Category: Ramblings

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Amazon.com Prime Search

I received an e-mail from the wonderful promotions department at Amazon.com this morning with some good news:

Finding Amazon Prime-eligible gifts is even easier. Sign in to Amazon.com, search, and look for “Prime” in your results.

I very much appreciate that some much needed help as arrived for making the most out of my Amazon Prime membership. It can be difficult to find which items are eligible without clicking on individual items in your search results. However, what if you want to limit your searches to just Prime-eligible items? Amazon has left us in a conundrum.

In comes a handy-dandy implementation of Amazon Web Services. The ability to Search Amazon.com for Amazon Prime Eligible Items. While this little tool does not offer a great deal of eye-candy, it does what it advertises. Give it a try and find your Free Two-Day Shipping-eligible items a bit easier.

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Health Care Flexible Spending Account: To opt in or out?

For those of you who just started a new job (read: me), you were probably presented with a great deal of information about your new benefits package. From health insurance to retirement accounts, one word sums it up: unfamiliar. Sure, your employer provides a great deal of information about your available choices, but it can be difficult to sort through all the information to just get to an answer before your enrollment period comes to an end. I was able to pretty easily work through health and dental insurance and after a bit of research I felt comfortable with my 401k. The most confusing part for me? Health Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FCA).

An FCA essentially allows you to set aside pre-tax dollars to be used for qualified health care expenses throughout the year. As with your medical/dental/retirement benefits, your FCA contribution also neatly comes out of your paycheck each period. Here’s the kicker: if you don’t use it all by year-end, you lose it.

In comes the Flexible Spending Account Calculator. This handy-dandy tool helps to simplify your decision on whether to opt-in to this type of program, and even more importantly, how much to deposit. As a 22 year old with no dependents, I’ve decided it’s probably not for me; though YMMV.

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Online vs. Desktop

With the Web 2.0 movement (technically, is it still a movement?) booming and more and more feature-rich sites being launched everyday, this question is now at the forefront: do I use conventional desktop applications or move to web-centered, online apps?

Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Google Reader, BlueDot, Digg, del.icio.us, Plaxo, Google Docs & Spreadsheets. To name a few. These “enhanced websites” offer a variety of functionality from e-mail to bookmarking to address book synchronization and even “Word” and “Excel” documents. Rather than firing up Office or Mail.app, why not just launch Firefox or Safari?

I have been wrestling with this question for the past few weeks as I have been discovering and sampling a breadth of online replacements for my favorite desktop-centered applications. To be sure, there are challenges with both offerings; not the least of which is the requirement for an active Internet connection to even access the long list of applications I’ve listed above. On the flip-side, how many hours per day (on a “normal” day) are you without a connection to the Internet? For some of you, it may be a sizable amount of time. For me? Not including my BlackBerry (which technically gives me 24/7/365 access to the web unless I’m on an airplane), I’m not connected (and not sleeping) at maximum 9 hours per day. As wireless becomes even more pervasive, that number will keep dropping until “I don’t have a connection” is no longer an excuse.

I’ve always been one to use desktop applications. When I was younger, I would go through a great deal of trouble in order to get Outlook working for my e-mail accounts. Now, I seek out the best of the best for my desktop apps. Mail.app, NewsFire, Address Book, iCal, OpenOffice (once again, to name a few). I like the integration on my desktop, how things click together and just work.

I’m a stickler for aesthetics. One of the biggest reasons I switched to Mac last year was because of the beauty of OS X. A functionally sound (built on a UNIX backend), aesthetically astounding operating system installed on a beautiful piece of hardware. Again, that’s where these desktop applications come in. They’re designed to take advantage of the aesthetic abilities of OS X and fit right in. However, as more Web 2.0 advancements pop up here and there the lines between a desktop application and webpage are continuing to blur. With AJAX we are no longer plagued with constant page refreshes. New transition and movement effects allow the user to feel like they are truly interacting with the webapp, rather than just merely using it.

While webapps are getting prettier, they still are a long way from the seamless integration of the desktop. So if it’s not truly aesthetics, what makes me ponder this question of online vs. desktop? One word: Synchronization.

I work on not one, but two (and if you get technical, three) different computers everyday. What does this mean? It means I read e-mail and RSS feeds on 3 computers. It means I have 3 different copies of my calendar and address book. It means e-mail attachments and USB keys are my best friends. It means it’s a pain to keep all 3 computers on the same page.

I would read e-mail throughout the day while at work (or on my BlackBerry) just to arrive home and have all of that e-mail still unread. I would skim my RSS feeds and mark them all as read throughout the day just to arrive home and have 192 articles waiting for me. I’d add an entry to my address book just to…well, you get the picture.

I wanted the state of my information to be known across all of my devices. No matter where I was, no matter what computer/handheld/kiosk I was using everything was updated. Now I’m not saying that a few webapps have gotten me to the point of true synchronization. No, that day is still a ways away. But it has helped me take a few strides forward.