IGG Developers’ Blog

At the risk of repeating myself: we are still hard at work finishing iBank Mobile. We’ve been polishing the interface and fixing a few last showstopper bugs before we go beta. Good thing we still have a sense of humor.

Last time I promised pictures, so without further ado, the Home Screen:

iBank Mobile Home Screen

The concept is to provide a quick overview of your finances so you can make impromptu spending decisions (like, can I afford that TV… or in this economy, those Girl Scout cookies), and to give you a quick way to enter transactions on the go.

The screen is divided into two sections: the top provides information, and the bottom controls what information is shown. For example, you might display only the accounts you use for day-to-day decisions (so you don’t have to have your mortgage or 401K on this screen if you don’t want to). This example shows your current account balances and a graph of those balances over the last 12 months.

You’d return to this display from the highlighted “home” icon in the bottom area. If you tap on the “graph” button, you’d see a similar overview of the user’s spending. The big “plus” button is used to create a new transaction. The “wrench” button is used to access settings, and the “chasing arrows” button is used to initiate a sync. By touching areas in the display part of the screen you can drill down to get details.

Stay tuned… more screenshots coming soon.

If you haven’t heard from me lately, it’s not because I’ve crawled under a rock. I’ve been hard at work and iBank Mobile is progressing steadily, with no further surprises impacting the schedule. (I did take last week off to visit family in Northern CA, but that was expected.) So let me give you a quick update.

We just completed the last big feature, the one most often requested: syncing without MobileMe (or even an Internet connection). I am now focused on UI polish and bug fixing. Once we are happy with the UI, I will try to post some screen shots. Look for those in the next couple of weeks.

I still expect iBank Mobile to go beta around the end of the month. This will not be an open beta because of the way software works on the iPhone. Each beta copy needs to know about the particular phone that it is going to be installed on. Since a lot of you have expressed interest in testing, we are trying to figure out how to get as many beta copies out as possible, given the restrictions of iPhone app distribution.

A side note: we are eagerly awaiting what changes iPhone OS 3.0 will bring. Even though we’re developers, we have no idea so far how much extra work, if any, it will take to support this, or what cool features it will bring. If I see anything that looks like it will affect our schedule I will let you know ASAP. But I don’t expect that it will ship before iBank Mobile, so we’ll most likely support it later on via updates.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
Thanks,
James

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