Archive for December, 2008

iBiz 4 Update

Monday, December 29th, 2008

I promised I would write about iBiz 4, so here it is…

I’ve been dealing with a lot of invoices coming to IGG, bills for ads we run, our iBank retail box costs and all sorts of things and I often ask for a statement showing what invoices they’ve sent and what payments of mine they’ve received (just to make sure they are accurately billing me).  Sometimes, much to my surprise, they don’t have a way of sending me this kind of info, especially in a clear and concise manner that is easy to read.  So enter new feature #1 of iBiz 4, send client statements with 1-click.  You can choose which invoices/payments and past statements to include, or restrict it to a date range.  You can even add a % late fee or fixed fee and the statements show up like invoices and payments right in the Billings tab.

 

From a developer’s standpoint, Leopard brought us the CalCalendar.framework — or in laymen’s terms, easy access to the iCal data.  So for iBiz 4 we’ve completely redone the iCal syncing engine.  The previous engine relied on SyncServices and it has some very odd and hard to reproduce issues, so we’ve scrapped that and adopted the new framework and all I can say is that, syncing works WAY better.  Let me say that again, syncing works WAY BETTER!  We’ve add more options so it is easier to just push events to iCal, or just pull events, or sync both ways and it is super fast.  So for you iCal and iBiz lovers, the marriage can finally live out happily ever after.

 

UI: it seems that every point release is accompanied with UI refinements and iBiz 4 is no exception.  We didn’t go crazy, don’t worry, we still have a left-side source list driving the rest of the UI, but the info drawer is finally gone and we’ve added much easier way to edit any item’s info in such a way as to not clutter the rest of the UI, here is a hint: it’s not a floating inspector panel.  

So there are a few things people can look forward to for iBiz 4, that’s all I’ll say for now, but be sure to follow the blog and IGG news.

Happy New Year!

Ian

Posted in iBiz | 9 Comments »

Status update

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

I have been negligent over the last couple of weeks about updating the blog.  So let me remedy that.  We have data syncing from iBank to the phone working.  We have the database and code to access it in place.  We have some placeholder screens to display and manipulate data. All and all, I think we have made a lot of progress, and I hope to have more to share soon.

Now, let me try to answer some of the questions that people have raised. A lot of you have expressed excitement about iBank on the iPhone, however some have raised concerns that the iPhone is taking away resources from our other products.  Let me just say that, there is no need for concern.  We have added resources to the company (me) in order to do iBank on the phone and when that is done I will be working on our existing Mac products.  We did not take any resources away from our current products. In fact when this product ships we will have more resources than ever working on iBank and iBiz for the Mac.

We have gotten a lot of great feedback about what people want in a handheld finical manager. Here is what we are trying to solve for.  We want to be able to very quickly enter transactions on the go.  We want to show an overview or peoples finance so that they can answer questions like, “can I afford to eat out tonight”? We know that a good mobile app needs to be very responsive and this should be no different.  People should be able to launch the app and get what they need in under 30 seconds.  Finally, we would like to have multiple family members have access to the same iBank data so that they can all enter transactions.  Please note this is not a list of features that we promise to deliver.  This is what we are striving for.

I hope this update helps to know where we are and what we are thinking.  Please give us any feedback you have.  It really helps us prioritize what we are doing.

Thanks,
James

Posted in iBank, iPhone | 16 Comments »

Planning and Resourcing: iBank v4

Monday, December 1st, 2008

There is always lots of talk on our forums about iBank in its current release and future releases.  I’m here to provide some info about what we’re working on.   

The obvious next chapter in iBank is version 4.  While we haven’t “broken code” on it yet, we are in the early planning and resourcing stages of development.  We are considering adding bill pay for v4 and there are a lot of requests for this.  But there are a lot of other features that users are requesting, like better reports, reconciliation and budgets.  I know these could greatly benefit from a bit of an overhaul.  

While I’m not hear to make promises, at least not yet, it really helps for us to hear what features users want, so please keep the feedback coming.  I’m sorry if you were hoping that I would say v4 is going to have feature X,Y and Z and it will be out on Y date, but unfortunately, we just aren’t in a position to say anything like that.  But please, let us know what you want!

~Ian

Posted in iBank | 33 Comments »