I’m unashamedly an app lover.

My wife and I joke about who spends more money on their favorite things–me on apps or her on clothes. We’ve ruled it a toss up for now.

To stretch my app budget as far as possible, I keep an eye on apps and snag them when they are on sale.

The best way I’ve found to track apps and be alerted at discounts is through the app and website App Shopper.

You can add apps to your wish lists via the app or website and have email alerts or push notifications sent to you when the price (hopefully) drops.

Here’s a screenshot of my some apps currently on my wish list.

I’ll also check out the app activity and see how often the app gets a discount. If it’s rare, I’ll normally just buy it right away. If it goes on sale regularly, like 1Password, I’ll wait for another heartbleed bug or sale weekend.

Here’s the recent app activity for 1Password for iOS. You can find it on the right side of the App Shopper site or down at the bottom of an app’s details on the app.

The website shows apps for iOS and the Mac App store, while the iOS app only shows iOS apps and prices.

Support app developers and take it easy on your wallet, all thanks to App Shopper. You can grab the free app or visit the website.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed the constant information churn on social networks. “Friends” and people we follow are continuously posting.

Unfortunately, sometimes that content is worthless, but you don’t want to unfriend or unfollow someone for whatever reason.

Here are 3 quick ways to clean up the clutter in your Twitter and Facebook timelines.

1. Turn off an individual user’s retweets on Twitter.

• Go to the users profile on Twitter.com, like twitter.com/nshirkman
• Click on the cog on the right side of their profile
• Click “Turn off Retweets”

This enables you to still follow people whose tweets you want to see, but to nix their retweets of other people. [footnote]PS I would never turn off my wife’s Retweets–and you shouldn’t either.[/footnote]

2. Unfollow people individually on Facebook.

• When you see a post from a person you don’t want to see in your main feed, click the little down arrow in the upper right corner
• Choose Unfollow [Insert Name Here]
• All done! [footnote]If you’re on mobile, you have to click another confirmation to finalize your decision[/footnote]

It’s ok, you can still be friends, but now you don’t have to listen to them.

3. Use Tweetbot to mute keywords, apps or users.

My favorite Twitter app, Tweetbot, has mute features.

You can add filters under the chat bubble with an X in it. It will automagically hide any tweets that mention any words you specify (e.g. you can mute tweets that mention “The Walking Dead” to eliminate show spoilers).

My favorite things to mute are Twitter clients–like Banana Kong on iOS, whatever that is–so only tweets worth reading are displayed. I love eliminating Fitbit step counts or random iOS game scores from my feed.

By the way, you can undo all of these tweaks by going to a user’s profile and choosing to turn on Retweets again on Twitter or follow on Facebook, and mute filters can be deleted in Tweetbot.

This is a new segment of tips I’ll publish each Tuesday that only take a minute to read and implement. Kudos to one of my favorite websites, The Sweet Setup for their quick tips and inspiration for these posts.

The Mac Dashboard (the screen to the left of all your other screens and has widgets you can add to it) has become a ghost town. I’ve almost seen a tumbleweed roll across mine. Since I have an affinity for getting rid of stuff I don’t need, I dug into how to nix the Dashboard.

It’s fairly simple, and you can do it too! My thanks to HowToGeek for this info.

1. Open Terminal on your Mac
2. Copy this code

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock

1. Paste that code into Terminal and press enter
2. Say, “Hasta la vista, Dashboard!”

If you want to bring back that wretched space, just copy and paste this code into Terminal and crunch enter

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO && killall Dock

Dashboard–boom, roasted.

One last tip–if you are using a text expansion tool (which I highly recommend), I use the short cut xdashoff to save the script above that kills the Dashboard. I use xdashon as the shortcut for script that turns the Dashboard back on, making it very easy to turn it off and on as you please.

If you want to see a screencast of me turning the dashboard off and on, you can check it out here.