The Far Side of Tech

I’ve been playing around with Digsby today by way of an invite from Ars Technica, and it has quickly become my new favorite IM client. The beauty of Digsby is that it combines the IM aggregation from the likes of Trillian and Pidgin with the social networking aggregation of 8Hands. Oh, and it lets you keep track of all your e-mail accounts as well. Simply put, it’s become my one stop for communicating online.

I’m running it in Vista and overall I’m finding it to be a much more enjoyable experience than Trillian 3 Pro. I’m not sure of the cause, but Trillian 3 has been overwhelmingly sluggish for me in Vista. I would see everything from increasingly long text input delays, to issues with Trillian having trouble with simple tasks like repainting the chat windows when switching between conversations. I’ve tried reinstalling and troubleshooting Trillian many times and nothing seems to have helped.

For me, Digsby certainly couldn’t have picked a better time to launch into beta. I’m tired of waiting for Trillian Astra, Cerulean Studio’s long-awaited upgrade to the Trillian platform which has been hyped up for its IM and social networking aggregation. Honestly, I’m tired of waiting because Astra’s development doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

We first caught word of Astra’s revamped interface and new social features back in November 2006, and its been in private alpha even prior to that announcement. Current word from the Cerulean Studio blog is that there is still no release date for Astra. And of course, the fact that they haven’t even gotten to beta yet is disheartening.

Currently, I’m using Digsby to connect to my AIM, Gtalk, Facebook, and multiple web mail accounts. I’ve been meaning to test it with my work IMAP account to double-check the error reported by Ars, but for some reason it won’t connect to that server. Otherwise, Digsby has been running stably for me and with far less slowdown and headache than Trillian. It doesn’t yet feature Twitter or video chat support, but I’m sure these will come in time.

Digsby also has one of the best auto-updating features of any Windows app I’ve seen. Just before I started writing this post, I launched Digsby and it instantly began fetching and installing an update without my intervention and then proceeded to sign me into my accounts as normal. It didn’t even require a restart of the app! I would describe the upgrade experience as thoroughly Mac-like in its simplicity–a trend Digsby carries over to some of its chat styles which seem to be lifted straight out of Adium.

Overall, I’m impressed with Digsby enough that I’m going to use it as my primary IM application. This marks a deviation from my 7+ year (!) devotion to Trillian. I’ll also start evangelizing it to all of my PC owning friends because, honestly, who wouldn’t want a single app to handle all of their web communication? There isn’t a Mac or Linux client yet, but they have a sign-up form up to let you know when they’ll be available. If you’d like to try Digsby, Ars Technica is sponsoring 5000 invites; just enter arstechnica as the invite code in their registration form.

I’m not sure what’s keeping Cerulean Studios from moving forward with Trillian Astra, but whatever it is I hope they get that sorted out soon. Digsby is here now and has already converted this Trillian devotee. I can only imagine how many more will follow…

As of today Mint.com, the much-hyped Web 2.0 personal finance site, is open to the public. This also means that their NDA has expired, so I’ll finally be able to share what I’ve learned about the service while beta testing it these past few weeks.

Please note that the screenshots on this page were grabbed from Mint’s feature page. They mentioned that they would make screenshots available to bloggers and press, but I have yet to see any pop up on their press resource page. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any screenshots of my own because every page is chock full of private financial data.

Overview

If you’re at all interested in keeping track of your spending habits but just can’t find the motivation to configure and update traditional financing software, then Mint is exactly what you’ve been looking for. It allows you to track the activity across multiple accounts, including checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, all in one convenient location.

Using Mint

After the initial sign up is completed you then configure Mint to keep track of your various accounts. Upon successful authentication for each account, which they assure is bank-level secure, Mint then gives you an overview page showing your total cash and debt, and a nifty comparison between the two. It also allows you to get a quick glance at your current spending trends–something which really deserves special mention: Mint’s intelligent tracking for spending trends is by far its best feature.

Spending Trend Analysis

While it offers the ability to see all of your transactions in a typical list format (more on this list later), Mint’s trend analysis brings all of that data to the next level. At the top of the “Spending Trends” page you have a pie chart that organizes your spending into useful categories like “Bills”, “Entertainment”, and “Food and Dining”. By clicking on an individual slice of the pie you then get a more specific view of your spending within that category. When looking at the “Entertainment” slice I’m presented with another pie chart that separates my spending into “Arts”, “Movies and DVDs”, and “Other”.

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