IGG Developers’ Blog

In my last post I talked about the four major things we set out to accomplish with the new reports. This time I want to focus on the first goal, “Combine charts and reports so that you do not have to create a chart to get a report.” On the surface this sounds trivial but there are a bunch of goals behind this one. We want reports and the charts they contain to be readable both on screen and on paper. We want to convey the information that people are looking for without being overwhelming. We want to provide explanations where necessary. We want to be able to group related concepts.

So with this in mind we looked at various examples. We looked at the Standard & Poor’s reports. We looked at Microsoft Excel. We looked at competitors’ reports. All of these had elements of what we wanted. Standard & Poor’s looked nice but had too much information density. Microsoft Excel had great charts but gave poor context to the information. Some of competitors had decent on screen layout but poor printing, or the reverse. We kept coming back to Apple’s Numbers and the beautiful templates that they provide. The problem is that Numbers’ templates show relatively static data. So our challenge was to create a report layout system that would look as good as Numbers, but would handle variable-sized data sets.

We decided on having four building blocks for the reports: bar graphs, pie charts, text and tables. We designed the system so that we could “plug in” other items when we need them. Let me show you some:

Report Pie Chart

Report Bar Chart

Text you can imagine, and since this blog is full of it (“it” being text…), I’ll omit an example for now.

So we have some nice looking pieces, but it really shines when we add the page layout. With our page layout engine you get the same reports on screen and in print. Our challenge for doing page layout was getting the data to flow to multiple pages without leaving some of the data hanging. For example you don’t want to have a table flow across two pages if the only thing on the second page is the totals. So far I think we have done a good job but we are still doing some polishing. Want to see it?

Report Example.pdf

This PDF is generated from our new reporting engine running in iBank using “real” testing data. The layout and all of the calculations, charts and tables are real. This is what you see on screen and on paper.

Once again I have to emphasize: we present this info is so that our development process is somewhat transparent. I can’t make any promises as to how soon these elements will be incorporated into a release, and we’re still a long way from setting a release date. So please try not to ask — we really can’t answer that yet — but do let us know what you think.

Finally, let me give a “hats off” to Brad and Brian for answering last post’s trivia question. The movie quote was from “Sneakers.”  Extra credit to CT Barbarian for pointing out that the line is also in “The Manhattan Project.”  And since I had forgotten that one, I need to rent it and watch it again.