IGG Developers’ Blog

I want to give everyone a quick update on how things are going. iBank 3.5 and iBank Mobile have been in beta now for about two-and-a-half weeks. Here’s a little insight on how the beta progressed:

We started with a pool of people selected at random (more or less) from all of the people who wanted to help out. To this group we sent a questionnaire to be sure that we had a diverse group of testers. Based on the responses, we chose a very small subset to start the beta. Then the bugs started coming in…

These ranged widely: a particular operation was “slow”… some wording was “misleading”… it “crashes.” The first few days were spent triaging the issues – several were bad, so we worked on fixing those first. Most of them were fairly easy to find and fix, and the beta stabilized quickly.

At that point, we started adding more users. We have now tripled the number of original testers and are continuing to add more. So far things are looking good; there are just two outstanding issues that we have to fix before submitting it to the App Store. There are also a few teaks that would be nice to get done. All in all, it should be about another week and we’ll be ready to go. I do want to give special thanks to everyone in the beta. You have been giving great feedback and really helping us make the product better.

Otherwise it has been really busy here at IGG. With the iBank Mobile beta and the launch of iBiz 4, everyone has been working very hard. Kudos to everyone who worked on iBiz 4 – it looks great!  For myself I took Memorial Day off with my family to go to my dad’s house for a BBQ, and a few hours off to see Star Trek (I liked it a lot). Other than that it has been work, sleep and eat since the beta started. So I hope you believe me when I say that we all want to get iBank Mobile out the door.

Hopefully, the next time you hear from me will be when we have submitted to the App Store.

Thanks,
James

iBank 3.5 is going to be the next big release of iBank and it will coincide with the iBank Mobile release.

Building seamless integration between iBank and iBank Mobile has been no small undertaking. For true syncing to work well and easily, we need to track every change of every syncable entity — in this case, accounts, categories, transactions and currencies. That way when it comes time to sync, we know exactly what has changed since the last sync and only need to deal with processing those records. (Imagine how inefficient it would be if we had to compare the complete database on the desktop with the database on the phone.)

While these changes to the underlying structure of iBank aren’t of too much interest to most people, there are several new things that we’ve added to iBank 3.5 to make it an even better program.

One of the biggest changes is how v3.5 handles multiple currencies. In past versions, if you made a transfer from an account in one currency to another, it applied an exchange rate. And in order to adjust the amount of the receiving account you had to adjust the exchange rate for it to work out properly. For people dealing with multiple currencies this quickly became cumbersome, to say the least. Now, you can just enter the amount, and voilá, you’re done — iBank automatically adjusts the underlying exchange rate so that the transaction remains balanced and you can adjust each “side” independetly.

Another great improvement for iBank 3.5, my favorite actually, is that we now cache all account balances and running balances for transactions, which means iBank launches a LOT faster. I have over a dozen accounts in my personal iBank file (many are closed) and launching is no longer a chore. Just a quick press of the iBank icon in my Dock and my large iBank document is open within a few seconds.

There has been a steady march on improving reconciliation with iBank.  In version 3.4 we greatly improved the process and we haven’t stopped with version 3.5.  New, is the ability to reconcile and mark as “cleared” two different sides of a transfer independently.  This has been one of the most requested improvements to reconciliation so we are happy to be able to add it.

There are many other minor bug fixes and changes, like improved handling of multi-currencies when making charts. But I’m not going to dive into those now; I’m going to get back to testing iBank and iBank Mobile.

Thanks for all of the great comments, please keep them coming.

~Ian