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Bills ~ On Your Table

Bills on your Table, Finance, Reviews
Developer: PoweryBase
Price: $1.99 (Introductory)
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Reviewed on: iPhone 3GS

iPhone Integration Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Usability Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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In the current world economic climate it’s pretty much safe to say that everyone is trying to keep a close track on their money, how it is spent, and who they owe. Developed by PoweryBase, Bills is a finance based app which allows you to input billing information for a number of different product categories. The app will then alert you of when you need to pay the Bills, ensuring you pay them all on time – or that’s the basic idea. But, does it live up to it’s promise?

In a word – Yes. Just by opening the app you’ll be able to smell the work that has gone into this user interface. Set on a oak table, the app displays bills you have that are overdue, due today, today’s Bill pre-alerts and Bills due within the next 30 days. Each are shown in this “napkin-style” and are all condensable with a tap of your finger. Each section is also colour coded, allowing for easy recognition of which type of bill is needed to be payed. To add a bill to the app simply tap the ‘+’ button (top right). Here, the app will display an editable bill and to change any field on the bill you simply tap. The first of which is the “Category” of the said bill. You can create a bill for: Credit Cards, Entertainment, Insurances, Invoices, Mortgages, Phone Bills, Rentals, Student Loans and Taxes and Others (bills which don’t tend to fall into any of the other previously aforementioned categories). Need a category that isn’t listed? Head on over to the Category tab, tap the ‘+’ button (top right), and create it.

After you’ve choose your bill’s category you can input the amount it’s for, its due date, and choose whether you wish for the bill to be recurring. One downside to Bills ~ On Your Table is the app currently assumes that if you want that bill to reoccur on the exact same date each month. As some App Store reviews noted, not all bill are paid on the same day each month. Other options include the ability to set a “pre-alert” (the app will alert via push notification that you need to pay said bill before the due date), choose for app to “auto-pay” the bill on due date (the app will set the status of the bill to paid on the due date), add a note and view that bills “Payment log” (only applied if bill is set to reoccurring). Of course, as well as all of this, you can also choose the manually mark the bill “Paid” or “Un-Paid” too.

Screen shot 2010-02-05 at 15.50.53

Once you’ve created your bill, if it is applicable to any of the “Bills” sections on the main screen of the app, you’ll see it appear immediately. Bills are shown as a summary with the Bills name, amount due and date due shown, alongside a picture of the category that bill falls under. But there are other ways to look at your bills. The app also provides a calendar view. Bill due dates are signified by white indicators on the month date.

Other tabs in the app include the sync tap. Bills includes the ability to sync with the PoweryBase secure server, and store all your bills online. To do this you’ll need to shoot over to login.powerybase.com and setup a free account. As well as online sync the app also harbors of user configurable of settings. Here, you can choose to turn off push notifications, set notification time and sound, change your home currency, activate auto sync and add or change your passlock code for the app.

Overall, Bills ~ On Your Table with its well-designed and user-intuitive interface makes for a clean and crisp experience to organise all those pesky bills. While the app does have a few tiny shortcomings, Bills ~ On Your Table is perfectly usable as it is for the general user.

Iphone Media
3G iPhone Downloads!


Apple’s Selling iPhones By the Bucketload. Macs Too! Now a $50 Billion Company.

Blog, Finance, Reports, apple, quarterly report

Yesterday Apple announced its quarterly financial earnings for Q1 2010 which ended on Dec 26th 2009, calling it a “Record Breaking” first quarter. In fact, the company reported it turned over $15.68 Billion in revenue, managing to sell a staggering 8.7 Million iPhones which saw a 100% unit growth, 3.36 Million Macintosh computers which saw a 33% increase over last quarter, and finally reporting it had sold just 21 Million iPods which represented a slight decline of 8% in unit growth.

In a press release statement posted on Apple.com, Steve Jobs CEO commented that Apple has now become a $50 Billion company, and looking forward to future product announcements (Ahem .. Tablet) and gearing up for the fiscal quarters that lie ahead, he doesn’t see that slowing down anytime soon.

“If you annualize our quarterly revenue, it’s surprising that Apple is now a $50+ billion company. The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.”

If this report suggests anything, it shows that despite the economic climate of 2009 and early 2010, Apple has boatloads of tenacity, managed to battle through it all, and is seeing, once again, a record breaking quarter in unit sales, especially in regards to its popular iPhone product line.

Iphone Media
3G iPhone Downloads!


iBank Mobile

Finance, IGG Software, Reviews, iBank, money
Developer: IGG Software
Price: $4.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

Graphics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Controls Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
iPhone Integration Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Re-use Value Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Intro
I’ve been waiting for this app for a long time; at least over a month. I was using Cha-Ching for a while because they had the iPhone app to sync with the desktop app for a bit before IGG’s iBank got on board. While Cha-Ching was cool, there is a high level of professionalism, forethought, and overall quality that IGG Software was concerned with that make iBank Mobile (and its desktop counterpart) a superior solution.

A brief background
If I haven’t said it yet, iBank Mobile is a solid 1.0 release. IGG has been working on this app for a long time and it shows. Check out their blog for the steady stream of updates about the mobile app—it’s painful to watch because of the anticipation that’s built up reading these. They’ve been working on iBank Mobile since October or November of 2008. A long time in the making and finally released to the App Store June 4, 2009, it wasn’t until July 15th, 2009 that developers posted an exhausted update the iBank Mobile was finally live.

And there was much rejoicing. The time and effort spent on this 1.0 is clearly visible. The app runs great, reliably syncs through several methods, and gives a great overview of your financial picture.

2-homeHow does it work?
Opening iBank Mobile for the first time brings you to a database selection. Check out IGG Software’s iBank Mobile page for screenshots. You can setup a password (strongly recommended). I set up a 6-digit password without issue. I’m not sure how many digits you can do because I haven’t played with it, but even if it’s just six, this is stellar to offer security beyond the 4-digit max of other apps.

The home screen has little text and relies on icons to direct you to the appropriate actions. In addition to the function buttons, you get a beautiful and informative graph which gives you an overview of the accounts within the app. It’s easy to move into your accounts and different functions without much thought.

Entering transactions
Clicking the giant ‘+’ sign takes you to the entry screen. After choosing an account you enter your transaction amount. Decimal entry is not automatic, so be sure you don’t skip this critical step. You can select what kind of transaction this is and how it was charged. Then you move on to entering the category. A winning feature here is split transactions. This is stellar—great job, IGG.

Version one does not include any budget views, so you’ll have to work off of the desktop app for this app. This was an intentional omission for the first release because they really wanted to focus on releasing a solid and reliable first version. In lieu of this, the app does allow you to view how much you have spent within each category. If you’re responsible with budgeting this shouldn’t be a terrible loss—plus we know it will be coming in a future version.

Syncing
Syncing is the killer feature of this app. I went to using Cha-Ching for a while because they had an iPhone app to record my transactions and sync with my desktop app. If I don’t enter my purchases the time I do them then it’s going to get forgotten until they’re syncing from my bank. By then I’ve forgotten where I spent how much and I spend a lot of time Googling addresses.

4-spendingiBank offers not one, but three ways(!) to sync your data from your iPhone/iPod to the desktop app. You can sync through Bonjour on your local WAN, MobileMe, or your own WebDAV server. For convenience I went with the wifi option. Syncing is flawless. I haven’t had an issue the week I’ve been using it.

Cons
It was a little bit of a process to setup syncing. So to save you some time just go to the ‘File’ menu in iBank. Select ‘Setup Device for Syncing…’. Then choose your syncing method. You must have the iPhone app running at the same time. I would expect this dialogue to pop up when clicking on the Sync Devices icon for the first time.

Another minor issue is the ‘memo’ option in the app. I entered a split level transaction with a memo on one of the line items. After saving the transaction I went to look at the memo, but was not given access to the note. I’m sure this is just a minor bug which is sure to be resolved in a future update. As long as the memo syncs to the desktop app it’s not a huge deal.

That’s all that I’ve noticed this week. I’m really happy with the app.

Conclusion
IGG Software put a great deal of attention into version 1 of iBank Mobile and it shows. Budgets are a much coveted feature, but overall, there’s no reason to be hatin’ on iBank Mobile for this. There are other options out there, but the overall quality will be lacking. iBank is a winner and I expect it to smoke all of the competition—that’s what I’m rooting for anyway.

Iphone Media
3G iPhone Downloads!




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