One of the great things about iBank 4 is its support for investment accounts. However, what users have said to us time and again is that iBank Mobile doesn’t support investments well enough on the iPhone. For the most part that’s true: while all of your accounts sync to iBank Mobile, you can only see the cash balance of your investment account, and there is no way to see how your securities and stocks might be doing by fetching online quotes (which iBank for the Mac does).
So I’m pleased to introduce our solution: iBank Investor for iPhone. This is an entirely new application that will work “standalone” or sync with iBank on your desktop. Its premise is simple. iBank Investor allows you to see quickly how your investments are doing based on downloaded stock quotes. You can view an overall summary, a breakdown by account and even by each lot you own of each security. That’s right, ever wondered what your percentage gain is for those AAPL shares you bought back in 2001? With iBank Investor that information is right there.
You may wonder why we made an entirely new app instead of rolling this functionality into iBank Mobile. And our answer is this: it’s better to have an application that does something really well, rather than trying to do too many things and each one be a bit clunky. iBank Mobile is great for checking account balances and quickly entering transactions on the go. That is what we designed it to to do, and it does it well. But iBank Investor is designed for seeing how your investments are doing, right on your iOS devices.
We have an alpha version that my brother (James Gillespie, IGG’s CTO) and I have installed on our phones and we use it all the time to check our investments. As James likes to say, “Sometimes I think there is a bug in the app because all of my investments show up in red.” And I say, “No, no, that isn’t a bug, you are just investing in the wrong stocks.” But seriously, my point is that iBank Investor will be a great, nimble app for quickly reviewing your portfolio.
iBank Investor also includes some new technologies that we’ve been working on, namely our project codenamed “Cirrus.” Cirrus is our new cloud syncing technology that will be making its debut in iBank Investor. Whether you set up the securities you want to track directly on the phone or get them on the device from iBank for Mac, you can sync wirelessly to as many iOS devices as you want “through the cloud.” You won’t need MobileMe or your own WebDAV server; we provide the service.
Although this is a relatively small app, I’m excited to finally be able to share this news with you all. In a future post I will share some screenshots and go into more depth on the app’s nitty-gritty.
Oh, and one more thing. Yes, we are working on an iPad app for your finances too, but that’s all I can say about that now.
-Ian
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Will the cloud sync be available in a future version of iBank Mobile?
That’s a lot of good news for one post!
Will the Investor support other financial sites than Google or Yahoo!? Hinting at my forum post on Bloomberg…
Hi,
Thank you all, IGG developers for such good news! The iPad will have its own app very soon. You cannot imagine how happy I am. I bought a wonderful iMac 27” and would like to have iBank on the go, I mean all the beautiful reports, forecast, net worth and budget on my iPad. The cloud system will be great. We’ll be able to sync ios devices without Macbook or iMac. So don’t forget all the features requested.
Best regard, a French iBank addict.
I think this is fine for the iPhone app, which is really about ‘at a glance’ what can I afford, or entering things on the go. However, it wouldn’t work for an iPad app, where we’d probably expect more of a ‘standalone’ application where you can view net worth and other reports over time, that would need investment information.
-Mark (Zoolook)
It’s great to see iBank develop something specific to investments. Hopefully the new iBank Investor for iPhone will come with a bit more development of the investment features in iBank for desktop as well. Specifically, I would really like to see some better support for foreign investments (please see my post here: http://forums.iggsoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=18396#p63983) and the ability to make adjustments to one’s cost base (please see my post here: http://forums.iggsoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=20247).
Sounds promising, although I would echo the comments above to support more sites than Google and Yahoo. I have a number of Unit Trust investments that have Bloomberg codes but I have to update manually in iBank on my Mac
iPad app is overdue.
Eric Akaffou, said ” I mean all the beautiful reports, forecast, net worth and budget on my iPad”.
Do ypu have loans ? If yes then you will be disappointed. iBank has a bug that will made bad reports when forecasting your balance account.
I already asked more than once to fix it. But the developers have other priorities. So my balance account is always wrong when forecasting.
Also if you have short term investments. The ROI report will show wrong unrealized gains. Only if you use OS 10.50.8.
Another bug less important to the developers.
Wow! Great news here!
Any idea when either one of these is going to be released?