Recently, I moved into a new apartment, and while the place looked nice when we signed the lease, there are several things I wish I had looked at more carefully before inking the paper. Luckily things are working out some weeks later, but doing these things would have saved a lot of money frustration and time if we looked into them more carefully. Here is my list:

Billshare is a simple web application with the goal of solving one of the most annoying problems when it comes to having roomates: bills. Basically, each paying member of the household creates an account, everyone belongs to a password protected group, you enter in your bills, when you pay someone, you mark it down there, and it creates a report of who has paid, when, how much, etc, and allows you to send reminders to people, all nice and official like.

If you're like me at all, you probably get a lot of email. And getting a lot of email requires a lot of sorting through the important stuff and getting to the other stuff when you have time. And if your Mom is anything like mine, you might end up getting a lot of forwarded jokes... usually which don't require immediate attention :-)

On the Job, from Stunt Software, is a nice little app to keep track of jobs you're working on. It has an interface like iTunes where you can manage different jobs on the left, and individual tasks for the job on the right, and "play" button to start the clock. You can enter your hourly rate, and it's smart enough to know that if your computer goes idle, it will ask if you want to subtract the time you were away from the keyboard.