App a Week #1 : Expenses – really simple expense tracking

So, the first week is almost over, and I’ve completed my first app:

(Sorry for the shaky camera work).

Ever since I stopped doing commercial work, I’ve had to keep a bit more of an eye on my finances – I’ve been tracking my expenses using a Google docs spreadsheet. This is fine for most cases, but all too often I would come home and have forgotten how much I spent, or I’d remember, get distracted, and forget to enter it into the spreadsheet. This app was designed a solution to that problem – I carry my phone all the time.

This ties in well with an approach towards app design that I’ve thought about quite a lot:
Take something useful, and make it portable.

Another important approach is simplicity. For my needs, an expense tracking app doesn’t have to be accurate and detailed (for example, in my app a transaction has only a category and date, no description) – it just has to make me pay some attention to what I’m spending.

So my goals for this app were a few simple ones:

• Quick and easy to enter new transactions
• Track expenditure against a category and a date
• Calculate running totals and averages (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Compare percentages for categories

No CSV exports or bank account tie-ins, no budget planning, no calendar functionality or repeating expenses. No to-do lists, no shopping lists. No income vs expenditure. Just expense tracking. I’ve been using the app in developing forms for a few days and it’s doing everything I wanted so far.

The app is certainly not ready for release yet (lacking among other things, an application icon, as well as some serious beta testing), but I’m happy that I’ve met the challenge that I set myself. I’ve learned an enormous amount trying to design and build a whole app from scratch in under a week – especially seeing as I’ve never really built a working iPhone app before.

App a Week has thrown up some interesting design and development challenges – because App a Week is so closely tied in with me learning how to program in objective-c, I took some steps in the that were (in the end) inefficient and cumbersome, but were necessary to meet my learning goals. I’ll be outlining the design process and some of my learnings in a later, more detailed post.