iPhone App for Expense Tracking

I debated posting anything about this at all, but it is something that was so long in the making that I had to.

Tammy and I have been tracking our finances in a custom web application that I initially wrote back in 2004 and have rewritten a number of times since. It has been a useful tool, as well as a place for me to try out new development ideas. A few years ago, I used a mobile web app toolkit to create a mobile web app that Tammy and I could use on our phones. However, it was plagued by a user interface that was not streamlined to data entry on the go, and a streak of unreliability that eventually killed any desire to use it.

When I signed up as an iPhone developer in late 2011, it was my intent to have my first project be an iPhone app for entering finances. But there was a cascade of things that prevented it. First was that the toolkits I used to write the web services had gone out of style and would be difficult to maintain in the future. So I rewrote them in Python and then found out that deploying them was going to be a pain. That discouraged me enough to put it away for a while. When it picked it up again, nothing had changed, but there was a new PHP framework that did what I needed. So I rewrote the services again and updated the web app to call them. Then we were moving.

So finally, Tammy wanted to do Camp Nanowrimo this month. I still have a half-finished novel from last November, so I was tempted to write, but I decided that I would take the time I would have written and sat down and wrote the iPhone app.

I finished a bare-bones, useable version this evening. Will now polish it a bit and listen to feedback from Tammy. But then I can think about writing something else, now that this monkey is off my back.