What sets money management site Rudder apart from its competitors, like Mint and Wesabe? It's geared toward the future—bills to pay, paychecks to come, money to save. Let's take a peek at its features.
Note: We’ve already posted about Rudder’s daily emails, but thought a deeper look into how its money management tools work on the site itself.
Like Mint and Wesabe, Rudder takes your online banking credentials and uses them to get transactions, up-to-date totals, and transfer data from all your money pots. The Rudder team explains its encryption, privacy, and anonymity policies at its site; you can vet the credentials for yourself, but they’re fairly similar to how Mint, et al. reassure you of your financial data’s safety.
Onto the site itself. Here’s the “Dashboard” view you’ll see when you log in:
The key element is the “What’s Left” widget, which takes into account recurring bills you’ve been paying, assumes regular rent/mortgage, and indicates which way your total asset/libility ratio is going in the next 30 days, or beyond. As with automating your finances, your actual financial health is a lot more clear when you know what kind of remainder you’re really working with each month.
But note those little X marks in the upper-right corner of each box—they're actually widgets, which you can add and rearrange on your dashboard page:
That’s a pretty neat feature, and while there’s not a huge selection of them at the moment (about a dozen at last check), it’s a definite boon to be able to remove stuff you’re not really using.
Just like Mint, you’re able to categorize your monthly purchases and expenses, and have Rudder remember them and break them into neat, informative pie charts and statistical breakdowns. As with most everything on the site, it also lets you look forward and set budgets and goals for spending, so you can carve out money to be socked away in savings or investments.
Perhaps the truest differentiator Rudder has is a goal and progress tracker—which, unfortunately, isn't live yet, but which promises some pretty nice financial geekery.
You might have already seen that Rudder can send you daily financial reports. iPhone users can check the App Store for its iPhone app that puts account balances and other reports on their phone.
Has Rudder, Mint, or any other all-in-one money site swayed you into managing your finances online? What are you still waiting to see before taking the leap? Share your punch lists in the comments.
Windows only: Free application 
From those three pop-out menus—Applications, Places, and System—you can accomplish pretty much the same thing as any Linux user can, just without the full desktop. Launch a program, and it appears in a window that looks like any other on your Windows system. Open a file browser from "Places," and you can get to your Windows files by heading to 
Whatever changes you make to your system stick with it. So if you, say, want to install VLC media player for some on-the-go media, you can install it from the Add/Remove dialog or tackle it manually in Accessories->Terminal, and it'll be planted right in the Sound & Video menu. The same goes for system tweaks or startup apps you add to your little Ubuntu package.
Portable Ubuntu makes for a great place to test out your more cutting-edge stuff, without having to worry about messing up your working Windows system. The latest beta of Firefox 3.1/3.5? Even easier to run than the 
When you’re running Portable Ubuntu, Windows treats it like any other program. You can close down individual app windows from your taskbar, and pop it onto and off your desktop with little hassle.
Windows only: Pod to PC can grab the music and movies off nearly any Windows-formatted iPod for transferring to your PC, and avoids duplicates while doing so.
Windows only: Desktop icon organizer Fences arranges your cluttered desktop icons into containers so you can clean up the mess into useful groups of shortcuts—or optionally hides them altogether.
Windows/Mac: Foxmarks, our favorite way to keep Firefox bookmarks synced across computers, is now offered for 
After that, Foxmarks gets going. Instead of installing an icon in Internet Explorer’s bottom status bar, Foxmarks plants itself in your system tray. You’ll see it pop up a notification when it’s done grabbing or placing bookmarks to/from the servers. Right-clicking this icon gives you access to your Foxmarks settings, can open up your web-based bookmarks browser, and close down the Foxmarks process. It seems to run whether or not you’ve got IE up and running, which is somewhat memory insensitive, but also convenient for those who open and close their browser regularly.
CrunchBang, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that sports a snappy, low-drag interface and is perfect for thumb drives, live CDs, or speed-obsessed Linux fans. Check out how it looks and runs in our screenshot tour.
Conky is one of those Linux tools that gets better every time you open it up and poke around. The basic setup in CrunchBang is pretty functional, giving you a list of the (really helpful) Windows key shortcuts (it’s called the “Super” key in Linux land) and basic system stats. You can, of course, modify a single text file to 
