IGG Developers' Blog

Even if we don’t yet have a name for it, development of iBank for iPad has been on going for over a year now. In an earlier post I talked about some of the design decisions and metaphors used for iBank for iPad. There is one in particular that is relevant to the short tour I’m about to give of iBank for iPad:

You can think of it as having your own personal financial report  on your iPad. If you sat down with a financial planner who asked a series of comprehensive questions to get a handle on your finances, what you would walk away with would be like our iPad app — your complete financial picture, always up-to-date.

The screenshots you are about to see are not polished and not final. Some still contain debugging code and some have pretty poor formatting, so please ignore this for now. For this post I want to offer of a broad overview; future posts will delve into specifics of its functionality.

So without further ado, here is one of the first screens you’ll see in iBank for iPad.

In this screen you can see we’ve embraced a “portfolio on a desk” metaphor. Each portfolio is an iBank document, and so yes: this app will support multiple documents (unlike iBank Mobile). A swipe gesture lets you browse the documents, the + button creates a new one, and the trash icon deletes the centered document. When you press the + button, you are taken to a modal “assistant” that walks you through document setup. Tapping one of the leather bound portfolios opens it to reveal the “document home screen”:

The Document Home Screen is the heads-up display (HUD) for your financial life. Everything you wanted to know is here. The idea is that you are looking at a financial report that is on “magical paper” — with binding on top (which conveniently acts as a toolbar). The paper can expand in size to accommodate users with lots of accounts and it responds to various touch gestures including dynamic interactions. At the top of the page you’ll notice there are two boxes: summary information for all classes of finances, and to the right of that, your upcoming bills and notifications. You’ll also see that all of your accounts are listed and grouped into general categories: “Bank Accounts,” “Investments,” “Mortgages and Loans,” etc.

Touching the various elements causes a new sheet of paper to slide in from the right. For example, if you tap “Credit Card” the new “sheet of paper” that slides in shows the details for that account:

Although it isn’t evident in this screenshot, the selection on the bar chart drives the transaction list below. So if you wanted to see transactions from September to November you would select that range in the chart. To edit a transaction, you simply tap it, and to get back to the Document Home View, you just swipe the page to the right to make it go away. (You can ignore the debugging info at the top of the page — as I said, these screens aren’t polished.)

From the Document Home Screen, if you select an investment account a new piece of paper slides in, but we customize what is displayed to emphasize the investments in the account.

Notice on this screen the Positions table (but ignore that temporary green color used in the bars). Here you have an overview of how each of your investments is doing. Tapping a position slides in a new sheet showing additional details of the specified security along with a list of all transactions associated with the security in the account.

So that is a brief overview of iBank for iPad. I haven’t shown all of the screens as I want to save some goodies for the next post. But this should give you a pretty good sense of how this app will work and how to navigate through it.

-Ian

As a small company that has experienced tremendous growth over the last couple of years we’ve had to come up with innovative ways to manage our expanding team. Inspiration struck after reading Panic’s post about their status board. When I saw that, I immediately knew we needed something along those lines. Although it took some convincing to get other folks on board, I saw value in easily answering questions that come up almost every day: “What is our tech support email load today?,” “What new bugs reports or feature requests are coming in?,” “How are our sales?,” “What is the Twitterverse saying about us?,” and of course, “What’s the weather like in your neck of the woods?” Before we made our status board we had access to those various bits of information, but it was by no means aggregated. So this is what our status board does.

The status board is interactive. For listed bugs and feature requests, I can click (or tap) on them and be taken to the appropriate place in our bug tracking software; Twitter mentions take you to Twitter and so on. The page also has different views. One each for “Owner,” “Manager,” “Support,” and one devoted just to “Email.” Access and permissions are controlled through our LDAP server and allows our web guy to customize it for different needs. We’ve also optimized the layout for viewing on iPad. The “Email” view has some great graphics:

We haven’t yet added a calendar module, but that should be pretty straightforward since we are now using a shared Google calendar. Since we need historical email stats we have a script that examines the exim logs and stores the relevant info a database. The weather comes from Weather Underground and the sales module comes from our own database for our web store. I can imagine that we will probably be adding a module for LiveChat in the future.

One thing to note: this has not taken away resources for iBank and iBank for iPad, nor iBiz. Our web guy, Jon, does all of this. Speaking of iBank for iPad, we are making good progress and I’m very excited about the app. Once some of the views get a little more polish we will be able to show some screenshots and talk about how we aggregate data.

Happy Holidays.

Ian

We’ve been getting lots of requests and comments about our forthcoming iBank for iPad app. I wish I were here to show screenshots and give a release date, but I’m not. However, I am here to talk about some features it will have, and what our guiding strategy has been during the development process.

First, I want to say we are not simply porting our iPhone app to the iPad. While that would have certainly been the easier route, we don’t think that is what our users want (and as one of those users, I certainly want something for more than quick entry and checking account balances). I should also say that we are not porting our Mac product to the iPad. The iPad is its own beast. It’s mobile, but not as mobile as the iPhone; its screen provides for a lot more data to be shown. And of course, it has the touch screen. Some of the best iPad apps are ones where the device becomes the app’s real-world metaphorical cousin, like Apple’s Calendar app — which feels like you are interacting with a desktop calendar. Similarly, using Contacts is like using an address book. Not all apps have such straightforward translations to what they might represent in “real life” (take the Settings app, App Store or FaceTime apps, for example).

So what will iBank for iPad be like? You can think of it as having your own personal financial report or portfolio on your iPad. If you sat down with a financial planner who asked a series of comprehensive questions to get a handle on your finances, what you would walk away with would be like our iPad app — your complete financial picture, always up-to-date.

In designing the app, there has consistently been one overriding theme: simplicity for the user. I want to make a distinction here when I say, “simplicity”. I don’t mean this is a simple app for tracking a cash account. The app is powerful, not only under the hood, but also from a practical standpoint; for example, you will be able to see and edit all investment transactions. By simplicity I mean ease of use. There is no “Download” button — you just launch the app and your accounts are updated. No import window will appear where you need to help decide which transactions to commit to the account. Instead, new unreconciled transactions just appear and they are conveniently marked “new.” The Get Quotes button is gone too; again, the market value of your investments just updates.

I think it’s also fair to talk about what the app won’t have. It won’t run on iOS 4 or earlier. There will not be bill pay. I know some of you will be upset about this… I’m sorry. At some point I would like to do another post about why we haven’t brought bill pay to our products. (Hint: it isn’t for technical reasons.)

I look forward to writing in more detail about iBank for the iPad.

-Ian