Apps

There’s been talk around the Web the past few days about a new app that can help you reduce junk mail.  It’s put out by a company called Readabl, Inc. and how it works is simple:  You take a picture of any junk mail that would wish to stop receiving – magazines, catalogs, fliers, credit card offers, the Yellow Pages, etc. and they will submit a request to the company on your behalf to stop the unwanted mail.  Readabl, Inc. has supposedly put together a large database of company information which they will they will then match to the photo you submitted.

Cool, hey?

The app is free for the moment although I would be definitely willing to pay for something like this.

You will have to provide your name, address and an e-mail so that they can remove your name and address from company mailing lists.   I have to admit that this did give me pause initial as I couldn’t help but wonder what they planned on doing with my personal information (name, email address, street address).  But according to their privacy policy, they do not share any of our information with third parties:

PaperKarma does not sell, trade, or rent your information to third parties. We only share your information for the purposes of fulfilling your request to unsubscribe with the original sender (who generally has your information already). The shared information includes the uploaded image, your name, and your physical address. Certain companies require a phone number.

Your Email address is not shared unless you explicitly opt-in—on a per-company basis—to our Paper to Digital conversion program. We will never share your information due to a creative interpretation of our privacy policy. You either request that we share, or else we won’t. There is no grey area.

They did post some examples and results to a blog entry that you might want to check out.  The app is available for iOS, Android and Windows phone.  If you experience excessive amounts of unwanted paper mail, this app might be worth checking out.

Download PaperKarma from App Store HERE

Visit the developer’s Web site HERE

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I have quite a collection of RSS Feeds (industry related as well as personal) that I read every day and Google Reader wasn’t just cutting it. So I tried out several RSS Readers that sync with Google Reader and one stood out from the rest: NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire displays all of your feeds in the left column so you can click on any feed to display the individual posts. Clicking on the Latest News Smart List will display posts for all of your feeds in one window.

What I like is the ability to categorize my folders. For instance, I have a “Mac” folder in which I store all of my Mac feeds. Then, I need only to click on the folder to display all of the feeds in one window.  Likewise, I have my other feeds organized into separate folders as well:  Tech, iPad, Language, Home/Garden, etc.  Oh – and sorting is extremely flexible.  You can sort subscriptions by name, unread count, attention, and last updated, and you can sort the feed columns by date, source, subject, creator or title.

Navigation is easy – click the down-arrow key on your keyboard to move from one article to another. If you want to read the rest of an article, either click the Headline or press the right arrow key and a new tab will display the full article. All open tabs are displayed in the right pane so you can quickly navigate to them. If you instead prefer to read the article in your default browser, right-click the headline and choose “Open in Default Browser”. If you prefer, you can set NetNewsWire to always load full articles in your browser from the program Preferences.

By keeping the program open, you can always have an up-to-date list of feeds. The number of new posts is displayed on the icon in the Dock. And if you use more than one computer, it’s nice to know that all your feeds are synced to Google Reader. This way, you have access to all of your updated and synced feeds when on a different machine.

NetNewsWire has support for one of my favorite services – Instapaper.  Use Ctrl + P to send an item to Instapaper or select News > Send to Instapaper from the menu.  You can also send items to Delicious, to Twitter, to your own blog or e-mail a link to a specific article.

In my opinion, NetNewsWire is a flexible, feature-rich and extremely customizable RSS reader that is definitely worth a glance. It certainly makes my life a lot easier.

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Awhile ago, I was looking for a timer application for my Mac which would provide a reminder when a specified period of time had passed, such as a reminder to add the fabric softener to the wash.  I checked out such several applications until I stumbled upon TTimer (the concept of the program is to time the brewing of tea). When a specific time period has passed, an acoustic alarm plays and a message box displays informing you that the time period is over.

What I especially like about TTimer, is that you can have multiple alarms going at the same time. For instance, you can time a work break, time your laundry and time a pie in the oven all at once. You can also pause and resume a timer, save a time for future use and display all active times in one dialog box.

You can see all of your timers in the TTimer Preferences pane.  This is from where you can add new and remove existing timers.  You can also add and delete timers from the main timer screen as well as from the menu.  I find this quite the versatile little app.

Oh and by the way…it’s free!

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