IGG Developers’ Blog

Let me start with the good news: as of this week, I am using iBank Mobile for my personal finances.

At this stage I would consider it an internal alpha. Some of iBank Mobile’s features aren’t complete, and we’re flushing out some bugs, but I am using it. Developers would call this eating your own dog food, and it does have that dog food aftertaste. But using it every day it really helps me get a sense of what needs to be polished and what is working well.

So now for some bad news. If you read my last post, it sounded pretty positive about our progress. But just a few days after I wrote that, we hit a memory wall for syncing transactions. Not a wall made of hay, or sticks, but a reinforced brick wall, and it stopped all development until we got around it. Then I had to go back and rework some of the guts of the sync engine. This was a non-trivial task, so now I am behind where I would like to be (maybe by weeks, but not months). I know many of you are eager to use iBank Mobile for your own finances, because we’ve received a lot of requests to help us beta test. I’m really sorry that you might have to wait just a little longer.

Finally for the ugly news. In this blog we have talked about what features *will* be in iBank Mobile. Now it is time for me to say what *won’t* be there for 1.0 – it’s time to just pull the Band-aid off. For this release, we will not have support for your stock portfolio on the iPhone; the other big feature that we won’t have is budgeting. While you’ll be able to see money spent by categories, you won’t have all of the budgeting capabilities that iBank 3 currently supports. These are features that I’d want in a mobile app, and so I imagine many of you do as well. However, we felt it was better to get the core functionality right and into the hands of users to get feedback, and to add more features later. There’s already a lot of great capability in iBank Mobile for keeping track of your finances on the go. But for those of you who were hoping for the abovementioned, I wanted to let you know up front that they will not be in 1.0, though they are on my radar.

As always, thanks for your feedback on how to make this a great mobile app.

Thanks,
James