I bought MoneyBook for iPhone yesterday after reviewing the competition under Finance. Most of the others were not as pretty as this app, an important criteria for any application used regularly on any platform. Of course pretty being subjective, means to me: aesthetically revealing the functionality through harmony of colour, form and movement. So it seems logical to suggest that there needs to be a good core utility about an application/website to be pretty.
The core functionality of MoneyBook is to budget by tracking how much you spend; the most attractive part being that it is on my phone and thus with me all the time for when those transactions take place. My most immediate gripe was that if you add an income transaction it automatically adjusts your budget with that amount. Having a starting budget is separate to ones income unless you are set to spend everything that comes in. I thought then that there would be two ways to use the app:
- Use the starting budget amount and don’t add any income transactions, thus using it as a “don’t spend more than this allocated amount” for the month.
- Set the starting budget amount to zero and add income transactions. This way, I would have a running total of my savings.
Option two seemed slightly against the grain of the how the app was intended to function and I have no way of knowing when the month ends, if the app will only say how much I spent or not.
Funnily enough, this morning MoneyBook was updated with an option that allows you to add income transactions without affecting the budget total – called “budget mode”. Sadly they did not address my 2nd gripe: the reoccurring transactions (income or expense) is useless for anything that is not monthly. Adding the calendar standard of daily, weekly, fortnightly etc would really make this feature usable, perhaps the only way to make it usable.
Now the good bit: I was going to talk more about the other apps and why I choose this one but when looking back over them for the purpose of this blog I found that MoneyBook and another pretty app Pennies were almost exactly the same… I wonder if MoneyBook is a ripoff. Pennies has a feature of browsing by expense category (just discovered that MoneyBook also does this) which would certainly be good but the reason I quickly wrote it out as competition for the “New and Noteworthy” MoneyBook was that it did not offer a way to export the data (at least according to users comments). Anyway I comped iTunes screenshots of both apps for a laugh:
