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Five apps to help you stay organized
Time is one of our most valuable assets and it's a shame to waste it looking for things that are misplaced and forgetting things because the details of your life are out of order. This week's Five Apps will help you gain control of life and get yourself organized once and for all. Completion ($2.99) Completion is a task manager that's quick and simple to use. It doesn't overwhelm you with complexity which makes its easy to get your tasks organized and stay committed for the long term. The workflow is simple. You add tasks and assign them to a project like work, personal or household. Each task lets you specify a date, set a priority, add a note, and assign it to a group. You can then use the group, due date and priority information to sort each list of tasks. When you have completed a task, you can delete it forever or mark it as complete which archives it for later retrieval. It has an attractive, colorful interface that makes Completion a pleasure to use. Pocket Informant ($12.99; $14.99 for HD iPad version) Pocket Informant is a contact, task and calendaring application for the iPhone and iPad. It's a productivity app on steroids that supports multiple calendars and syncs to a variety of services including Toodledo and Google calendar. The best part of Pocket Informant is its long list of customizations and settings. If you can see it on the screen, you can likely change its appearance and configure it to your preference. It's meant for the power user who doesn't mind spending a few hours tweaking it to his or her liking. Once you get it set up, you'll have 75% of your life at your fingertips. Bill Minder for iPhone ($1.99) BillMinder for iPhone lets you organize your bills by recording payment, amount and due date information. The app has a calendar and a list view that'll let you see which bills are past due and which are due in the future. If you need some help remembering when each blll is due, you can setup reminders that will alert a set number of days in advance. You can also sync bills between your iOS devices and back your data up to the cloud for retrieval if your phone is lost or stolen. Payment from within the app is made easy by its integration with DebtMinder (also made by the developers behind BillMinder) and Pocket Money. Billings Touch (Free to try; $15 to unlock via in-app purchase) Billings Touch is an invoicing and billing app for the freelancer. It'll let you organize your clients, track the amount of time you spend working on a project and manage invoices. Developed by Marketcircle, Billings Touch works alone as an iPhone app or as a companion to the desktop Billings for Mac app. We took a look at Billings Touch when it first came out. We liked it back then and still like it now. It's not perfect -- you can't use a custom invoice on the iPhone, but it remains one of the best apps for freelancers who want to keep track of their precious incoming cash flow. Pocket Money ($4.99 for iPhone and iPad) Pocket Money is a financial app that'll help you organize your money. It uses a standard register interface and lets you add accounts like your checking, savings, credit card, and cash. It has all the information you need to record a transaction like category, date, amount, and note. Best of all, it lets you easily sync information between two iOS devices. You can also export transactions to your desktop finance app via Qif files. It's an excellent app for your basic financial needs.
Quicken won't run on Lion: 10 Mac finance apps that will
OS X Lion isn't out yet, but it could be hitting the Mac App Store as soon as next week. For many Mac users, the decision on whether or not to upgrade to Lion is boiling down to one incompatible app -- Quicken for Mac. We've been hearing from our readers for several weeks that Quicken is the sticking point. In this post, I'll discuss what your options are to control your personal finances with a Lion-compatible Mac app. You'll be glad to know that Intuit's flagship app isn't the only game in town. Intuit sent out a note to "Valued Quicken Customers" over the last few days stating that Quicken for Mac 2005, 2006, and 2007 will not run on OS X Lion. Intuit offered some solutions that had TUAW readers steaming: Move to Quicken Essentials for Mac The slimmed-down, next-generation app will work on Lion, but it doesn't have all the features users of the standard Quicken are used to. Intuit is even offering a 50% discount, but points out that you need to make the move before you upgrade to Lion since the app won't import your old data under Lion... Move to Mint.com This is Intuit's replacement for the old Quicken Online, and it's a web-based personal finance site. However, there's no way to move your existing Quicken data to Mint.com. Great thinking there, Intuit. Move to Quicken Deluxe... on Windows Brilliant idea, Intuit, if you have a Windows machine handy. If you're in an all-Mac home, forget it. If you want to run Windows 7 under Boot Camp on your Mac just to run Quicken Deluxe, you have to get a license for Windows 7 ($188 for Windows 7 Home Premium Full Edition on Amazon) and Quicken Windows ($35 for Quicken Deluxe on Amazon). Running a virtual machine under Parallels or VMWare adds additional cost. Why not take this time to move away from Quicken altogether? Here are my suggestions for other apps that will take your existing financial data into the world of Lion. iBank 4 Probably the best solution for most Mac users moving to OS X Lion is iBank 4 (US$59.99). It's available on the Mac App Store, it imports files from Quicken for Mac or PC, and it even has a mobile companion (iBank Mobile, $4.99) for tracking expenses and monitoring account balances. Feeling anxious about moving your data from Quicken to iBank? Don't be -- they even have a set of online video tutorials to set your mind at ease. Money 4 Another personal finance application that is Lion-ready is Money 4 from Jumsoft ($18.99). It imports and exports Quicken QIF files, handles recurring payments, and does portfolio management. Reviews of the current version aren't exactly glowing, but many of the comments appear to be from people who don't understand even the basics of accounting, so your mileage may vary. iFinance for Mac Here's another finance app with a mobile companion. iFinance for Mac ($29.99) also imports Quicken QIF files, and the universal iFinance Mobile app ($1.99) is a good way to capture expenses on the go. MoneyWell One of the more higher-rated Mac personal finance apps is MoneyWell ($49.99). It supports importing financial transactions directly from many banks and other financial institutions, and imports a number of the Quicken formats that have been developed and then abandoned over the years. Anyone who purchases the current 1.6.8 version from the Mac App Store receives a free upgrade to the upcoming (Summer 2011) 2.0 release. Koku The Mac app that gets the award for the brightest page in the Mac App Store has to be Koku ($29.99). If you can make it past the purple background, there's some great information in the description. Like many of the other apps, Koku imports Quicken files and can directly pull transactions from many banks. Koku provides a "smart tagging technology" to label your spending and income with phrases that are familiar to you. PocketMoney To say that longtime developer Hardy Macia of Catamount Software is an Apple fan is putting it lightly -- he developed apps for the Newton platform for many years, including the first iterations of PocketMoney ($19.99). Now the app is available for Mac and PC, but the emphasis is on the iOS version of the app. Mac users may find the Mac flavor lacking in some features, and Macia admits that the current version is primarily for syncing the iOS app to the desktop. Still, the app has most of the features that users will want in a personal finance app, including one that I found fascinating -- the ability to affix photos of receipts and checks to transactions. Budget An interesting take on personal finance and budgeting is Budget ($39.99) from Snowmint Creative Solutions. This app does away with the traditional ledger format of most accounting applications and replaces it with envelopes. Envelopes represent different accounts, and you move money between envelopes to show where money is coming from and going to. It imports OFX and QIF files, but does not support direct bank connections. iCompta Yet another ledger-like Mac app for keeping those dollars, pounds, francs, or euros in line, iCompta ($18.99) also features a $4.99 iOS companion named iCompta 2. Import of existing Quicken data is a given with most of these apps, and iCompta is no exception. It'll also grab your transactions from many banks. Squirrel The winner in the cute logo competition has to go to Squirrel ($24.99), which features a squirrel stashing gold coins in a safe. The app imports existing transactions with ease, lets you define scheduled transactions and budgets, and even brings the Apple concept of Smart Folders to Mac finance for filtering transactions. Squirrel also has an iPhone companion that is highly rated and appears to be very easy to use. iCash SE At the end of the list is a powerful accounting app that has been localized for a number of different languages, including Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and English. Like many of the other apps listed here, iCash SE ($49.99) doesn't use double-entry bookkeeping so it's fairly easy to use. While it doesn't appear that iCash SE supports import of bank transactions, you can definitely get your Quicken data into the app. Conclusion Well, that's it for our roundup of Lion-compatible apps, all of which are available today in the Mac App Store. Don't let anyone tell you that there's no personal accounting solution except for Quicken. I'd love to hear from Mac users who are fans of these or other finance apps, as I'm sure you have good feedback on what the high and low points are for many of these applications. One thing is for sure -- if you're considering making the move to Lion in the very near future, taking care of your personal accounting software needs should be foremost in your mind.
First Look: Pocket Money 2.0 for iPhone
It always makes me happy to see a familiar name on a press release, so when I received a note this morning about PocketMoney 2.0 for iPhone (click opens iTunes) now being available in the App Store, I took more interest than usual in the news. Hardy Macia and his company, Catamount Software, have been developing software for mobile devices and Macs since the Newton MessagePad reigned supreme in the PDA world. In fact, that's when I first became familiar with PocketMoney. Fifteen years later, PocketMoney is still an excellent mobile app for keeping track of expenses, incomes and budgets. There are so many new changes and features in the 2.0 version of PocketMoney that Catamount has released a 13-page document (click to download) describing them in detail. I like the new budget features, which show you at a glance how you're doing with meeting or missing a categorized budget. Catamount has added a library of video tutorials that take users step-by-step through almost every function of the app.If you'd like to give PocketMoney 2.0 a try, there's a free Lite version (click opens iTunes) that has all of the capabilities of the full version, but is limited to 2 accounts and 2 repeating transactions. The full version is currently on sale for US$4.99.To learn more about PocketMoney 2.0, check out the gallery below. %Gallery-48517%
