You start wondering: “Should I just disable the NAS’ power schedule and keep it running 24×7? What about the electricity bills? What about those drive’s lifespan?” You could just change the NAS’ power-on schedule, then again you can’t always foresee the times when you can have some movie watching moments.

If only there’s a way for the Apple TV to be more than a media player. Something to control the devices in your home network.

We’re working on an app for the 4th generation Apple TV to solve this very problem. Utilizing the open “Wake-on-LAN” protocol, you don’t need to get up and leave your couch to power up your file servers since you can do that right from your Apple Remote.

Our wake-on-LAN app is much easier to use and more functional than the competition. It automatically scans your home network so that you don’t need to figure out your devices’ ethernet addresses. Put it on the top shelf of your Apple TV home screen and you can get an overview of your home network. However you can still enter MAC addresses manually if you really need it.

These are just some of the benefits of using our app:

• Save electricity by keeping those PC servers asleep most of the time.
• Prolong the service life of your network hard drives.
• No more movie night mood breakers just to turn on the video server.

Interested? Sign up at the form below to get early access to the app. Since Apple limits the number of beta users, we can’t guarantee a seat for everyone. First-come, first-serve – don’t get behind the curve!

When you involve your clients to create a mood board together, you can easily find key information up front in a low-risk way. The alternative would be creating a series of visual prototypes – a lengthy and potentially expensive process – and risky if your client consists of multiple decision makers.

Who uses mood boards?

Many web professionals and design firms use mood boards as a way to convey their idea to the client. Some even preach it as a way to fix the design by committee problem in web projects – which is often the case when a boutique firm is doing work for a large corporation. One firm – Viget – even claim that mood boards is an integral part of their process.

Photographers are likely the second group of people who creates mood boards extensively. Lindsay Adler gather inspirations and develops concepts by creating mood boards – and some of these boards makes up the plan for the photo shoot later on. These boards provide the aesthetic and direction of the shoot and useful for communicating visual ideas with the client without needing waste hours in creating throwaway previsualization materials.

A number of authors also found that mood boards are a great way to communicate an idea to design a book cover. In fact, Graeme Shimmin shows how he designed how he used mood boards to communicate with his graphic designer on a book cover. As good book cover design is vital to get the book picked up by a browsing reader, authors need to spend good effort in the cover design.

Last but not least, mood boards would also be useful for businesspeople and startup founders. The business model canvas is really a type of mood board, albeit less visual. It’s a single board that shows all aspects of a business in a single glance. Of course there’s nothing that stops you from including visuals in to spice things up a bit (e.g. include a persona picture of your target market).

How to use it?

One way to brainstorm using mood boards is to follow these four steps:

1. Gather relevant materials and place them into the board.
2. See how they are interconnected and group related things together
3. Remove materials that are not relevant.
4. Take a photo of the board and then repeat from Step 1.

After having through a number of these iterations, then you should all go back and see which boards that made sense the most. Finally choose the one that’s best and that would be the result of your session.

Free Template

I’ve put together a Keynote template to help you plan the scope of your next project. These templates should get your brains rolling and not simply stare at a blank page and get stuck. There are a number of slide layouts available that you can use for your own brainstorming sessions:

• Website Design
• Photo Shoot
• Book Cover
• Lean Canvas

The website design mood board template takes inspiration from style tiles. There are placeholders for colors, textures, fonts, and buttons. Furthermore there are placeholders for you to place adjectives to show the gist of the site. These style tiles are meant to get an overview of the overall “feel” of a website and typically a few of them are presented to the client or constructed with their participation. Eventually these elements would make their way into the actual design of the site – in the form of stylesheets and textures.

The photo shoot mood board template collects past portfolios or other sample photos in order to plan a photo taking session as well as a guide for everyone that will be on the site. Having a mood board not only help the client visualize the end result of photo, but also to align the team for the shoot – wardrobe, makeup, lighting, props, even the models as well.

Similarly the book cover mood board template collects sample covers from other books, movie posters, or other artwork to help communicate what kind of cover that the author desires. The template also has a number of color well placeholders that are meant to set the color scheme of the cover art.

Finally the lean canvas template is mainly meant for planning a new business or product. It forces the participants to think about the new venture holistically – not just about the new product and the problems it’s going to solve, but also who are the customers, how to reach those customers, and how to sustain the business profitably.

We’re also pondering whether an app would be useful to help create mood boards collaboratively. That is a brainstorming meeting which revolves around creating a mood board together to scope out the project. We’d figure this would be useful when you don’t have a big white board available or empty wall that you can use to write on and iterate ideas.

If you think this is a good idea, please sign up to our app’s launch list. You’ll get the free mood board templates after you have confirmed your e-mail in the list. More details on the app available after the jump.

Get Free Template

Here’s what we have right now:

• A working iOS app and a Universal app too – works great for both the iPhone and iPad, and let’s not forget the iPod touch. The iOS Speech Timer has been redesigned to fit with iOS 7’s new style and is pretty much feature complete by now.
• A working Mac app. Yes, a Mac app. There have been a number of requests for Speech Timer to work on the Mac, primarily for classroom use.
• Video-Out support on iOS. Now you can make good use of that Lightning-to-VGA connector that you’ve just bought and use an overhead projector as your timer display.
• Secondary monitor support on the Mac. The OS X version has a dedicated presentation-only window that you can use to present the timer to your audience.
• Sync over iCloud. This was a hard one, but I believe I’ve got it working. Your speech type settings as well as your speech history are synchronized between your iOS devices and OS X computers over iCloud.
• A new icon (yay!). At least for the iOS app that should fit nicely into iOS 7’s home screen.

Here’s what’s still in the works:

• Bug fixes.. lots of them.. all those tiny details and loose ends need to be tighten up.
• Manuals.. yes, need a better user manual, videos and all those documentation to help you make a better use of it.
• iOS 7’s UI dynamics. Something to add zest to your role as a Toastmasters’ Timer or Sergeant-At-Arms.
• Icon for OS X. iOS 7’s icons may be flat and skeuomorphism has been taken out of Mavericks, but OS X app icons are still in it’s 3D glory.

Here’s a teaser screen shot from the OS X version. Hopefully this gets you excited to use it as we’re excited in completing it.

You’re excited? Enter your e-mail address below to be “in the know” of Speech Timer’s development or simply be the first to know when it’s ready, or when a beta is available.

• She could stick a post-it note to your door. Provided that she has one handy – or at have least pen & paper readily available to slip under your door. Hopefully the note doesn’t get blown off by wind or taken out by your neighbour’s naughty children.
• She could try calling your phone – provided that she knows your phone number and you can answer her. Similarly she could send you a text message or e-mail – but again this information needs to be available somehow. You could display your phone number (or e-mail address) on your door, but this makes you vunerable to spammers and telemarketers.
• She could just try coming back later. However this takes time and effort and she’ll doubt that you’ll be present the next time she comes around and may decide not to come back – hence you may miss an opportunity.

What if there’s an easy way for people to contact you but still keep your contact details safe from irresponsible callers and spambots? Just like an executive secretary who takes phone calls and fends off monkeys from wasting her boss’ precious time.

If this is your problem, we believe it can be solved by a web form. That is the visitor can simply fill out a form on the web saying that she was here and provide some information for you to call her back. Now you may ask, “if she’s not on the Internet, then how can she fill out the form?” Well, with the proliferation of smartphones, people tend to _already_ be on the Internet most of the time – since they have an always-on data connection on their phones. Even better, web forms can filter out spammers better than most e-mail filters when equipped with a CAPTCHA. Moreover reading a message takes only a fraction of the time than taking a phone call of similar content – which is a good defence against telemarketers.

Then all you need is to have a web form somewhere and prominently display its address on your door so that visitors know how to reach you when you’re not around. Tell them to open that form using their smartphones and leave their notes there. Since most people won’t have post-it notes handy, this virtual post-it note should prove useful.

So here’s our idea. Using our app you can print a poster that you can stick on your door – containing your name, web form URL, and a QR Code to make it easy to enter the form’s URL. Visitors will see this prominently-placed poster then either scans the QR Code or type in the URL below it on their smartphone.

On their smartphones, they’ll see a web form to write their message to you. The form is deliberately made simple and thus only two fields are mandatory: the message itself, and a CAPTCHA to ensure that this is a real person who are posting the message.

Furthermore if the visitor desires, she can leave their name and contact information if she wants you to call her back. What’s nice about this is that the smartphone’s web browser should be able to auto-fill this information in the form – letting her name, e-mail address, and various other details for you to use to get back in touch with her.

Do you think this is useful? Contact us or leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

In this article can see our preliminary mockups that shows how Speech Timer may look like. Keep in mind that these are work-in-progress and may change when the application is live. In fact, we’re keen to know how you think of these designs and whether you’d enjoy using it on your Toastmasters meet-ups.

iPhone & iPod touch designs

Timekeeping Screen

We’re taking out the faux metal and fake LCD display and replacing them with a clean style based off DesignModo’s flat UI color scheme. Emulating a hardware timer is a thing of the past – users have grown up and accustomed of using a touch screen thus faking a physical device is no longer necessary.

You can see from the screenshots below and compare Speech Timer’s old look with the new look. All decorations have been stripped out hence we save a good amount of screen space for real functionalities. The buttons are made bigger so that they’re easier to tap when you’re enjoying your colleague’s speech and the light indicators are similarly enlarged to make them evident from your peripheral vision. 

Those screenshots above are for the 4:3 aspect ratio of iPhone 4S and previous generation iPhone and iPod touch devices. Whereas the screenshot below is designed for the iPhone 5’s taller screen and 16:9 aspect ratio.

Horizontal Mode

In addition to getting rid of skeuomorphism we’re also adding a horizontal “display-only” mode. When you rotate your iPhone or iPod touch horizontally, the timer controls and various other buttons will be hidden. Now the entire screen functions as a timer display that can be read at a distance. You can see the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 variants of the design below.

iPad designs

In the iPad designs we enlarged the content portions of the display but kept the controls at the same sizes (more or less). Thus it’s more suitable for viewing at a distance but without wasting screen real estate for the buttons since the sergeant-at-arms will be operating it at arm’s length anyway (pun intended ^_^)

Timekeeping – Portrait

As you can see for yourself in mock screen below, the iPad timekeeping screen doesn’t deviate much from its iPhone counterpart. Colored lights indicators, numeric time display, speech type and orator have been enlarged while keeping the bottom row for use by the sergeant-at-arms to operate the iPad.

Timekeeping – Landscape

However when the iPad is turned on its side, we change the light display to run vertically. Otherwise there would be too much unused space on the sides of the display and we couldn’t enlarge the green/yellow/red traffic lights display. The numeric timer display will be repositioned to the top of the screen for easier glancing by the speaker at a distance.

iOS Secondary Display (AirPlay / display cable)

Nowadays iOS devices are able to output to a secondary display either through AirPlay or VGA/HDMI cable. If you’re lucky enough to be in a Toastmasters club that have a large television or LCD projector, you can make use of these to display the timer for everyone to see.

TV Out (16:9 ratio displays)

Modern television sets nowadays usually has VGA or HDMI inputs so that you can use them as a secondary display for your iOS device. Typically these are widescreen televisions with 16:9 ratio displays – that is when you divide the number of horizontal dots to the number of vertical dots in the unit, you’ll get a number close to 1.77 (which is 16 divided by nine).  Here is one example mockup on how Speech Timer may use a television screen to display the timer and speech type.

Overhead Projection (4:3 ratio displays)

However many LCD projectors have a resolution of 1024×768 or even 800×600 – that is 4:3 aspect ratio. This requires a slight change in the screen design, since we don’t want to show any black bars at the top/bottom of the screen.

Mac Designs

Unlike iOS devices, Macs are capable of having multiple windows being shown at the screen and these windows can be resized. Mac notebooks tend to have a 16:10 aspect ratio screen whereas iMacs use a 16:9 ratio. Moreover the Mac Mini and Mac Pro doesn’t have any built-in monitor and can be attached to just about any resolution display. This makes designing the screen for the Mac a bit challenging.

However we’re taking a bet that most likely Speech Timer will be run on a laptop – hence assuming a 16:10 default aspect ratio. We also try to make the design a bit more flexible and allow the window to be resized.

Primary Window (Timekeeping)

You can see a sample screen design for the Mac version of Speech Timer below. We plan to use a chrome-less utility window to maximize the display area and minimize distractions. In keeping with the Mac, it uses Lucida Grande as the default font and not iOS 7’s default of Helvetica Neue Ultra Light. The indicator lights are made rectangular so that it can blend well with other applications on the Mac, should the user chose to run them at the same time with Speech Timer.

Secondary Window (Projection / Display only)

The primary window above works well even if you have a projector attached and chose to run it in display mirroring mode – where everyone else looking at the projection sees the same content as the one you’re looking. However if you prefer to use the projector as a secondary display, we also have something that you can use.

You can use the secondary window to show the timer without any controls that can distract the audience. This is similar to the secondary display screens found in the iOS’ version.

What’s On Your Mind?

So you’ve seen our plans for the next generation Speech Timer. The app will be iOS 7 / OS X 10.9 only and hopefully we can get them out just after those platforms are available to general public.

Now it’s your turn: what do you want to see in the next version of Speech Timer? Please let us know. Better yet enter your e-mail address below to be “in the know” of Speech Timer’s development or simply be the first to know when it’s ready.  

PS: you’ll also get a free “Toastmaster’s Timer Sheet” if you sign up to the form above! 

Scuttlebutt is a Yammer client made for Mac lovers. It’s our answer to Yammer’s contempt of their official desktop client made from Adobe’s AIR. Integration with the Mac desktop is our top priority for Scuttlebutt. Hence it’s a true desktop-grade Cocoa app that embraces multiple windows – not just some cross-platform app or a remake of an iOS app. Power user features are in the pipeline: menu bar item, services menu, notification center, etc – the whole enchilada.

At this time of writing, Scuttlebutt is about 70% feature complete and currently being circulated with a small group of Mac/Yammer enthusiasts who volunteered to be alpha testers. Here are some features that I consider complete in Scuttlebutt.

Message Lists

These are the various feeds that you normally see in the Yammer website:

• My Feed – updates from people you follow in your network.
• Private Messages – messages sent to you privately.
• Received – replies to your updates.
• Liked Messages – updates that you “liked”
• Company Feed – all updates in your Yammer network.

Groups

Scuttlebutt can lists groups in your Yammer network and lets you view the group’s messages. You can also join or leave non-private groups within a click of a button as well as view group information, the owner of the group, as well as group information.

Members

The member list shows people in your Yammer network. From there you can get detailed information about a person and see her updates as well as the messages that she liked.

Mini Browser

Scuttlebutt also has a mini web browser that you can use to peek through Yammer’s site that’s pretty handy for some features that Yammer hadn’t provided any programming interfaces for 3rd party applications like Scuttlebutt. One example is the Poll / Questionnaire – Yammer currently only allows polls to be answered from their website and the mini browser is handy for this. Why a mini browser and not just open it in Safari? Scuttlebutt can access more than one Yammer account at the same time and you can’t do this in Safari.

External Networks support

Scuttlebutt supports Yammer external networks (a.k.a. communities) as well as multiple Yammer accounts. Now you don’t need to log out and log back in if you have multiple Yammer accounts and need to switch between them.

Search

You can quickly search for messages, files, members, topics, and even notes in your Yammer network without leaving Scuttlebutt.

Join the launch list!

You like what you see? Enter your e-mail address below to be “in the know” when Scuttlebutt is ready.  Better yet, tick the “Beta Tester” checkbox if you’d like to get exclusive beta releases of Scuttlebutt. No spam, promise!

Hi All,

Finally Speech Timer for Android is at its final stage. All the functionality is working, except for the Speech History section and the accelerometer function. Which I hope can be finished in one month. I am working this thing while also working as a full time developer, so please excuse me. But now I am getting faster and faster in working with the Android platform, and who knows, I might be releasing my second app soon.

Below are some of the screens which I have finished :). The icons are looking better there, but we still need to polish the a little bit to shine.

The speech page is working fine like in the Apple version, except the accelerometer function is not there yet, so if you want to display the flag as a whole screen, you have to click the flag button ladies.. For those of you which are not familiar with Speech Timer previously, it is an app to assist you when you are practicing your speech or becoming a judge for a Toast Master programme. You will need to select a speech type to practice with ( we provided a default one for your convenience ). The time markers for your speech is the green time ( the minimum time for your speech ), the yellow time ( when you are supposed to wrap up your speech ) and the red time ( when your speech should have stopped ). These time markers are represented by the three light bulbs at the top of the screen. If your speech surpasses the red time mark, then the light bulbs will blink altogether and an alarm is played. Please note that even when the speech is running, you can change the speech type and orator name by clicking the big grey button in the middle.

Linking the Contacts data and making the dynamic list was a little bit tricky. But I am glad I managed to get through it. In this screen, the user is able to select the orator from a list of names in his contacts or he can type the name himself. The list at the bottom part enables the user to select the speech type. The screens below is for managing the speech types, you can update, delete and create a new speech type, and setup the timings of the speech. Please note due to the different platform between Android and Apple, I am not able to create an identical UI experience. But I do hope you don’t mind with the differences.

By default we provided you with the speech types above. You can change the the speech types by clicking the ‘Edit’ button. It will take you to the following three screens.

An iPad is better suited for use while standing in cramped positions (such as in a public transport) while still providing a larger screen and keyboard buttons that makes typing easier. A laptop would need a desk or at least a lap to work – yes I know you can use Connect-A-Desk laptop harness but it would be awfully awkward to use such a harness in commuter busses. I’ve tried thumb-typing on my iPhone to write articles, but it’s too small and interferes with my “flow” since I often need to correct mistypes and reading the post is a pain too when you only have half a screen (due to the other half is covered by virtual keyboard) to work with.

However I’m still unable to write complete articles 100% on the iPad alone. Put simply, I haven’t found a good set of tools for completing entire articles in the iPad. Applications on the iPad doesn’t cooperate as well as on the Mac and thus an iPad application needs to support an entire workflow for something that’s achievable via orchestrating multiple applications on the Mac. Like for example a blogging tool needs to be able to import PNG images and crop them because funneling line-drawing images through the photo library often degrades the image due to JPEG compression.

What’s keeping me from blogging from the iPad alone? Take a look at my blogging workflow:

1. Write a draft in the iPad’s Notes app or TextTastic.
2. Draw an accompanying illustration using OmniGraffle (for Mac or iPad) or simple screen annotations with LittleSnapper.
3. Retouch and crop the image using Acorn or Skitch.
4. Move the text to MarsEdit for editing and enriching the text with appropriate hyperlinks.

Enough about me. What about you? Do you find the iPad a good tool for writing short articles? What about the software do you use? What software? Do you use your iPad as your primary blogging tool? Tell your experience in the comments!

However unlike Facebook, content in Yammer is private by default and can only be accessed by other people with the same e-mail domain (the part to the right of the “@” sign in your e-mail address). Being in a private network, you can feel quite safe to discuss things that can’t be normally shared outside company boundaries.

But that “one domain” feature can be a problem for mavericks like me. I’m part of more than one Yammer network and have multiple accounts that corresponds to the various networks that I’m in. Yammer doesn’t make it easy to switch between networks in their website – you’ll need to logout and then re-login using the other account to “switch” between networks.

Yammer also provides desktop and mobile client applications to access your Yammer network in addition to the website. The  desktop client is based on Adobe Air and with it comes the usual lack of functionalities and integration with many other cross-platform applications. It’s their second iteration of the desktop client and still based on Adobe Air.

Yammer does talk about having a native Mac client – but it has been more than a year since their last update without any Mac app in sight. Probably a Mac client isn’t their priority and it’s hard to see that the recent Microsoft acquisition will improve support for Apple’s OS.

There is another 3rd party Desktop client for Yammer: Gabble. It’s a pretty decent application. However Gabble still lacks multi-account support. It takes quite a lot of screen space – designed more like a full-fledged e-mail application instead of a satellite “instant messaging” app, which fits more to Yammer’s use cases.

So I’d figure to give a go making a Yammer OS X app. A nice one that’ll be a joy to use and written with the Mac power user in mind. It’ll be a paid app – casual users can continue to use the free official Adobe Air client or Gabble. These will be the app’s primary value propositions:

• Multi-account support. The power tool for the power user, now you can be logged in to multiple Yammer accounts at the same time and easily switch between them.
• Menu Bar access. Like any decent instant messaging app, you can get to it from any applications for a quick post or update.
• Desktop integration. The whole enchilada: drag-and-drop files, Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, Services menu, emoji support, etc.

We call this app Scuttlebutt. The original name was Water Cooler, named after the water cooler effect. But I couldn’t get a good domain name for it. So Scuttlebutt (which is another name for water cooler with an interesting connotation) is the second best option.

There is a snag that may be preventing Scuttlebutt from seeing the light of day: Yammer might pull the plug. As one product manager (Drew Dillon) put it, they are “actively discouraging 3rd party clients”. That’s a bit sad for us Mac users since it doesn’t look like they have been doing a good job for Mac users.

We’re dependent on Yammer to provide us with an API key for Scuttlebutt. This key determines which Yammer networks that Scuttlebutt had access to. Thankfully a Yammer engineer (Sidd Singh) provides an API key for “temporary global access”. Let’s hope that it will be more “permanent” global access.

Anyway we’ve starting work on Scuttlebutt now. We’ve got Scuttlebutt’s website up and a launch list ready. Sign up below when you want to be a beta tester or just get the first scoop when Scuttlebutt is launched.

One of my big complaints that haven’t been solved by these personal finance applications – Quicken or MoneyWell – is reconciling transactions with the banks that I use. These applications are programmed with US banks in mind and rarely makes it easy to use financial institutions outside the US.

The Problem

Almost all personal finance applications that I see expects a QIF import or need to talk to the bank’s Internet Service directly via DirectConnect or OFX protocols. That’s fine if your bank provides these interfaces. What’s bad is that I haven’t seen any bank that offer these. Neither DBS/POSB (Singapore) nor BCA (Indonesia) – the two banks that I use – supports DirectConnect nor provides QIF/OFX export of transaction data. Perhaps I was born in the wrong side of the world?

DBS Bank’s pseudo-CSV format

DBS Bank provides CSV export of transaction history of savings account. They say it’s CSV but it’s not really CSV. The screenshot below shows DBS’ CSV dump when imported to Microsoft Excel. As you can see, it’s not a pure CSV because:

• There are other headers besides just the column header – range A1:B4.
• Rows 5 and 7 are empty – CSV aren’t supposed to have empty rows.

Because of this data format problem, I had to manually clean up all the CSV “errors” of the file that DBS provides before feeding it to MoneyWell. What’s worse is that I had to do it every time I reconcile my savings account.

What’s worse is that DBS doesn’t provide any plain-text export of my credit card transaction history. Thus I had to manually enter every transaction that I made – which is quite a bummer. In this respect, my credit card doesn’t have any value-add than the cash that I have in the bank and I’d rather use NETS debit card instead so that the transaction shows up in my savings account’s CSV dump.

Getting transaction data from BCA

Bank Central Asia (BCA) is even worse such that it doesn’t have any kind of CSV export at all. Because of this I had to save the web page and key-in every transaction in that web page, manually copying each line item from the table. This is a real bummer.

MoneyWell’s CSV Import

MoneyWell provides a CSV import which does help a bit. But a major issue is that it needs to be set-up properly and can’t “remember” the setting that I’ve made. That is since different banks have their own way of representing data MoneyWell should be able to retain such “import profile” for each bank. But currently it does not, which can cause quite a problem as I tend to forget which column in the CSV maps to which field in MoneyWell and cause the fields to be mapped inconsistently.

Proposed Solution

Rather than regretting the sadness of in the unsupported part of the world, I have a solution in mind. It’s an app that runs on your computer that does four things:

1. Helps you login to your bank’s Internet Banking site.
2. Captures the web page (or export file) that contains your transaction history.
3. Converts that data into a format that your favorite personal finance application can read and launch the app to import your transaction history.

The app sits between your Internet Banking site and manages the data conversion between what your bank provides with what your personal finance app expects. It will even be more useful if you have multiple accounts in different banks since the application will remember each bank’s output format and will convert them appropriately. This will save you about two hours per month for each account since you no longer need to key-in every transaction from the bank’s site or massage the data yourself and fiddle with your financial app’s import settings.

You can see an illustration on how it work in the diagram above. The Bank Data Converter app (name yet to be finalized) have a web browser that you use to login to your bank and capture your transaction data from the bank’s website. Then the app converts the data and writes out a data file specially formatted for your favorite personal finance application. This data file is already pre-configured so that the app can load it directly into its database without requiring much work from you.

Why not a web app? Think of it: do you feel safe to trust your financial records to small indies like us? Not only that, _we_ don’t feel safe of keeping other people’s transaction data. We’re going to have to harden our servers considerably – that amounts to a lot of costs. Not to mention the lawsuits that may happen should – heaven forbid – we accidentally leak your bank records. If this is made a web app, your privacy may be compromised as your financial data is funneled through a 3rd party server (which is the app developer’s server).

Having the app running on your computer solves all these security issues. Your data is safe since it never leaves your computer in the first place. No, we won’t transmit your bank’s data file to us without your consent – we respect your privacy and really don’t want to be entangled in that kind of issues.

Now here’s the million-dollar question: do you have this problem? Is your #1 cause that you slog in balancing your checkbooks is because it’s just pure drudgery to get the data into your finance app? Please let us know in the comments and we’ll work together to solve your problem.