Finally.

I’ve been using You Need a Budget (YNAB) for over a year and I’ve been very happy with it. The YNAB implementation is unique in the finance management software market but it’s based on a simple model called “envelope budgeting.” YNAB preaches “give every dollar a job” and the desktop app does a good job encouraging proper budgeting. I’ve discussed this at length on Nerds on Draft episode 19. This week they released YNAB 5 and it’s clearly not aimed at me.

Visor is billed as an assistive app for those times when you need to read but the font, lighting, and your age make it impossible. Let’s just pretend that we know other people with that problem. Or better yet, let’s pretend we actually read the “fine” print on credit card statements. Here’s a simple example of how effective Visor is at magnifying and inverting colors. Visor isn’t intended to be used as a camera (although it does have a camera button) so these images are screen grabs of the interface.

Safari for iOS is one of my favorite browsers, simply because it’s so fast. The content blockers in iOS 9 has only made me love it, and the web, more. Even with all of this Safari love, I’m still just as likely to send a page to iCab because it’s my utility belt for the Internet. I’ve already started this new year by giving more attention to the apps that are truly exceptional instead of looking for new apps.

Here’s a funny little presentation from the creator of Pinboard, Maciej Ceglowski. There’s some mild shaming but it feels mostly like desperate pleas for sanity. As computers get faster, the web gets slower and design gets worse. The Vimeo page is 2.41 MB after blocking 8 trackers.

I wrote about losing one of my favorite “news” apps and how that’s changed my habits. I used this as an opportunity to up-end my entire reading process as an experiment in knowledge acquisition. This has mostly been a success and a surprise. The first surprise was Wikipedia and related community driven repositories. On iOS, there is no shortage of Wikipedia apps. As it turned out, I’ve owned one of the best for the past 5 years.

Weeks before my holiday vacation, I refresh a long-standing list — my “things to try” during vacation list. This very Web site began life on that list. This year is no different and I thought I’d share them as I complete them. Today’s post is about the Wolfram Programming Language. I wanted to learn at least the basics of the language because I think it’s one of the most impressive achievements in general-use computing this decade and I knew very little about it.

2015 has been the year of great television. There’s never been a year quite like this with consistently great and surprising shows.1 Here are my “hot takes.” Maybe I’m abnormal, but it’s really thrilling that Netflix and Amazon are both making some of the best television around. I haven’t cared what was playing on the big three for quite a long time. Unfortunately it’s also getting harder to avoid subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime for anyone that’s interested in the future of television.

App Santa is back and there are a lot of great apps on sale. By way of @pslobo

If you search the archives here, you’ll see that I’ve been a huge fan of the iOS news app Zite for years. If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably seen my early morning and weekend reading-links filled with science, beer, politics, and technology. Most of that content was surfaced for me by Zite. Zite was special because it drew from multiple sources. It had a few of their own sources, which were mostly click-bait or teen-dream content, but the real power came from my RSS sources, Twitter account and an amazingly specific preference engine to tune content.