TECHNOLOGY AIM

Do you need You Need A Budget? While that might seem like a typo (or some kind of obscure Zen koan), we’re simply posing a question regarding the app called You Need A Budget, which we’ll call YNAB (like they do) from here on out to eliminate any confusion. YNAB does pretty much only one thing – help you create a budget and stick to it – and it does it really well. But is it worth its relatively steep annual fee? Let’s take a look. After installing YNAB, you’ll be asked to connect your banking and credit accounts if you’d like. Doing so lets the app pull in all of your financial transactions which can then be assigned to different spending categories. If you aren’t comfortable handing over this information, you can also enter transactions manually, although the company uses some pretty serious encryption algorithms, so security doesn’t seem like an issue. In either event, you can initially assign transactions to any of the app’s five categories: immediate obligations; true expenses; ...

Remember the old days when you used to have to go outside to see what the weather was like? Well, Weather Dock, a desktop app for Mac, eliminates that need by placing a handy little icon in your dock that can show you the current conditions, or a range of other information.  Of course, nothing beats getting a little bit of fresh air to find out what the weather outside your window is like. But if that’s simply not practical, Weather Dock is a great stand-in. Once you download it from the Mac App Store, it automatically appears in your dock. Allow it to know your location and it will instantly bring up the current weather conditions. Depending on the number of icons in your dock, this can be a bit difficult to see, as more dock apps makes each icon a bit smaller, but still, you should be able to at least be able to see the current temperature at a glance. Weather Wizard Things get really interesting when you click on the icon, though. Do so and you’ll be presented with a colorful...

  Thanks to ever-advancing technology, it’s become easier than ever to keep track of your personal finances using a wide range of software solutions, apps, and cloud-based programs. One service that consistently stands out in this space is Getting Started When you fire up Mint for the first time, you are asked to add any accounts you are interested in tracking. These include checking, savings, investment and credit card accounts. To link an account, you simply enter the login details for each and the software does the rest, bringing your transactions directly into the Mint interface. While it might sound a bit scary to turn over those credentials to a third party, the software takes extra precautions to safeguard your data, including storing login details in a separate database protected with multi-layer encryption. Mint is also owned by Intuit, the same company that owns TurboTax and QuickBooks, so they’re no strangers in handling and protecting sensitive data – and they are ce...