Tech.blog

For some months now, I’ve been using Bloomberg Mobile on my iPod Touch to keep myself updated on what’s happening to my stock portfolio. The thing I liked about Bloomberg is it allowed me to monitor stocks from almost any stock exchange in the world, like the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). Since I live in the Philippines, adding stocks from the PSE was a huge plus.

Then just the other day, I read that Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone/iPod Touch was available at the App Store. So, I decided to give it a try and compare it with Bloomberg Mobile.

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Facebook for iPhone Home Screen

The latest version of Facebook’s application for the iPhone and iPod Touch is finally available from the App Store. It has a new user interface that totally blows away the UI of the previous version.

Taking a cue from the iPhone OS interface, Facebook for iPhone opens up with a home page containing icons representing common Facebook pages: News Feed, Profile, Friends, Inbox, Chat, Requests, Events, Photos and Notes. You can even add your own links to your friends and pages just as you would add applications on your iPhone when you purchase them from the App Store. You can also rearrange the icons and see different pages of the Facebook home screen the same way you do with the iPhone.

What is nice is that the icons show badges that represent new items. For example, if you have 5 new friend requests, that number is shown with the Requests icon.

In terms of functionality, the Facebook iPhone app is very close to the Facebook website. Below are some of the Facebook for iPhone functions:

The bottom part of the screen shows the latest notification that you may have. Touching that part of the screen will display all of your recent notifications. The number of new notifications also appear as a badge on the iPhone application when you are on the iPhone’s home screen.

When you are in News Feeds, you can filter what is displayed using the group lists that you created in Facebook. It would have been great if the same feature was available in the Friends page. As it is, you can only scroll through a list of all your your friends. So right now, if you created a list to contain your friends from high school and another list to contain your friends from college, you cannot filter your view like you can in Facebooks’ website. But I’m sure this will be addressed in a future release, though.

You can easily comment or like your friends’ posts. It’s all a matter of selecting the post you want to comment on or like, and then selecting the appropriate button.

The Events page conveniently separates events and birthdays just like in Facebook’s website. From the birthdays tab, you can just select a friend who happens to be celebrating a birthday and post to his or her wall.

You can confirm friend requests from the Requests page. I wish you could also confirm fan, group or page requests, but maybe these will come in a future version.

An additional feature that I wish the developers will add is the ability to add a friend to an existing list group whether you are adding a new friend or you are confirming a friend request. Right now, you’ll have to remember to login to your account using a browser so you can add your new friends to the respective lists. Sometimes, I do forget and when I do remember, I have to check all my friends again just to see if I missed adding anyone to their respective list. So you can see how the feature can be handy in the iPhone app; well, at least for me.

The Photos, Notes, Inbox, and Chat apps all function as they should. Although like the Requests and Friends apps, I do wish I could set my online status selectively using the group lists I’ve already created.

Overall, the Facebook for iPhone app is worth the download (and it’s free). It’s the best way to connect to your Facebook buddies whenever you are on the go. If you’re like me, you can even use it while you are on a computer but don’t want to fire up a browser because you are doing something else…like working or playing World of Warcraft, for example.

iBank Mobile

For a few months now, I have been on the look out for a financial management app from the App Store. Although most of the apps that I tried came with lite versions, the features that they showcased were not enough to make me go ahead and purchase the full versions. I’ve almost given up my search until I discovered iBank Mobile from IGG Software. Created by the same people who made iBank for the Mac, it offers a great interface to enter transactions while you are on the go.

The application was designed to run either as a standalone mobile application or as a companion application to the desktop version. If you run it as a companion application, you have the advantage of synching transactions between your Mac and your iPhone/iPod Touch.

Unlike other personal finance apps that are sold on the App Store, iBank Mobile does not have a lite or trial version. Thus, I had to buy it for USD4.99 just to try it. I have to admit that the app coming from IGG Software was an advantage. About a year ago, my wife and I tried out iBank and was very impressed by the software.

When I first launched iBank Mobile, I was asked if I wanted to use it standalone or if I wanted to do a sync. I selected standalone. From that point, it was a matter of setting up my accounts: cash accounts, savings, checking, credit cards, etc. even line of credit accounts. I was expecting to be prompted for the beginning balance for each account but that didn’t happen. So, I created a transaction for each account wherein the Payee was “Beginning Balance” and entered the initial balances. It would’ve been great if this were part of the account setup process particularly if the app will be used as a standalone application. If the app will sync with the desktop version, then the beginning balances can be picked up easily.

The next thing I tried was to do a transfer between accounts. I had to search the support website before I could figure out how to do it. In my first attempt, I placed the transfer transaction’s target account in the Payee field. I found it strange that the name of the account was not in the list, so I typed it in. When I saved the transaction, I could not understand why the amount was debited from the source account but not credited to the target account. It would’ve been really strange if I had to enter two separate transactions.

Luckily, I found the answer in the support website. Apparently, someone else was having the same problem. I discovered that to do a transfer between accounts, you select the target account via the Category field. But then, the list of accounts is listed on top of the Categories that you have created. You will have to scroll before you can actually see the accounts. That is not very intuitive in my opinion. I mean why use the categories field in the first place? Hopefully, the guys at IGG Software will realize this and come up with something better in a future release.

A neat feature of iBank Mobile that I really like is the passcode option allows you to set a passcode that is longer than four numbers. So far, I have tried using passcodes that have six, seven, and eight digits. It appears though that you can even enter more than ten digits but I guess this is only good if you have a good memory. The passcode is requested each time you open the app — even if your device sleeps and then wakes up while you are within the app.

Overall, iBank Mobile is a great app well worth the USD4.99. It is also worth noting that this is a very early version of the software and it already has great features. The developers themselves admitted that they only focused on core functions when they released it. We can only expect even better versions of this app.