Where’s my finance manager app?
One of the reasons I am still using a Psion 5 mx was because it’s applications. There are so many Psion apps that have not found them ways to modern smartphones. And I mean a lot. One of them is a unified finance manager where I can track expenses, forecast my budgets, monitoring my bank accounts and cash and more. Applications like ABP5, RMR Bank, 5Accounts and Money are among examples of this excellent programming showed by Psion communities more than 5 years ago.
For my personal use, I prefer Palmtop’s (now TomTom) Money which is truly excellent in assisting me managing my financial life. It’s a simple and powerful app. And supports exporting to other formats like CSV which can be imported into MS Excel for analysis. I’ve been using Money for years and havent found it’s equivalent on Symbian neither UIQ nor S60.
If there’s something close to a unified personal finance manager for UIQ 3, it’s Malcolm Bryant’s jABPlite. However, it’s written in Java, eats a lot of RAM and the UI is slow. It does offer account management and everything else you could expect from a good personal finance management app but it doesn’t belong to UIQ 3 in terms of intuitive interface and takes a lot of clicks to do simple operations.
This is another area where UIQ 3 developers can take note and look into. I hope they read this…
So guys, how do you manage your finance using your UIQ 3 smartphone? A spreadsheet? 
Hi,
Out of interest, did you try Jabp? (as opposed to JabpLite) One of the neat things about Jabp on UIQ is that you can use exactly the same program on your PC as well, accessing the data directly on your phone via USB. So when you need a big screen and keyboard, you have it. When you are ‘on the road’ you still have the full functionality on your UIQ3 phone. Works on M600, P990 and P1i but not on Z8, W950, W960.
Best regards,
Malcolm
http://www.freepoc.org
Malcolm,
many thanks for your comment. Your abp5 is unrivalled and I always recommend it to my friends who use Series 80 Communicators and also Psion users to manage their financial.
my post above was about native solutions. I intend to tell my readers and uiq developers out there that this important function is being omitted.
Your jabp and jabplite are both excellent apps. No doubt about that, but the complexity of symbian programming (not to mention symbian signing hurdles), made uiq 3 users live with limited functions.
i tried jabp and found it very functional in both win xp and p990 but i think it’s not my cup of tea. Furthermore, for me, it’s a hassle to keep the data updated on both pc and mobile.
recently, flying money was released and it promises a new chapter for personal finance manager.
keep up the good work ok!
[quote]
i tried jabp and found it very functional in both win xp and p990 but i think it’s not my cup of tea. Furthermore, for me, it’s a hassle to keep the data updated on both pc and mobile.
[/quote]
That was my point really. One of the coolest things about Jabp on UIQ3 (at least in my opinion) is the ability to run the PC and UIQ3 versions from a single set of data files **stored on the phone**. No sync issues, no moving data back and forth.
Flying Money is promising, but still rather buggy at the moment ( which is a problem for a personal finance app).
Best regards,
Malcolm
http://www.freepoc.org
Dec 31st, 2007 at 10:35 am
[...] you read this blog since the beginning, I’ve been yakking about the missing financial application for some time. It seems that some UIQ 3 developers also thought the same and released an app that [...]