[tweetmeme]Like my obsession with note apps, I was at one time obsessed with finding the perfect finance app. I just want something simple. I was on the Cha-ching Touch beta for a while, but it was buggy as hell and the developers didn’t listen to a lot of bugs I found. I live in Japan, and found all sorts of problems. The damn number pad didn’t even work when your region was set to Japan in 1.0. They didn’t fix it for three months. For those three months, hitting a 2 would get you a 7! So after I gave up on them, I looked at simpler apps. The one I used for a while was Pennies by design by a knife. It’s still a good looking app, with a very useable interface, but it hasn’t been updated in 10 months. Software needs to evolve with the times, or it starts to look old.

So I found a newer app that I’m hoping sells well and gets continued development. It’s a simple finance app with a wallet-themed UI called MoneyBook. It’s a pretty app. The leather textures are subtle enough that they manage to not look silly, the color scheme is cool and hued with blues, and has a great lighting effect that changes as focus shifts from one icon to the next at the bottom of the screen. Oh wait, in the latest update, the awesome blue highlight effect has been removed! It was the coolest effect I had seen in a long time, and damn it if the developer didn’t take it out!

As far as features go, it let’s you input income and expenses, and you can assign categories to them, add comments that become titles, and adjust dates even after the fact. (Something Pennies doesn’t let you do.) You can see a bar graph showing how much you spent or received in each category for the month and see a line graph to see how your money’s been over the past months. The only thing Money Book doesn’t have that Pennies does is the ability to show all transactions within a category. They both let you maintain a history, and will export a record of your expenses. (Pennies doesn’t do income.)

As far as flaws go, Money Book needs that list of expenses within a category, and it needs to adjust the text in the app. I figure the developer isn’t from a native English-speaking country, and that’s why the title bars and buttons have strange capitalization issues. It doesn’t affect usage, but it detracts from the overall experience when it looks like a 3rd grader did the text bits. The standard category titles need a change too. The one with a heart icon is labeled “Honey”, and would be better as “Date.” Being able to edit the categories would be even better. As it is now, a lot of the text looks silly. I also experienced some weird graphical errors if you rotate the device from side to side too many times, too fast. And you could have extra room at the bottom by moving the “New transaction” button to the top and make it just a + icon.

For all its faults, Money Book has become my main finance app. It’s not for people who spend mostly using credit cards. For you, check out Mint. Moneybook is great for all your cash expenditures. It’s still getting updates unlike my former favorite, but with each update, there’s always a chance an update can screw up what you like about an app. That was notespark’s problem, and the newest Moneybook update has taken out my favorite effect, oranged-up the icon, and made it less attractive than before. It’s available for $2.99 in the App Store. I hope some of the things that were changed get put back in the next update.