IGG Developers’ Blog

We’ve been getting lots of inquiries about whether our products will work with Snow Leopard, and the short answer is: yes.  iBank and iBiz run on Snow Leopard (at least on the latest build that Apple has made available to us) without any major issues. However, we have found a few cosmetic glitches with iBank that we plan to address in v3.5.2, which we will release on Friday.

I just want to keep everyone in the loop and let you know: Don’t worry, Apple’s new kitty won’t destroy our apps.

-Ian

Yesterday was a big day. After about six weeks of private beta testing involving our crew and numerous loyal users, we’ve finally released iBiz 4 to the public — as a beta. Its amazing how much time and effort goes into a major release. The documentation has to be updated (although not done yet for the beta), a new web page needs to be created, new disk image backgrounds need to designed for the .dmg downloads, and so on. It is a great feeling to have made it this far! All major components are in place and iBiz 4 has no known “show stoppers” bugs or large outstanding features.

There are a few areas that still need some work and polish, though. For example, we wrote a new html invoicing engine that allows for invoices to have running headers, footers and page number and all of the good things you would expect in a multi-page invoice. We’ve shipped a couple of professionally designed templates with iBiz 4 to illustrate the power of these new invoices, but these don’t have matching statement templates yet. So before the final release, or perhaps another public beta, we want to add more invoice templates and create matching statement templates. And there are a few minor UI glitches we have noticed that we need to address.

Along with the invoicing engine, one of the nicest changes in iBiz 4 from iBiz 3 has been a switch from the antiquated “drawer inspector” to our new pop-up inspector à la iCal. This took a while for me to appreciate and get used to, but now I see its advantage — you only need to take up screen space when you need to see specific info, otherwise it is hidden. The existing tables still let you see lots of info at a glance, but if you need to dig deeper, or do some editing, a double-click quickly brings up the contextual inspector.

Another change you’ll notice is that throughout the UI we replaced big icon-driven buttons by more streamlined + and – buttons. This allows fore more window real estate to be devoted to data instead of buttons.  Not to mention it makes the UI look more sleek and professional.

There are a LOT more features that we’ve added to iBiz 4. Please see our newly posted webpage for details.

Enjoy Spring!

~Ian

Last Friday we reached a significant milestone with iBiz 4 – we reached beta status!  We contacted our private beta testers and got them their first look at the new app. One user is enjoying the new iCal syncing, which he says it is working great. We still have a list of small UI tweaks to finish and known issues (all pretty minor) that we want to resolve. Our next step will be to do a public beta and let our loyal customers get their hands on it. I don’t know when this will be exactly – I would love to have the public beta out at the end of this month, but we’ll just have to see.

Our first private beta didn’t include iBiz Server/Client, so this week I’m working on those to get them in the hands of our testers. It shouldn’t require too much work, as they share about 95% of the code of the single-user iBiz (one of the reasons upgrading from the single-user version to the server version is so seamless). Now on iBiz Server you can create clients (as in customers), as well as the new “client groups” (which you can do on the iBiz single-user version as well). So I have to do some testing to make sure that clients can be created, and that dragging and dropping of clients into and out of groups behaves as it should. All in all, I think users of both iBiz single-user and iBiz Server/Client will appreciate the new groups to better organize their clients.

-Ian

I’ve been hard at work with iBank 3.3 and today we have released it.  The version changes are all documented, but some highlight are:

• Improved keyboard entry (“Return” now commits the transaction editor)
• New “custom setup” pane when enabling OFX for an account. You can automatically jump to this pane by holding down the “Option” key after you choose a financial institution, but it should come up automatically when appropriate.
• iPhone web app has been restored to functionality (darn Prototype framework)
• Future transactions now appear in Forecasts
• Added an “At Risk” column to the portfolio view that shows you all of your invested cash, i.e. re-invested dividends are not included in this total
• and much more 

Now that it is out I’m going to shift some of my focus back to iBiz 4 which is coming along well.  But don’t worry, I’m always working on iBank so don’t think this is the last iBank version until iBank 4 or anything like that.

Until next time,

~Ian