooks at a time and don’t need to bring their entire collection with them. The only solution to this dilemma is creating playlists for specific audiobooks and that’s more time consuming than it should be.

3. Better File Organization for Large Libraries

As our libraries of media content grow and grow, Apple is focused on being center stage in helping us organize it all. iTunes is a powerful application and supports a wide gamut of different file types (music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, podcasts, etc.). It would be ideal for Apple to allow users to manage those specific areas on different hard drives since some of us have iTunes libraries that are growing too fast to store on just one drive. We can work around this at the moment by turning off the “Keep iTunes organized” feature when adding new content, but a more elegant solution would be welcome.

4. Ability to Import Unencrypted DVD & Blu-ray Content

We all know there are licensing issues to work out, but since Apple feels its the company’s lot in life to manage all of my digital content, why not figure out a way to manage all of the physical content I have laying around too? If I can “find a way to decrypt my DVD” (hello VLC), then iTunes can make a copy of it. This has actually been rumored and I would love to see it come to fruition.

5. Support for HD content on iPhone & iPods

While at first this really doesn’t seem like an iTunes feature, I personally hate having to maintain two copies of content with compatible versions for my Apple TV and Mac (HD content) and my iPods and iPhone (SD content). For some cases this isn’t a problem, but I find myself watching a lot of HD podcasts and they simply will not sync. If Apple could resolve this issue, users wouldn’t have to download iTunes Store content like TV shows twice (one in HD and one in SD). They could just download the HD file and be ready to rock.

6. More Robust Tagging

There are lots of apps available (like MetaX) that give users the ability to tag their content with more useful information than what iTunes allows them to do on their own. Content from the iTunes Store features some of this useful information (like movie director, actors, etc.). Why can’t I edit this for my own content directly within iTunes? Why can’t I tag my own music as clean or explicit from within iTunes?

7. Lyric & Metadata Lookups

iTunes has the ability to lookup artwork for our own music that may be missing covers, but now that iPhones and iPods support lyrics, wouldn’t it be great if iTunes could search, download and tag your files with the appropriate lyrics? Better yet, it would be even better if iTunes could fill in missing metadata information like some third-party apps do.

8. More Robust Sharing Support

iTunes 4 brought about the ability to stream playlists to other iTunes users on a local network. This feature was hacked to allow users to stream across the Internet and Apple quickly released a patch to fix this. Since then, several vendors, first and foremost being SimplifyMedia, have risen up to provide this service again. While SimplifyMedia is great, a more ideal solution would show you your entire iTunes library, with podcasts, audiobooks, TV shows, and the like. To be honest, if Apple even rolled this out as a feature exclusive to Mobile Me users, and allowed the ability to view this content streamed via me.com, that would be enough to justify a membership to me.

9. Music Videos

Probably the smallest of all the content types in my library, music videos are just lumped together in my main library. How come there isn’t a separate section for music videos?

10. Easier Syncing Between Multiple Macs

At the moment, I sync my iPhone on my iMac, where the bulk of my media is stored (simply because it has the biggest hard drive). It would be great if I could sync my iPhone or iPods there for some content, but sync it to my laptop for contacts, calendars and iPhone apps as that content changes more frequently.

In short order, we’ll actually see what Apple announces at its media event. In the meantime, what features would you like to see added to iTunes 9?

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A number of different email clients are available for the Mac, but a new piece of software announced at MacWorld takes a new and different approach. Postbox is a new way to manage online communication, aiming to let you spend less time managing messages and more time getting things done. Built with powerful search and organization features, finding and browsing old messages is a simple process.

A video of the application in action can be seen at a recent presentation, and gives a great overview of what the app is capable of. The system supports all manner of email accounts and formats; IMAP, POP3, SMTP, Mobile Me, Gmail, RSS and Newsgroups. The software is noted to scale well, having been tested on databases of up to 30,000 messages.

The Main Interface

The main interface consists of folders, topics and search tabs. Folders and topics are used for categorizing and managing your email, and search tabs allow you to quickly view your contacts (generated based on all the messages you’ve received), images, attachments and links. Easy searching is central to the application and is given a great deal of attention.

The detail of the interface itself is impressive, feeling very much like a native Mac app. That said, it does feel slightly cluttered at times and there is undoubtedly room for further simplification in its look and feel.

The idea of ‘topics’ adds a different slant to traditional folder organization. These operate in a similar way to tags, and messages can be set to automatically be assigned a topic depending upon their contents or who they are from.

Conversations

As with many modern mail clients, the facility exists to display email messages in conversation threads. This is done in an accurate and visually appealing way, clearly displaying the details for each message along with a summary of who is involved with the conversation.

The sidebar area in a conversation is something I could see being very useful. It collects all the information which has so far been shared in a message thread: links, addresses, images, attachments — it’s all displayed in one place. This saves a great deal of time navigating back and forth through different messages.

Searching

While both Postbox and Mail.app are fantastic at cataloguing mail message content, Postbox takes displaying search results to a new and interesting level; emphasis is placed on context. When searching for a piece of text within a message, for instance, results show the matching results with a multi sentence abstract around it. Messages retain their original thread information, and searching for images shows all the related message information.

Sharing

With full integration to web services such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious, sharing information received via email is remarkably simple. Right clicking a link, for instance, brings up a context menu of useful export options:

Getting content from various web services into a new message is just as simple — the sidebar lets you pull in information directly from search engines, reference sources, and social media sites. Integration with Google is present through the application, though for now there doesn’t seem to be any link to this being a revenue stream for the developers (as is the case with applications such as Firefox).

Conclusion

After trying Postbox I would seriously consider it as an alternative to the standard Mail.app shipping with OS X. It takes a step forward in terms of features, offering far greater functionality than Apple’s basic email client. That said, I do enjoy the simple interface of Mail.app and there are a number of minor bugs which will need ironing out before the release of Postbox.

Postbox is currently in Beta stage, and you’re able to register your details to be notified of new developments. This can all be done through the Postbox site.

What are your thoughts on the application. Do you feel that it will prove to be a solid competitor to Mail.app, or are people more likely to continue the gradual move towards web-based email services? I’m sure Apple will be watching the development of this application carefully, and I would not be surprised if several of the features it offers make an appearance in a future version of Mail.app.

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Having done quite a bit of traveling for our move from Pennsylvania to Washington state, I was inundated with advertisements for ways to keep business cards, documents and travel receipts electronically organized. Unfortunately, none of these products worked on the Mac. In my quest to get organized and also to prepare for tax time I searched for an equivalent all-Mac solution and here’s the combination that has worked best for me.

Step One: The Hardware

I debated for quite a while on whether I should buy a new scanner since I already own a decent multi-function device. I suspect that many readers do as well and, while I cannot say that a special scanner is absolutely required, I do need to point out that receipts can be tricksy little items. There are no fixed/standard sizes and you never know when or where you will need to turn them or other paper items into digital documents. With that in mind I sought out an inexpensive, compact, Mac-friendly device with TWAIN support and settled on the Pentax DSmobile 600:

Pentax DSmobile 600 Scanner

While Mac support was a key factor, I wanted something that was highly portable (it comes with a travel bag) and that did not require external power – the Dsmobile 600 is powered solely through USB (cord provided). I deemed TWAIN support critical since I wanted to ensure compatibility with existing software and I hoped that my receipt-organizing solution would support this standard as well. I bookmarked the Pentax (I did not want to spend $115-135USD on it before finding the key element in my quest) and pressed on.

Step Two: The Software

While a specialized software package was not absolutely necessary – one could use a manual solution composed of a well-crafted Numbers spreadsheet, organized directories and decent file naming conventions – the goal was to make this task easy. Since my receipts were already somewhat disorganized, introducing more manual tasks into a new process would doom it from the start.

After an exhaustive search trough Google, Version Tracker, MacUpdate and many forums (including our fine forum) I settled on a $39.95 program called ReceiptWallet, developed by Scott Gruby.

The most basic description of ReceiptWallet is that it is a document organizer & repository similar to Papers in that it can store almost anything you throw at it. This makes it great for user manuals or other items you just do not wish to transcribe. While it can store everything, the true power of ReceiptWallet lies in the ability to import, interpret, itemize, report on and export financial data associated with receipts. After playing around with the demo version, I was confident enough in the software to warrant the purchase of the Pentax (it turns out that the model I chose is also one recommended by the developer – always a good thing) and a license for ReceiptWallet and started organizing my paper mess.

Working With Receipts & Documents

When you first start the program you create a new “library” that is either used for organizing documents or receipts. Each library type presents unique fields with which to categorize entries. Receipts have an associated merchant, amount, method of payment and potentially itemized entries whereas documents have titles, categories, URLs and other taxonomy elements. Fields are completely customizable in any library you create, but I suspect most users will settle on the defaults provided by the author.

ReceiptWallet Main Window

My main goal was to manage receipts so I began with a receipt library and started scanning any merchant slip I could scrounge. The software does an admirable job when attempting to discern the date and amount of the purchase. It is no easy task since every receipt is different and the condition that some where in was far from optimal. After taking a guess, the program allows you to make corrections, itemize any detail you wish to capture and tag the entry with a note. Again, you can add more fields to accommodate any level of detail required (e.g. department number, employee number, etc) and all this captured data is available via built-in reports and can be exported in a formate that most spreadsheet and financial programs can read.

Adding a receipt

Not Limited To Scanning

Organizing paper receipts was my primary goal but it turn out that that task is only part of the story. Much of what I/we purchase today is either delivered electronically or at least has a receipt which is delivered on-screen or e-mail. While OS X provides a handy “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” option in the Print dialog, ReceiptWallet lets you take this one step further and lets you create Droplets for each library as well as ReceiptWallet itself. Rather than hunt around in e-mail or use Spotlight to find old receipts or even license keys you can put those documents/elements right into an organized database with full searching & reporting capabilities, all by just “printing” them! The software would be worth it for just that feature alone. Imagine having all those Amazon, Apple Store, eBay & PayPal records immediately accessible or never having to submit a replacement request for a lost license key. Remember, though, that the software is not limited to receipts. You can save any HTML page or any document from any program as PDF and store it directly in an organized document library within ReceiptWallet.

Integrating It Into Your Personal Workflow & Mindset

ReceiptWallet doesn’t come with a magic wand that will turn you into an well-organized life form. You will need to find the best way to integrate it into your daily/weekly workflow. That’s easy for electronic documents and receipts but requires a bit of discipline at first when dealing with those bits of paper you quickly tuck away into bags or pockets each week. I suggest using a physical drop box where you place any receipt from any purchase during the week and then designate some small period of time during the week to process the data from the past seven days. That way you have a focused task for brief period time that is long enough to mentally allocate without considering it a distraction (which would probably be the case if you performed the task daily).

The title of this post includes the word “budget” and ReceiptWallet can be a powerful tool when it comes to helping develop and stay on a budget (which is one of the best ways to get started managing your finances). If you are diligent in scanning, importing & itemizing your expenditures, then you will know just how much you are spending on, say, groceries in general or even specific items and use that to change behavior (if necessary). You’ll know and have a record of anything that you can deduct from your health spending account (if you have one). You’ll even get a good picture of what you spend each week on eating out (this can be a real eye opener). You can use all this data to develop a baseline of what you think you should be spending and then use it to keep yourself honest. I guarantee you’ll save enough in one year to pay for the cost of the scanner and software if you use it to create and stick to a budget.

One final feature that I’ll mention (there are more facets to the software than I’ve touched on) is that the IRS (for those in the US) will also accept scanned receipts as evidence during audits, and ReceiptWallet makes it simple to keep solid backups of all your key data in the event the government comes-a-knockin’ at your door.

If you’ve been using ReceiptWallet for a while or have come across another solution for organizing your receipt and document mess, please drop a note in the comments if only to help the next pilgrim in search of the best means to getting his/her life in order.

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This morning, Apple released a software update for Apple TV owners which added the ability to access YouTube videos, in addition to content already present in iTunes. Not one to wait around, I installed it immediately, and it works well, but I can already see limitations to the service that surprised me.

Upgrading the Software

Accessing the software update was simple. Navigating to the Apple TV’s Settings menu with the Apple Remote, I clicked Software Update and was notified an update was available. I opted to install, and it immediately began downloading, with the familiar “download in progress” spinning indicator being displayed. When complete, I was asked to reboot the Apple TV.

During the reboot process, my TV screen temporarily lost input, and was then replaced with an Apple logo and progress bar. When the progress bar was completed, the Apple TV rebooted again, and I was treated to Apple TV’s startup video, oddly reminiscent of TiVo’s famous boot-up sequence. And when that was complete, I was back at my home menu with a new option: YouTube.

Adding YouTube to the Menu

YouTube becomes just another menu item for Apple TV, in parallel with Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts and Photos. Selecting the YouTube option presented me with a variety of still images, as album covers are shown in Music or TV Shows. And underneath the YouTube header, I had a few options, including Featured, Most Viewed, Most Recent, Top Rated, History and Search. Featured, Most Viewed, Most Recent and Top Rated mirror their same options you would find at YouTube.com.

Personal Viewing History and Search

The History folder tracks those videos you watch, and displays them in a descending column, with most recently viewed on top, as we’ve grown accustomed in Safari. Apple offers the ability to “Clear History”, but not to individually select clips to delete from that history, so if you’re watching items you don’t want someone else with access to the Apple TV to see, then you have to wipe the whole thing.

When it came to the Search function, I at first thought I might be yearning for a wireless keyboard, a la the ill-fated WebTV, but Apple, mirroring TiVo, makes it easy, with a navigable alphabet, selectable by remote. As I typed one letter at a time, the search results, on the right, would change immediately, without waiting for me to hit an enter or return button.

Quality and Questions

While it worked very well, finding videos of “beagles” or “fennec fox”, for example, I was surprised to find that instead of seeing the full array of results there, I only would be presented with one option, which match the first result from the YouTube site. It seems that the full library of YouTube is not yet fully available or searchable on day one, or the functionality is being limited to conserve bandwidth?

Watching a YouTube video was surprisingly clear on the 42-inch screen. While I expected more blurriness or grainy video, the quality was the same on the TV as it is on my laptop, thanks to a near-equivalent pixel count. Of course, given YouTube’s amateur video archives, the quality of the content and shaky camera work is not improved, no matter how big the screen is.

Conclusions

For a first pass at integrating the services, the YouTube/Apple TV relationship is off to a strong start. I believe with time we will see fuller search results, and maybe even an Apple channel on YouTube? Doesn’t it make sense to have all of Steve’s keynotes on YouTube as well as through QuickTime? Just a thought. While we’re still waiting for rented movies to make their way to my Apple TV via iTunes, YouTube is a great addition. Anybody who has an Apple TV today should make the time to update.

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