Dear Users, we hope you all had happy holydays and a great start in the new year.
We just wanted to say, thank you for the support in the last year, for all the mails with the bug reports and features requests. We really appreciate this and it enables us to improve our products and make them step by step better.
There are still a lot of open emails, we had no time to answer, but we will.

We also wanted to tell you what our roadmap for the year 2012 is.

The two big releases for 2012 are BudgetBook for iPhone and ListBook for iPad.
Both will be universal and both will Sync over iCloud!
We are currently working on it and make good progress, but we don’t have any release dates yet.
There is still a lot of work. Both apps will come with a kickass user interface and we will promise you, that you will love them…

These are currently the two main projects for this year. Of course we will also make bug fixes and updates for our other apps.

Best wishes Sandro and Mischa

Dear user, we listened to your feedback and put some new cool features in ListBook.
A lot of code in version 2.0 of ListBook is written completely new so it should be twice as fast than the old versions.
We also worked on the whole GUI and if you’re pixel fanatics like us, you will maybe notice the little details and differences between the new and the old GUI. So let us begin with the new features!

Notifications

The most important feature for us is notifications. A todo app must have notification and thats they way to add it in your to do’s. Just push the clock icon, choose your date for the notification and tap on save. Thats it!

Import/export list via e-Mail

One of the main features is also to send and receive lists via e-Mail.

Sort lists

Some of our users also asked for the ability to sort the lists and now you can do this in the list overview, by selecting the button on the left top of the view.

Gestures support

We have also added some cool gestures support. If you want add some new todo’s, click the plus button and after writing your todo, just swipe from right to left and write your other to do’s. It’s like to press the plus button but much faster. You can also go back to de list items view by swiping from left to right. We promise you, if you begin to use the new gestures for editing and adding new list items, you don’t want to tap the buttons anymore.

Localization

Listbook is now also available in german, other language will come with future updates.

Important

Listbook 2.0 will just be able for iOS 5 because we had some problem with the date picker. So if you want to use the new feature please update to iOS 5.

We hope you will have as much fun with the new features as we had developing them!

We always try to be open about our plans and our work. We’re a small team (2 guys is a team, right?) and sometimes we’re buried in our work we love and so writing blogposts maybe isn’t our highest priority. But we think it’s time for a wrap-up. So here’s what we’re doing next.

MoneyBook will receive soon an update which fixes some iOS 5 problems. We already sent it to Apple, and it’s awaiting approval. We have plans to improve and rework some of the MoneyBook features, to make them easier and more reliable. But first is the iOS 5 fixes update.

After that we’ll finish the iOS 5 fixes update for BudgetBook. It’s already done, but needs some more testing as we changed some (technical) stuff in the core of the code.

Yearly has some smaller updates in the work. One is a fix for timezone problems (in new zealand) and other small things like it will make use of the contact settings regarding first-name/last-name display. For the future one possibility would be to include twitter in the contact details, as it is now a part of iOS 5 (so you can congratulate your friends over twitter too).

The next big release will be ListBook 2.0! The update is already finished, we’re just putting the final touches on it and preparing promo material, like video etc. It will bring lots of cool stuff, we promise! There will be a separate blogpost about ListBook 2.0 when it’s out.

Things that are a little more far away: Everybody is talking about iCloud, and we’re interested in it too of course. It’s not like you can add iCloud sync to an existing app with one click it’s a bit more work. We’re thinking about an iPhone version of BudgetBook which then will sync over iCloud with the iPad app. We also can imagine an iPad and/or Mac version of ListBook, with iCloud sync too.

Keep in mind, this is just what we’re thinking and planing at the moment, MoneyBook and BudgetBook updates are already finished and ListBook 2.0 too, but the rest is nothing concrete. So please respect this, we’re just sharing our ideas and thoughts with you In this industry it’s almost never possible to make long-term plans. That’s just the current state.
For a small team like us, we can’t make everything, we have to take it step by step. There’s so much we want to do, so many plans and ideas with our apps. It takes time, but we’re doing our best.

Thanks! Your noidentity team

Mischa & Sandro

First of all, thanks for all your feedback regarding Yearly. It was mostly positive and people were especially delighted by the user interface. We’re really glad to hear this, as we worked hard on it.

We received a some emails from people asking how to put birthdays in the app. To be honest, this is entirely our mistake, we simply didn’t think about what happens when somebody hasn’t birthdays or other dates in their contacts app and if they don’t know how to put them in there. Sure, the description says the dates are fetched from the address book (contacts app), but anyway, we should have made this clearer. So we’re making an update right now which shows a message when there aren’t any dates. And we made a small how-to site showing step by step how to add birthdays and other dates, check it here:

How to add Birthdays in your address book

We should have made this from the beginning, but we just didn’t think about that, sorry for those who had problems.

Our latest iPhone app just hit the AppStore! Yearly is an app to remind you of upcoming birthdays and other dates like anniversaries. As with all of our apps, we made Yearly because we personally had the need for such an app. Yes there are already tons of birthday reminder apps out there. But none of them was satisfying for us. We just wanted an app which shows all upcoming birthdays (and other anniversaries) in a beautiful way and reminds us of upcoming events with local notifications. And hey this is an app about birthdays, about anniversaries, it’s all about happy days! So the app should reflect that in its user interface. It should look beautiful and it should be a joy to use.

We put a lot of effort in the user interface and we think the result really shines on the iPhone (especially on the retina display). At first sight it looks like a small and fun app, but there are some really interesting user interface lessons in it (which are important for us and we can use them in future apps and updates too):

- The main view just shows an elegant list of the upcoming events. No navigation bar, no toolbar. The space is entirely used to display the information which is most important for the user. Just a beautiful list. Of course this doesn’t work for all kinds of apps. Often you need navigation bars. But I also saw lots of apps which put a navigation bar or even a toolbar just to put there a label with the app title in there.

- Gestures: They are the shortcuts for touchscreen devices. On your laptop or desktop, you have keyboard shortcuts for the more advanced users. On touchscreen devices it’s the gestures. For example in Yearly if you are in a sub view (a detail view or similar) you can always go back with just a right-swipe. Of course there’s a back button too, but once you get used to the swipe gesture, it’s much faster and effortless. Another example: You can swipe on every row to reveal buttons for contacting the person. Of course you can tap a row and go into its detail view and then choose the contacting option you want. But it’s faster to just swipe and tap the button for SMS or whatever you like. And to be honest, it’s also more fun. And fun and emotions should play an important role in every user interface.

- Sound effects: Of course we’re not the first ones to discover sound effects in iPhone apps (and by apps I mean apps and not games). Tapbots with their Tweetbot are surely the most prominent example. And we really got inspired by them. I use Tweetbot everyday and I’m so used to its sound effects that when I tap a button in another app and I don’t hear a click sound, I think something is wrong. Sound effects are a very good way to give the user additional feedback. And again, as a side effect they make using the app even more fun. Of course we include the option to disable them in the settings.

So in one sentence, our goal was to make the app fun to use but concentrating on important features and not wasting space with unnecessary stuff or complexity.
It was an extremely fun project for us to work on and we hope this gets reflected in the end product.

View Yearly in the AppStore or check the video below:

It’s a sad day, but we’re also very thankful. Because of his genius we’re able to do what we love, every day of our lives. For a living.

So, thank you Steve Jobs.

It got approved a few minutes ago, our first iPad app. We worked really hard on this and we hope you will have as much fun using it, as we had developing and designing it!
Check the product page of BudgetBook or the AppStore link.

Today was (and still is) an exciting day for us two at noidentity. You already saw that we have two new apps coming and one of them is the finance iPad app. Today the first of those two apps has hit the AppStore: ListBook.

We also revamped the whole website, it’s now “noidentity” branded and not just “MoneyBook” as we have more than one app. That has also consequences on the blog, as this is now the noidentity blog. Makes sense we think

We think most apps for making lists are too complex if you just want to make a shoppinglist or write down some things you have to do when you go in the city. And that’s exactly why we made ListBook.
Just watch the video or read more about ListBook on its product page.

So, we thought maybe it’s a good idea to keep you up to date with the development of our iPad app. I never thought about that some of you could gain the impression that we abandoned the development or that we don’t care about our users. But then I saw the latest comments on our blog…
Rest assured, we read every single EMail, every blog comment, every tweet. You are the most important part of MoneyBook and we appreciate every user. But let’s keep this in mind, we are two guys, working on what we love to do. We do everything by ourselves. That’s a lot of work and we love it! But there are times in which we have to make priorities and put our focus on something in order to be productive. In the last months we worked every day on our iPad app. Because that’s our highest priority right now. So I hope you understand that sometimes we don’t have the time to comment on our blog.

Ok but I’m not writing this blog post for this, I’m writing it to keep you up to date about our iPad app. Maybe you registered that I call it “our iPad app” and not “MoneyBook for iPad”. We want you to know what we do, why we do it and what our decisions and thoughts were.

When we announced the development of an iPad app, we wrote that it will be an entire new app, we wanted to make it completely new from scratch. Including everything we learned from MoneyBook for iPhone. And that’s exactly what we did. We developed a completely new financing/budgeting iPad app. People were missing multiple accounts in MoneyBook for iPhone, we included it in the iPad app. They’re missing multiple budgets, including budgets for categories, it’s all there in the iPad app. They want more flexible settings for recurring transactions, like weekly or bi-weekly options: again, we built this into the iPad app. Same counts for budgets, you can set a start date and choose the cycle. That’s great and everything, but while we were developing and designing all this, we begin to realize a problem. This new app hasn’t very much in common with MoneyBook for iPad. There are big differences. We would never be able to sync these two together.

Let’s look at this: We’re two guys, we love developing apps. But again, we’re a very small team. So would we be able to build a cloud sync solution? Just have a look at the people from cultured code. They’re a bigger and more experienced company than we are, and they’re working on their cloud sync solution for a long time. And I’m sure they will be doing a great job with this. The point is, most people say “oh why you just don’t use dropbox?”. Yeah, dropbox is great, we use it almost every day. And yes there are tons of textedit apps which sync over dropbox. Because dropbox is a file based sync solution. Dropbox syncs files and folders. If your data structure is like a list of notes and maybe every note is in a file, then dropbox is perfect. But now we have a data structure with transactions, recurring transactions, categories, accounts, budgets and they’re all referencing each other. So syncing becomes very complex. And with such a relational data structure, dropbox makes almost no sense (yes I know there are techniques for using Core Data with files and whatever). Believe me, we have spent weeks with reading sync stuff.

Ok so let’s assume we two would be able to build a sync solution. There’s still one problem: MoneyBook for iPhone was never built for the newer features like multiple accounts. Or the recurring transactions, we rebuilt them in a completely new way in the iPad app. So the point is, it’s almost impossible and makes no sense to try to sync these two apps together. We came to this conclusion.

Ok let’s recapitulate this: We built a financing and budgeting iPad app from the ground up. We included every lesson we learned with MoneyBook for iPhone. The app grew to a great app, but to an app which became “incompatible” to MoneyBook for iPhone.

So this is our plan: This iPad app is maybe 90% done. We’re beginning with internal beta testing this week. I guess it’s feature complete, so it’s time to fix bugs, to do some refining here and there (both in functionality and usability/design).
Once it’s finished, we will bring this into the iPad app store under a new name. We can’t name it MoneyBook, because… just read the above paragraphs about the differences and naming them the same, would cause a lot of confusion about sync and other stuff. So this is a completely new app and it will get a new name (we’re not sure about the name yet, maybe BudgetBook, because I think this is the main focus of the app).

I know there are many sad and upset people now. But believe me, we talk about this decision almost every day and thought about it for weeks and months. And it’s the only right and realistic decision. We could have named it MoneyBook for iPad and yes, we would have made money with this, because MoneyBook has a name and some people know it already. Marketing-wise this would have been the best decision. But if we made this, we would lie to our users (and ourselves). Because this is not MoneyBook, it has not much to do with the iPhone app, it can’t sync with the iPhone app. We want to stay fair and honest.

Just some few more words. I really hope you understand our decisions and that you respect it too. We do everything that the new iPad app will be a beautiful and great budgeting app for iPad. And of course MoneyBook for iPhone will stay alive. It will get more updates. This is our first big app, we love MoneyBook and everything about it.

So, that’s the plan for now. Just keep always in mind if you read these lines, we’re not Apple, we’re not Microsoft or another multi-billion dollar company. We’re two guys, doing what we love and doing our best.

Here’s a little sneak peek at the iPad app. Note that it’s still in development, so the design can change at any time.

In the last weeks/months, we were working almost non-stop on MoneyBook for iPad. As we wrote in another post, this won’t be a simple port of the iPhone version. Instead we’re rewriting it from the ground up.

So when is it coming? Are we finished? I’m sure those are the questions on your mind.

We’re not yet finished, but large parts of the app are almost done. Including the new look and feel. It’s really a complete different thing to develop an iPad app, the larger screen opens so many possibilities but also so many risks.

For example, many apps try to imitate real life behavior in their apps. That’s not a bad thing, but you can easily exaggerate this. This is a screen, a touch screen, and not 3D objects like in real life. So, real life metaphors can be great, but you have to be careful using them. The problem is that the big screen makes it so tempting to “over-design” the UI. I mean we had this years ago and some iPad apps (especially in the finance category) try to bring this on the iPad.

That’s just one of the difficulties. Like I said, we’re implementing the whole app from the ground up, almost every line of code is new. Of course there are some snippets from the iPhone app which we can use, but most of the code really is new. Including the whole database layer. So I’m sure you understand it takes some time.

I guess we will finish implementing most of the functionality in about 1 month, but then the testing and bugfixing begins. So don’t expect the app before February 2011. And this is NOT a release date, I’m not saying that February 2011 the iPad will be in the AppStore. I’m just saying it won’t happen BEFORE February 2011

So thanks for all your patience! And don’t worry, we won’t forget the iPhone app too.