Greetings, By way of introduction, my name is Chris Larson, aka kergoth. I'm a software engineer, but primarily kernel and driver development, but I have little insight into user interfaces. I've always had financial issues, until a couple months ago when I discovered YNAB (http://youneedabudget.com/). I purchased YNAB Pro ($40). It was my first direct exposure to envelope style budgeting, and the concept of financial software geared toward the future rather than the past (adios, quicken & money). It's the only budgeting setup that makes any sense to me. Being able to roll over balances is just intuitively obvious, in my opinion.
At any rate, I recently (a few weeks ago) switched my primary workstation to a MacBook. It's the first Apple machine I've ever owned, and the first time I've used OSX. Naturally, I've needed to hunt down the right apps for a whole lot of things I already had solutions for in the Windows and Linux worlds. The YNAB folks are working on an OSX version, but they're using Java for it. I'm going to avoid getting into a rant, but I'll just summarize my thoughts by saying that portable codebases are a good thing, but portable UIs usually end up uglier and less consistent than native UIs. So I started looking elsewhere. I discovered Budget by Snowmint, used it for about a week, and then discovered MoneyWell. I'm currently trying out MoneyWell version 1.4. I have to say that the developer has done an excellent job on it. The user interface is clean while still retaining a fair amount of flexibility (always a challenge). It's obviously much more pleasant to look at than Budget is. In fact, the only things I noticed that Budget had that this does not were: - Easier to see all budget balances at once, at a glance (this is fixed in 1.4, much easier to see now) - Ability to allocate funds from specific income sources. I had a bit of fun playing with this, since I could use it to show certain things being paid out of my girlfriend's paychecks, and certain from mine. This isn't a necessity, and I've gotten along without it fine with YNAB Pro, but was something I took note of. I'm certain first half and second half of the month will be sufficient for most things. - Envelope/bucket balances per account. I'm sure it being done otherwise in MoneyWell was a conscious design decision, and I'm sure there are points to be made in either direction. - Integration with Address Book for payees. This is actually a pretty cute feature, and might be something for you to consider at some point. It can complete payees out of your address book, and can add payees from its list to the address book (to a specific Group). Issues thus far: - Double click on an expense bucket. Input a new name for the bucket and hit enter. Now create a new transaction and try to assign it to the new bucket. It will be unable to do so. After deselecting this expense bucket, I was able to switch the transaction to the appropriate bucket fine. - Right clicking on a transaction appears to blank out the transaction line. EIther the text is removed, or its foreground color becomes the same as the background. Once the right click menu goes away, the text returns. - Capital One Credit Cards is missing from the database of OFX data for the online account setup. I also note that there's no way to create a custom entry with user supplied url, etc, but yet I can select an existing one and change its settings.. this is a bit odd. I'd say either you shouldn't let the user tweak it at all, or you should let the user add a custom entry.. but that's just my opinion. Once I selected capital one bank and then changed the settings to match the capital one credit cards ofx settings I obtained from the online MS Money database, it was able to connect, but it says my username and password are incorrect, as though it actually used capital one bank despite the settings I inputted. - ING Direct is missing from the database, but I was unable to find anything on this elsewhere too. I gather that most that have access to this must go through yodlee to pull it off, so that's not really a bug report, just pointing it out. Also note that there are entries in the list of connections which have no url and stuff. Might be better to remove them from the list entirely if they aren't going to end up functioning. I could see this confusing the new user if they run into it. - Orchard Bank credit cards isn't in the list, and I had difficulty finding anything on this online also (it's actually an HSBC card, however). - The app gets a bit confused if you try to add a connection via manage connections, but it isn't able to get an account list via that connection. It then -forces- you to create a new manual account, even though I already have a ton of accounts, and will end up changing their active connections to this one later. It shouldn't be forcing me to add an account, -particularly- a manual one, and when I added the conneciton through manage connections, since that isn't an account creation path. Random possible feature suggestions (beware the feature creep! but i have to mention them anyway..;): - Spell checking in memo wouldn't be a bad thing, if it didn't add much overhead, and if it isn't too much work to add. - The aforementioned Address Book stuff. - It could be cool to have an option to show the dashed lines on the income/expense graph, when you select multiple expense buckets, or one of the smart buckets, so that you can see the planned amounts going forward, not just the scheduled amounts. - In the spending plan, I noticed that the amounts it sets aside don't take into account the amount of time from now until the month where the money is needed. For example, were I to set, on the GIfts bucket, an amount of $0 for every month but December, and set $600 there, it would set the monthly amount to $50, $25 per half. However, it's October. We only have 2 months until the most recent December, so an option for it to want to set aside $200 in oct, $200 in nov, and $200 in dec, to ensure I have the money in time, and then drop back down to $50/mo after that, would be a useful feature. I do this myself in a Numbers spreadsheet, so I can manage my spending plan that way, but I figured I'd point this out, since with that option, I could just rely on the spending plan, at least for the repeating expenses that occur within the next year. To sum up, great job. Clean interface, good functionality. Much improved visibility on bucket balances, and allocations are much, much less confusing than in Budget. The ability to download transactions isn't that important to me personally, but I can see where that would attract a substantial amount of users. I'll almost certainly be purchasing MoneyWell shortly, now that I've played with 1.4. Thanks, -- Chris Larson clarson at kergoth dot com clarson at mvista dot com Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus Maintainer - Tslib Software Engineer MontaVista Software, Inc. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
