Download Stats & Press

We’ve received over 3,600 downloads in the U.S. alone in January and February. We’ve also received quite a lot of downloads outside the U.S. as well. As of this post, we are still within the top 50 finance applications on the iTunes Store. (I’ll post new download stats as soon as March numbers are reported.)
Vault has been featured on the RPI.edu site and received front-page headline for the school newspaper.

Press Release

RPI UNDERGRADUATES UNVEIL OPEN SOURCE IPHONE APPLCATION

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Troy, New York – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute undergraduates Amit Kumar and Devin Ross have built an open source money management application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In conjunction with RPI Computer Science Department’s initiative to develop open source software, Kumar and Ross worked with the support of Sean O’Sullivan and Professor Mukkai Krishnamoorthy to create an application catered to bounds of mobile devices.

The application, title “Vault”, allows users to quickly add transactions to their bank accounts, and keep account balances up to date. In addition, users can quickly launch their bank’s website or find their bank’s nearest local branch.

Vault is currently available for free download from the iTunes Store. The project source is located on http://code.google.com/p/rpiiphone/source/browse/ and the development blog can be found at http://rpiiphoneproject.wordpress.com/.

Ease of Use on A Mobile Device

To make a great app for the iPhone or any mobile platform requires a refined piece of software. A mobile app shouldn’t be judged on how many features it has, rather how well the app works as a solution. For Vault, we’ve focuses on eliminating the amount of user input has to do in any and all ways. Take iteration one for example, while a user won’t be editing account information too often, it’s important to not stress the user because they have to enter too much about entering information. The title of the account is surely important, so we allow the user to enter the name using the keyboard. No big deal. For bank name and information though, Amit & I initially planned to allow the user to enter the name, phone number and website of the account. While the calling the bank phone number and accessing bank website is certainly a useful function to build in. A user usually won’t take the time to enter such details on the device, or they’ll be annoyed by the time they do. Instead, we decided to provide the phone number and website of some of the most popular banks. That way the user can just pick “HSBC” or “Bank of America” from a list and be done with setting up that functionality.

For iteration 2, again we’re faced with being able to provide software that can work with as little user input as possible. This time around, the stakes are higher because the user will be adding new transaction rather frequently. So we focused on the single transaction screen where a user will be adding a title, amount, date and whether the transaction is reconciled. Apple has already created great UI elements for entering the date and amount with the UIPickerView class and a switch for reconciling a transactions.

That brings us to transaction title, where again we’re faced with text entry. We certainly want to provide a user the flexibility of entering text as the title, but also something as quick & simple as picking an option from a list. So we intend to combine both ideas, and allow the user to enter in a title, while at the same time allowing to pick a pre-made title. When a user starts to type something like “Groceries”, they’ll see the list of pre-made option shrink so they can pick that option, and choose the text they entered.

So we’ve condensed most input entry to picking option and maybe entering a few characters, but what else can we do to condense a user’s work? Taking a page out of a desktop application, we decided to add a duplicate button. Since many transactions are repeated, it makes sense because most transactions have the reoccurring information.

Iteration 2: UML

 

UML

Iteration 1 is complete!

We have completed making the first third of our project. This first third has been displayed in a UML below. We are now working on mapping out a similar UML for the second portion of our project. We will post that shortly as it is still in the making.

Project Schedule & Iteration One UML Diagram

Iteration 1

To be finished in 4 weeks

• Password Settings  – Includes enabling a password, storing and asking for the password on startup
• Account – Dealing with creating, editing, deleting, viewing the accounts

When a user starts the app, they can be prompted to give a password (if they want to) to access any of the accounts. They can set the password, and enable it in the settingsViewController. They can edit, delete or add a new account. An account will have a title, bank name, starting balance ect.

Iteration 1 UML Diagram

UML For Iteration One

Iteration 2

To be finished in 3 weeks

• Transactions – Being able to view, edit, create a transaction
• Being able to call a telephone number, go to a bank website

When the user picks an account, the transactions for that account will “pop” into the view. On this screen, they will see the table of the transactions. From their they can edit, add or delete a new transactions. Along with that, the user can be directed to the bank website and phone number.

Iteration 3

To be finished in 3 weeks

• GPS – Dealing with finding local branches of current account

This iteration will specifically have us develop the GPS functionality of finding the local bank branches.

Run Tracker App Demo

I made Run Tracker, an app to keep track of times for running a distance. In the video I show how to add new distances and and times using the iPhone’s various gui objects.

Idea

Yesterday, Devin and I sat down and discussed how we want the program to look like form the User’s prospective. We mapped out every screen and what every button will do. Attached is the sheet with our goal for this application.