When you first set up a document you’ll be presented with a choice: do you want to sync with iBank for Mac or use the app standalone? If you choose to sync with iBank for Mac, your account data will be transferred over, including all security/investment transactions – unlike in iBank Mobile. You can then edit your transactions, add new transactions, add/edit/delete accounts, etc. There isn’t anything too new with this concept, yet there are some non-trivial improvements over iBank Mobile syncing.

The more interesting discussion occurs when we talk about choosing to use the app “standalone.” We knew from Day 1 that if we developed iBank for iPad we needed to have a really good solution to aggregating your financial data. Manually entering transactions is so 1990s. The current OFX solution we have in iBank for Mac works great, if your bank supports it. The problem is, there are too many banks that don’t support it and likely never will. We also considered having users log in to their banks’ websites via Safari on the iPad, or having an embedded WebView (much like the built-in browser in iBank for Mac). But this solution is wrought with problems too – the biggest being it can get tedious fast if you have more than a couple of accounts.

I’m pleased to announce that we have a solution that allows our users to connect to thousands more financial institutions than what we currently support via OFX. While not every bank is supported, it’s easily a ten-fold increase over our existing supported financial institutions. Even the little credit union here in southern Vermont works. We’ve partnered with a company to assist us with this account aggregation and we are really excited about their services.

Having this ability to get data from so many banks, coupled with the any time, anywhere mobility of the iPad, pointed to a name for the app that seemed both obvious and inevitable. We call it iBank Access.

Here is how it works (and note that none of the screenshots here are final). The account set-up assistant gives you two choices when you create a new account. You can either set up a “manual account” for which no automatic downloading will take place, or choose to link the new account to a financial institution. If you choose the latter, you are asked to type in the name of the bank where the account is held. This is where our massive list of supported banks gets filtered as you type:

After you enter valid credentials to log in to the bank’s website, you are given a list of accounts that you have at that financial institution – with the option of choosing which accounts you actually want in iBank. For example, many folks might have a checking, savings and even credit card all at the same bank and in the last screen you would be given the option to choose which of these you might not want to import. Most users will link all of the accounts. When the accounts are created, iBank imports available historical transactions associated with each account and even does some automatic categorization. Here is where the beauty of our new aggregation system really begins to shine. Each time you launch the app, it goes out and fetches any new transactions. Unlike iBank for Mac, however, there is no separate window that appears where you have to manually verify which transactions to import. The new transactions just automatically appear conveniently marked:

Transactions that have been manually entered are matched based on date and amount, and their status is updated as appropriate.

As you can see, the process of updating accounts is really not much of a process at all. They just update. No more download or import button, no import window where you have to manually reconcile each transaction. It all just happens when a user opens their document. I’ve been using the app daily, and just having all of my personal accounts up to date, all the time, is pretty amazing.

To be transparent, there is a downside to this approach: it will cost money. Again, current users of iBank who are satisfied with the state of their accounts will simply be able to sync their desktop data to iBank Access. We know many of our current iBank users already have iPads, and while we haven’t settled on a final price for the app, the goal here is to make it an inexpensive add-on.

But in keeping the app affordable, we didn’t want to take the approach some competitors do and sell your personal financial information (while marketing the service as “free”). I don’t want ads for credit card offers or loan refinancing, so our model is simple: if the user wants to take advantage of automatic account data aggregation, there’s a small monthly subscription fee. We don’t have an exact price point yet, but I anticipate something in the range of a fancy cup of coffee. Because there are significant, ongoing costs in partnering with a third-party aggregator of bank data, a pricing structure with an optional subscription seemed the best model for all users: no ads, a reasonable app price, a nominal cost for those who want data updates automated, but no extra fees for those who sync with iBank.

There’s still lots more to tell you about iBank Access. In future posts I hope to cover in detail some of the other features we are really excited about.

-Ian

You can think of it as having your own personal financial report  on your iPad. If you sat down with a financial planner who asked a series of comprehensive questions to get a handle on your finances, what you would walk away with would be like our iPad app — your complete financial picture, always up-to-date.

The screenshots you are about to see are not polished and not final. Some still contain debugging code and some have pretty poor formatting, so please ignore this for now. For this post I want to offer of a broad overview; future posts will delve into specifics of its functionality.

So without further ado, here is one of the first screens you’ll see in iBank for iPad.

In this screen you can see we’ve embraced a “portfolio on a desk” metaphor. Each portfolio is an iBank document, and so yes: this app will support multiple documents (unlike iBank Mobile). A swipe gesture lets you browse the documents, the + button creates a new one, and the trash icon deletes the centered document. When you press the + button, you are taken to a modal “assistant” that walks you through document setup. Tapping one of the leather bound portfolios opens it to reveal the “document home screen”:

The Document Home Screen is the heads-up display (HUD) for your financial life. Everything you wanted to know is here. The idea is that you are looking at a financial report that is on “magical paper” — with binding on top (which conveniently acts as a toolbar). The paper can expand in size to accommodate users with lots of accounts and it responds to various touch gestures including dynamic interactions. At the top of the page you’ll notice there are two boxes: summary information for all classes of finances, and to the right of that, your upcoming bills and notifications. You’ll also see that all of your accounts are listed and grouped into general categories: “Bank Accounts,” “Investments,” “Mortgages and Loans,” etc.

Touching the various elements causes a new sheet of paper to slide in from the right. For example, if you tap “Credit Card” the new “sheet of paper” that slides in shows the details for that account:

Although it isn’t evident in this screenshot, the selection on the bar chart drives the transaction list below. So if you wanted to see transactions from September to November you would select that range in the chart. To edit a transaction, you simply tap it, and to get back to the Document Home View, you just swipe the page to the right to make it go away. (You can ignore the debugging info at the top of the page — as I said, these screens aren’t polished.)

From the Document Home Screen, if you select an investment account a new piece of paper slides in, but we customize what is displayed to emphasize the investments in the account.

Notice on this screen the Positions table (but ignore that temporary green color used in the bars). Here you have an overview of how each of your investments is doing. Tapping a position slides in a new sheet showing additional details of the specified security along with a list of all transactions associated with the security in the account.

So that is a brief overview of iBank for iPad. I haven’t shown all of the screens as I want to save some goodies for the next post. But this should give you a pretty good sense of how this app will work and how to navigate through it.

-Ian

The status board is interactive. For listed bugs and feature requests, I can click (or tap) on them and be taken to the appropriate place in our bug tracking software; Twitter mentions take you to Twitter and so on. The page also has different views. One each for “Owner,” “Manager,” “Support,” and one devoted just to “Email.” Access and permissions are controlled through our LDAP server and allows our web guy to customize it for different needs. We’ve also optimized the layout for viewing on iPad. The “Email” view has some great graphics:

We haven’t yet added a calendar module, but that should be pretty straightforward since we are now using a shared Google calendar. Since we need historical email stats we have a script that examines the exim logs and stores the relevant info a database. The weather comes from Weather Underground and the sales module comes from our own database for our web store. I can imagine that we will probably be adding a module for LiveChat in the future.

One thing to note: this has not taken away resources for iBank and iBank for iPad, nor iBiz. Our web guy, Jon, does all of this. Speaking of iBank for iPad, we are making good progress and I’m very excited about the app. Once some of the views get a little more polish we will be able to show some screenshots and talk about how we aggregate data.

Happy Holidays.

Ian

First, I want to say we are not simply porting our iPhone app to the iPad. While that would have certainly been the easier route, we don’t think that is what our users want (and as one of those users, I certainly want something for more than quick entry and checking account balances). I should also say that we are not porting our Mac product to the iPad. The iPad is its own beast. It’s mobile, but not as mobile as the iPhone; its screen provides for a lot more data to be shown. And of course, it has the touch screen. Some of the best iPad apps are ones where the device becomes the app’s real-world metaphorical cousin, like Apple’s Calendar app — which feels like you are interacting with a desktop calendar. Similarly, using Contacts is like using an address book. Not all apps have such straightforward translations to what they might represent in “real life” (take the Settings app, App Store or FaceTime apps, for example).

So what will iBank for iPad be like? You can think of it as having your own personal financial report or portfolio on your iPad. If you sat down with a financial planner who asked a series of comprehensive questions to get a handle on your finances, what you would walk away with would be like our iPad app — your complete financial picture, always up-to-date.

In designing the app, there has consistently been one overriding theme: simplicity for the user. I want to make a distinction here when I say, “simplicity”. I don’t mean this is a simple app for tracking a cash account. The app is powerful, not only under the hood, but also from a practical standpoint; for example, you will be able to see and edit all investment transactions. By simplicity I mean ease of use. There is no “Download” button — you just launch the app and your accounts are updated. No import window will appear where you need to help decide which transactions to commit to the account. Instead, new unreconciled transactions just appear and they are conveniently marked “new.” The Get Quotes button is gone too; again, the market value of your investments just updates.

I think it’s also fair to talk about what the app won’t have. It won’t run on iOS 4 or earlier. There will not be bill pay. I know some of you will be upset about this… I’m sorry. At some point I would like to do another post about why we haven’t brought bill pay to our products. (Hint: it isn’t for technical reasons.)

I look forward to writing in more detail about iBank for the iPad.

-Ian

People have been asking for some news about iBank for Mac. Let’s first start with what we’ve accomplished, albeit quietly, and then we can talk a little about what is still to come. iBank 4, which we released one year ago, was our most successful product launch, and the press and feedback on it have been overwhelmingly positive. Since that time we have released 11 updates, fixed over 119 bugs and implemented about 32 user-requested features. Yet since we launched iBank 4 the world has changed in three ways that we had to respond to but did not see coming.

First, the Mac App Store. It was clear as soon as Apple announced the Mac App Store that people would want to get our software from it. The store has some real benefit to customers and we wanted to be a part of it. However, there were some non-trivial code changes that needed to be made to support the store.

Second, Lion. Everyone knew Lion was coming but until WWDC (in June of this year) we did not really know how big a change Lion really was. Our customers expected that our software would work on Lion. The truth of the matter was that iBank as it existed in June would not run in some edge cases once Lion shipped in July. So we had to do some non-trivial changes under the hood to make iBank Lion-compatible. One of the challenges we faced was that iBank 4 shipped supporting 10.5 and that we did not want to drop those customers’ systems in order to support Lion (Lion’s development tools do not allow building 10.5 PowerPC apps). This work continues with iBank 4.3, which will have its first Lion-only feature: full-screen mode. Next we’ll work to implement sandboxing, a major security change which only affects things behind the scenes.

The third is the death of MobileMe and the birth of iCloud. As many of you know, we use MobileMe as a syncing platform for iBank for Mac and iBank Mobile. We need to replace this with some other solution. It might be iCloud, but we are still evaluating the best way to sync our products. Certainly iCloud plays a role but we are not ready to commit to what that is.

Our latest update to iBank is 4.3, which will be released in the next few days or so. In addition to integration with iBank Investor, iBank 4.3 a number of bugs that our users have been requesting we address. We will continue to fix bugs and add refinements and we will certainly need to make further significant changes to decide how to gracefully terminate MobileMe syncing with iBank Mobile.

So that is a lot of what we have been doing with iBank. Now let’s talk about how iBank improves in the future.

The two new products that we have been talking about on the blog, iBank Investor and iBank for iPad, both can help shed light on this. Much of the work being done in those products will result in new features in iBank for Mac. This is because we build all of our products on a set of shared code. Right now if I count the files in iBank for iPad, 80% of them are shared or planned to be shared with iBank for Mac. In fact, the best thing about working on the iBank for iPad project is that we actually get to implement a number of features and enhancements that will later make it into the next iBank for Mac release. You can think of iBank 4 as running on our “CoreFinance” 1.0 engine and iBank for iPad will run on CoreFinance 2 and a future version of iBank will run on it as well.

We have a binary of iBank for iPad that loads on iOS 5 and you can see accounts. Some of the UI is starting to take a more final look. But there are still many significant components that need to be implemented. I wish I had some screenshots of iBank for iPad, but we aren’t ready to share that part of our progress, yet.

Thanks,
James

In my last post about iBank Investor I talked about the general workflow for adding securities and syncing with iBank. In this post I would like to talk to you about some additional features and show some polished screenshots.

The most exciting unannounced feature is that iBank Investor is a universal app, with custom UIs specific for iPhone and iPad. This was a decision we made relatively late in the game. Since we are offering free, behind-the-scenes syncing from device to device, it makes sense to allow our users to see their data across multiple devices without having to re-enter it. For the iPad version, the entire app is navigated within one screen:

iBank Investor on iPad -- The entire app is navigated on one simple screen

One of the unique features about iBank Investor is its ability to show you exactly where you stand on your investments down to the individual lot level. For people managing their own investments this can help them make the best decisions for each of their holdings. Additionally, for summaries at the account, security and lot level, we show four useful calculations (this is a change from what was said in the earlier blog post): today’s gain, today’s percent gain, total gain and total percent gain. Instead of cluttering the screen showing all of these calculations at the same time, you toggle between them by pressing any of the red/green button. The header above the column indicates what you are viewing.

iBank Investor on iPhone -- Tapping the green/red button toggles what calculation is shown in that column

When you are looking at an individual security you’ll notice that there is a “page view” widget. There are three possible screens you can view. The first is the security detail view which shows the price of the security, change, your cost basis, etc. The second view shows stats about the current security, like 52-week high and lows, dividend yield and open/close prices. The third screen shows a list of news headlines for the security. Tapping any of the headlines will go to that respective article in Safari. This is a nice feature for those “OMG” moments when your security takes a big move — now you can quickly see what might be the news story behind it.

I’ve also mentioned that for those who track their investments in iBank for Mac, getting your info into iBank Investor is done by using our new cloud-based sync service. We’ve added a new source list item to iBank 4 that is “Sync Settings.” This is where you will manage how iBank syncs to iBank Mobile and iBank Investor. Here is how syncing to iBank Investor works.

In iBank for Mac

1) You’ll create a free IGG Customer Account.

2) Press the sync toolbar button (or have iBank 4 sync automatically on launch and quit).

In iBank Investor

1) Log in to your IGG Customer Account.

2) There is no two.

We had some trepidation about asking users to create another online account. Let’s face it, we have accounts for banks, social networking sites, email, you name it. However, in the end we decided this was the right way to provide the best customer experience. Once your IGG Customer Account is set up, you are done and you can forget that it is even there — but don’t forget your login and password . And because our software company is run by reasonable human beings like you, we do NOT sell or give away your information. Period.

Along those lines, we got some feedback about the free, ad-supported version of iBank Investor, and in response to that we are going to offer an in-app purchase that will remove the ads. This is the best of both worlds. For those that hate the ads they can get rid of them, but everyone can try the app and even use it indefinitely, for free.

One last thing you’ll notice about the screenshots I’ve shown you here: we’ve added a big arrow that indicates the big picture — big green arrow pointing up is a gain, a red arrow pointing down is a loss.

Once the beta testing period wraps up we’ll be submitting iBank Investor to the App Store. We’ll send out a tweet or news blip once we reach that milestone.

-Ian

@ianggillespie

A short note about iBank for the iPad

I know a lot of our customers are itching for us to release an iPad version of iBank. It is our highest priority and we are developing it as fast as we can. Lately the development has slowed down because of the changing requirements of iOS 5 and some additional challenges we’ve encountered on the back end. There aren’t any other details to announce yet, but when we do have more to say, it will be here on the blog.

For those of you who are being forced to make some tough choices, I am sorry. There are many of you who have used Quicken on the Mac for longer than you have had your jobs, longer than your children are old, and longer than your marriage. Some of you are from a generation that grew up on Quicken and know nothing else. For most software, you use it to do many one-time jobs: write a paper, give a presentation, or send an email. Once each job is done you start off with a new task and a new set of data. If you did not like the way Microsoft Word did the layout for your last document, you can try Pages for your next one – and even switch back and forth. Financial management software is not like that. It is software that you use to do one job (maybe more if you have a business) for many years.

So as you are looking at your alternatives to Quicken, whether you were happy with it or not, I would encourage you to think not just about what the software does today but what the company that makes it is like.

At IGG Software, we believe in one thing: if we provide great products and services we will have happy customers. This core belief drives everything we do. And this is how we do it:

That is who we are.

Finally, if you do choose to use iBank, remember that we are not the same as Quicken. iBank is its own product, and it does some things differently. But we’re not inflexible about it; let us know what you do like about iBank and let us know how we can improve it.

Again, I am sorry that many of you are being forced to make tough choices. I hope that whatever choice you make will help you manage your finances now and well into the future.

Thanks,
James

So without further ado, here is the main screen of iBank Investor.

You’ll notice that you can see all of your holdings separated by account, with a market value summary for each account. You’ll also notice that for each security there is a button to the right. Pressing this button toggles through four different states: Today’s Gain, Today’s % Gain, Total Gain and Total % Gain. Press the button in any row to change all rows and change the heading above so you know what you are looking at.

To add a position, you press the + button in the upper right. (Note that if you are syncing your portfolio from iBank for Mac, the data is read only.) This brings up a modal view where you are asked to enter a security. One nice thing we’ve added for this is symbol suggestions. For example, let’s say you don’t know the symbol for Toyota; if you start typing “Toy,” you’ll get suggestions:

After you’ve chosen the security, you’ll be asked to enter cost info, number of purchased shares and the purchase date.

When you select a security from the main screen you get the details of that security and your position as it relates to the account in which it resides. In this example, you’ll see that I have two lots of AAPL, purchased on 4/15/11 and 6/20/11. In this Security Detail Screen you can also toggle what information is shown for each lot so you can make the best decision about what to do with your positions.

From the Security Detail Screen you can drill down and edit each lot, add additional lots, or delete all lots associated with the account. For securities for which we can’t automatically get quotes, like precious metals, you can edit the price from this screen as well. You’ll notice there is a page control on the Security Details Screen – I’ll talk more about what this does in a future post.

Now that I’ve shown you the main screens of iBank Investor, let’s talk about a few other things. We are initially releasing this as a free, ad-supported app. We might introduce a paid version later that removes the ad banner, but no promises there yet. Syncing happens in the background with minimal invasion and only when it should – you don’t have to push a “sync” button to to update! Similarly, quotes are updated and downloaded each time you bring the app to the front. This is done on a background thread so that UI remains responsive.

So there you have it – the first sneak peak of iBank Investor. For those that have investments they want to track, I hope you are as excited as I am!

-Ian

@ianggillespie

The blog has been a little quiet. I’ve been away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks, but I’m now back in full-swing, IGG mode. I don’t have a lot to report on, except what has been the focus of my life for the past two weeks.

In late April, my wife, Hally, gave birth to our son and first child, Silvan Lundy Gillespie.

For us English-speaking developers, what is perhaps more interesting than the actual localization is the mechanism by which we did it. As Cocoa developers know, the usual way to localize an app is to maintain multiple copies of NIB files for each supported language (NIB files are used for loading the majority of user interface elements). This approach, while easy to do, is plagued with long- and even short-term problems. So we decided to use a more dynamic method described by Wil Shipley.

While this approach isn’t without its own flaws, the benefits seem to far outweigh the costs. We contributed some code to Mr. Shipley’s DMLocalizedNibBundle.m file to support translating toolbars, table view columns and tab views. You can ask him for it.

So that’s a brief update about French coming to iBank 4.

-Ian

P.S. I’m looking forward to having some screenshots from iBank Investor to share, but we aren’t quite there yet.