iBank for iPad 1.0 quick look.

     iBank for iPad is out, and available now in the app store!  Unfortunately, at the minute, that's about all the good news there is.

     Firstly a quick rundown on iBank.  iBank is one of a number of finance tracking software packages, if you're interested in the finer details you can take a look at http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/.  Briefly though, in my opinion, it's an interesting piece of software which tries really hard to have a pleasing aesthetic, and does so with a fair amount of success.  It also has some simple, but interesting, touches that I like.  For example on a net worth report it'll tell you if you're trending towards saving more or spending more money.  But it has some really odd limitations as well - no real landing or home page where you can see everything at a glance.  No calendar view.  No way to have a report which graphs which categories you've spent your money on in prior months.

     iBank for iPad continues along the same vein, but in a far more extreme way.  It does things in a very pretty way (for a finance app).  It has some neat little features.  But many of the basics are horribly overlooked, or indeed absent.
     Firstly syncing.  The iPad version syncs with the Mac version.  Well, kind of.  It syncs transactions & accounts.  It doesn't sync budgets.  It doesn't sync reminders.  This means that you kind of need to either use one or the other.  Do not buy the iPad version thinking it'll provide a convenient supplemental way to manage your Mac iBank accounts.  For example, marking off bills (scheduled transactions) as paid on the iPad while sitting on the couch would seem to me to be the perfect use case for iBank on iPad.  Without being able to sync all your existing scheduled transactions though....  It's not going to happen.  Same goes for budgets, they don't sync.  (I personally find setting up budgets in any finance application very annoying, so I'm certainly not re-doing it for the iPad version of iBank.)
     Ok, so if you give up on syncing and think of iBank for iPad as a complete replacement for the Mac version - does it fare any better?  Well, there's a wizard for setting up a budget and scheduled transactions all at once.  Good idea, saves some work.  The basic home/landing page on iPad is fairly basic - but it's still a step up from that available in the Mac version.  It's a bit slow when updating transactions.  (At least on an iPad 2)  Entering some types of data is pretty clumsy - there's no calendar to choose a date from, you can only type in numbers.  Reports are...  Well, "missing" would be the best description.  A finance app that doesn't let you compare your net worth for the previous year?  Or the total of all your savings accounts.  Or a breakdown of income vs expenses.  Or pretty much anything else you might want to track your finances for?  Interesting design choice that one.

     To be fair, for each individual account you can see a graph of the total amount at the start (or end?) of each month.  For a six month period.  Or eight months if you use your iPad in landscape mode.  You can't change to weeks.  You can't change the scale.  You can swipe backwards and look through any previous block of six/eight months at a time, but that's it.  Also under the budget screen, you can see your total ingoing/outgoings in the same limited manner.
     Limited is really what springs to mind whenever I try and use this app.  Due to the lack of desktop syncing functionality it doesn't make a very good addition to the desktop client.  Due to it's lack of reporting options it doesn't make a very good stand alone option.  I think it kind of makes it a bit pointless in its current incarnation.
     Hopefully in six months time once Igg Software has done some updates it'll become a useful tool.  As it stands currently it's nothing more than an interesting tech demo of what they want their iPad app to be.  At $15 I'd say this makes it a very unwise purchase.
     I'm actually surprised they released it as is.  I know there was a lot of pent up demand for an iPad version of iBank but I can't imagine that charging people $15 for software that's in this state is going to give customers a positive opinion of the company.