Some statistics & future plans

Congratulations to all of you 45 persons who have so far purchased my budgeting app. I just put you on the map and it seems that we have a worldwide community. I've been quite busy with my real job, but some plans have emerged also to this direction. Now I just need to squeeze some free time to implement this kind of stuff:

• Better in-app statistics
• Improved caching, scroll marker & ordering options in Show budget -list
• Setup wizard
• Test drive for new Asha platforms
• Revised menu structure
• Data synchronization between BudgetMan clients

These ideas have arisen from my daily usage of BudgetMan. If you have suggestions, other great ideas of improvement or some "pain in the bottom" areas with the program, I'd be more than pleased if you tell what they are either by e-mail or commenting this post.

I'm also getting there with an Excel-spreadsheet that does number crunching and prints pretty statistics, but some polishing and macro magic is still needed in that area too. If you have rolled your own, please show off: I'll exchange your spreadsheet to mine. Promise!

Update 4.6.2013: I just managed to test the brand new Asha platform and it seems that some things have changed enough to introduce some bugs. Fixed some and expecting some new ones to emerge.

Localization and Android port

BudgetMan is built to support multiple languages from the beginning depending on the phone's locale settings. Only thing missing are the actual translations, so the only currently available language is english. There might be a finnish translation in the pipeline done by me, but if you're interested having BudgetMan translated to your language and you are ready to help, give me a hint.

For those people that have multiple smartphones in their household and they happen to run different OS:es, there's always the question when some good software is found - will it run on the other device? Currently BudgetMan is a 'one trick pony' and it can be run only in JavaME capable phones.

Because there's another phone present and because the owner of that phone is responsible for half of our family's economy, I decided to port BudgetMan also to Android platform. It's not even near production ready, but the work has been started.

My current plans include covering about the same functionality as in current JavaME version of BudgetMan and when ready, there should absolutely be an option to synchronize transaction data between clients. The Android style of making things happen is still a bit of a mystery to me, but so far everything has gone quite smoothly and I'm a fast learner. It's basically Java, after all.

Adding transactions

When BudgetMan is started for the first time (or new budget is activated), you are presented with an empty main screen. You can start using BudgetMan right away by adding new transaction. To add new transaction, select 'New Transaction' from BudgetMan main screen. Location of the command item depends of your phone model.

Settings screen

Settings screen is a place from where you manage how BudgetMan works. It's possible to:

• Set up categories
• Manage budgets
• Set currency
• View version and licencing info
• Reset all data and settings 

BudgetMan QA testing

Hello there! This is the first post announcing BudgetMan is sent to Nokia store QA review. If everything goes smooth, it can soon be yours for pennies!