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.

Tartini in Tune

I've been using various tuning apps on my iPhones for a couple of years now.  I think I've had around six or seven, and most of those I've paid for.  They've pretty much all worked, after a fashion, but I've never been all that happy with any of them.  They're usually finicky about the sound level.  They fall over if the tone they pick up is a long way from what you're trying to tune to.  They're just not that visually appealing.
When you start to play a note, the usual process goes something like this: No, can't hear anything.  No, still nothing.  Nope.  (Play louder)  Maybe.... Yes, you're very sharp.  Err no wait, I meant flat.  Play louder, can't hear you again.  Oh, that's perfect!  (When even with my tin ear I can tell the horrible sound I'm making is still clearly a million semitones from being in tune.)
In steps Tartini.  It's iPad (or computer) only at the minute, but what a revelation! It's easily the best quality tuner that I've used - both in terms of picking up a sound, and giving a stable predictable indication of what you're playing.  For that alone it'd be the pick of the crop.  But that's only skimming the surface of what this app will do.  Where it really blows everything else away is that it doesn't just attempt to replicate a hardware guitar or chromatic tuner.  It's like the people behind this have really thought about what you want from a tuner, without any preconceived ideas about what your typical hardware tuners are.
The app opens up, showing you a music staff. (Well, by default it shows a compressed view with around 10 octaves, but it's easy enough to change it back to a standard music staff.)  You play a note, it shows up as a line on the staff.  If it's a little flat or sharp, then the line isn't perfectly centered on the staff.  If you're nowhere near the note that you're trying to tune to, it's very obvious.  Simple, and obvious once you see it, but brilliant to make that jump from the traditional hardware tuners that you've probably used before to something which takes full advantage of the hardware available.
It doesn't just stop there either, as you play notes it will tag them on the staff - including sharps and flats.  Also included is a vibrato monitor, which gives you a visual indicator of whether your vibrato is centred around the note as well as smooth and consistent.
The icing on the cake is that it records all the visuals so you can scroll back through and analyze your performance if you're so inclined.
There's also PC/OSX/Linux versions of the software - see the University of Otago site. (I've not used these much at all, they're not as pretty and it's just far more convenient to use the highly portable iPad for this kind of stuff.)  If you're interested in delving into the details of the software there's source code and papers about it on the site as well.

And it's all free.

I can't complement it enough.  Go and get it, even if you're just a hack of a muso like me.  You'll love it.