FOSSwire

Many financial applications, such as KMyMoney, can be very useful, however there is often quite a learning curve associated with them.

Buddi is an open source personal budgeting application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X that is designed to keep things very simple, yet still be usable for the average home user to keep track of their finances.

Installation

Buddi is written in Java, and thus needs you to have a working installation of Java on your system to run. Whether you have Java and how to get it differs depending on your operating system. Mac users should be fine, Windows users can grab an installer, and this guide should help Linux users.

Once you've got Java, you can get the appropriate download for your system from the Downloads page. Here on Kubuntu Linux, I get the .deb and double-click it to install (which actually does Java as well for me if I don't have it, but your results might differ).

Interface Impressions

On the Linux platform (and possibly elsewhere too), Buddi unfortunately sports a rather generic, and ugly, Java interface. This makes integration with the rest of your desktop poor. This is a symptom of the way it is developed and its cross platform Java nature, however, and something that can be difficult to avoid.

The main interface is divided into three simple tabs for accounts, budgets and reports. Unlike some competing programs, it's a nice simple setup that is easy to digest and understand.

The first two tabs also work as you expect and it's obvious how to use them. Aside from some commands being hidden away on the Edit menu, where it's not immediately obvious to look, these two modules work as advertised and it's really easy to get to grips with them.

On the subject of those Edit menu commands, it would be much better from an interface point of view to use a toolbar, with graphical buttons for the most frequently used commands, like Create Budget Category, for example.

The final tab, for reports, however, came across to me as working in a bit of a confusing way.

You select a report to view from a relevant drop-down box, but then there is an unnerving delay when it's not clear whether that action worked, or didn't. Turns out what is happening is that your web browser is being loaded, to display the report as an HTML file.

The reports are a good way of getting your data back out of the application and present the information in a clear way, but I think it wouldn't hurt here to make it more clear that your browser would be invoked, and that there might be some delay.

A further criticism, which might be more to do with my Java setup, is that my default browser wasn't loaded for some reason, instead it loaded in a different browser installed on the system.

Functionality

Buddi isn't trying to do everything. Far from that, Buddi tries to be simple and is even described as being aimed at those with little financial experience.

Functionality wise, though, it offers enough to do basic financial recording and reporting. Transactions can be performed on your accounts, allowing you to keep track of what's going in and coming out of your account.

These transactions can be linked to Budget categories and then allow you to track what you planned against what's actually being spent in each category.

Speaking of those Budget categories, it's trivial to add custom incoming and outgoing categories of different types to personalise your records and ease the process of tracking your personal data.

As I've already mentioned, the Reports are also good, giving you a nice overview of how well reality is matching with your budgeting, and allowing you to drill down into the categories and transactions to see where everything is going.

One final thing to say is you have to remember to save your accounts to a file, and then manually use File > Open when you relaunch the program to load in your saved data. It would be nice here to have Buddi remember your last file, and automatically open it.

Overall

Buddi doesn't try to be too clever or complicated, and I personally think it succeeds in offering a simple solution for people who want to do basic personal budgeting.

While I do have some minor interface concerns, I can't emphasise enough how simple Buddi is to use. Even if there are quirks, it's likely that most people will quickly learn how to master the application given a bit of time.

If you want a budgeting solution a bit lighter than the others (and don't mind braving a distinctly Java-y interface on Linux), Buddi is a win.

Feed readers are quickly becoming very important applications in people's daily workflows. Along with your email client and web browser, your feed reader is a hub of information.

RSSOwl is a Java-based application that is designed to run on pretty much all platforms - that includes Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions. Here, I'm reviewing version 2.0 Milestone 7 on Fedora 8, but the functionality should be identical wherever you run it.

Installation

You can quickly and easily download the right package for your operating system from the download page. With the Linux version, it's a simple case of extracting the Zip file, and double-clicking the RSSOwl binary. You do however, need Java installed, no matter where you run it.

First impressions

Once RSSOwl loads, you're presented with a screen that looks something like this:

The interface is divided into two columns, with a list of feeds on the left and the main area on the right. The list of feeds comes pre-populated with some that the developers have decided you'd like, but it's trivial to delete that whole set and either import your own feeds or add a new one.

Adding a new feed

Adding a new feed manually is pretty simple and intuitive. As you'd expect, you click on the green plus in the toolbar. Interestingly, it brands this as adding a bookmark - which might be a bit confusing for feed veterans, but might well make it easier to understand for those who are new to the whole concept.

One negative point here is that if you don't specify the direct feed URL (for example, just put down http://fosswire.com/), RSSOwl doesn't appear to actually go and auto-discover the real feed URL and fetch from there. Instead you have to put the direct feed URL in from the beginning (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/fosswire. Coupled with the confusion of calling it a 'bookmark', this could prove very frustrating until you work out exactly what it means and even then might add an extra unnecessary step to adding a feed into your reader.

Once you have done so, however, the feed items will be loaded in and you'll be able to select it from the source list at the left and see the items in the main pane.

Reading items

Reading items works in the way you expect it to, click an item and the bottom part of the right-hand pane and read it. I generally have no complaints.

If you're a fan of the 'river of news' metaphor, then RSSOwl won't disappoint there either. The 'New and Updated News' group on the left gives you this view, and shows you, obviously, all unread items in the right-hand pane so you can go through them. It works well, although with several hundred unread items the performance did suffer quite a bit and RSSOwl became a bit sluggish.

Importing feeds

I currently use Google Reader as my main feed reading solution, so I proceeded to export out my subscriptions as an OPML file. In RSSOwl, I simply clicked File > Import Feeds and imported the file. My labels in Google Reader became folders in RSSOwl and within a minute or so, all my feeds were loaded in and the items displayed.

I do have around 250 subscriptions, and I was pleasantly surprised with the speed at which they were imported, processed, and the items loaded into the client.

Conclusions

I actually have used RSSOwl in the past, back in the 1.x series in August 2006, and posted a review on Gizbuzz (a previous Oratos Media blog). Since then, I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of progress that has been made in making RSSOwl easier to use, faster, and particularly on Linux, easier to get started with and a better citizen on the Linux desktop.

While there are some areas in which RSSOwl could definitely improve in, overall I find it a very capable feed reader. Personally, I'm going to stick with Google Reader for the moment, as the fact that it is web-based gives me more portability, but to those people who don't use a feed reader right now, or are looking for a change, I'd recommend you download RSSOwl and give it a try.