We love our users, for they inventive and resourceful. Here’s a nice invention from Ryan Straight of Teach Video Games that allows you record your expenses by pressing just a few keys on windows (and possibly under linux as well). It was inspired by the LifeHacker post on adding items to Remember The Milk (another excellent app that you should look at, by the way).

Here’s how to set it up:

• Make sure you have Launchy installed.
• Download the script from here. Copy it to your Launchy plugins folder, typically “C:\Program Files\Launchy\plugins“
• Open it in your favorite text editor and update the “GMAIL USERNAME” and “GMAIL PASSWORD” fields to your gmail username and password.

• Setup the Launchy Xpenser command by hitting Alt+Space, and click the gear icon at the top right of the popup.
• Click on Plugins tab, then click on “Runner” in the list of items on the left.
• Hit the Plus icon near the bottom of the screen and add the following:
  • name: xpn
  • program: C:\Program Files\Launchy\plugins\xpn.vbs
  • arguments: “$$” (include the quotes)

You should now be ready to go. To use it:

• Hot Alt+Space to get launchy to pop up.
• Type in “xpn”, then hit tag. You should see a right arrow/triangle pop up after the “xpn”. Now type in your expense as usual – for example, “lunch 45.11 with Joe”. Hit enter.

And that’s it! Your expense will be sent over to Xpenser and recorded without breaking your workflow or even requiring you to open up your browser.

Thanks Ryan and LifeHacker!

As always, please let us know of any feedback, suggestions, neat tricks, or inventions at feedback@xpenser.com .

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Zia Consulting, we have our first Xpenser iPhone application, called Fresh Xpense.

Fresh Xpense has been built using our brand spanking new Xpenser Platform APIs, also available now. More apps for more platforms are coming soon, and feel free to jump in and build you own.

Fresh Xpense is wonderfully easy to use and supports offline mode – you can enter expenses even when you’re not connected to the web and they will be synchronized the next time you get online.

Give it a try, and don’t forget to rate it. And as always, feedback is very much appreciated and welcome: iphone@xpenser.com .

Some of you may be familiar with YubNub, which bills itself as a “social command line for the web”. The idea is to provide a simple command line like interface to allow you to performs all kinds of interesting actions by simply typing them in. We, being geeks, are quite familiar with it, so we were thrilled to find out Nathan Rein (@nbr) has created an Xpenser command for Yubnub:

http://yubnub.org/kernel/man?args=xpns

Thanks Nathan, yet another beautifully simple way to interact with Xpenser!