Smartspender – designing a stylish app for tracking your spending habits | Hacker News Reader

Smartspender – designing a stylish app for tracking your spending habits

infinum.co

15 pointsFelecro18 comments

Someone designed (ie didn't even make) an expenses tracking app. It's barely novel. Maybe it looks a little better, but the thing only has about 3 screens to it.

It strikes me that the part that makes expenses tracking hard isn't how pretty your app is, but forcing users to regularly and consistently enter expenses. I know that I've never managed to track expenses for more than a month before starting to slip and eventually giving up. What you need is a zero-effort workflow.

I think perhaps the ideal expenses tracking app would link into your bank details (via Yodlee or similar), perhaps use your location history to identify shops you went to, and then try and do as much heavy lifting as possible to give the user a very easy daily task of aportioning the cash they withdrew recently to the shops they visited.

Maybe it's about the tools? I could never bother myself tracking my expenses in any application I tried until I started using plain old ledger (actually hledger) from the command line. Only then it started to feel almost effortless.

A master's student posts an Upworthy headline to HackerNews, you won't believe what happened next...

Not trying to sell the whole platform (although I love it), but for me, the YNAB mobile app is the gold standard for functionality. I can track my spending in the time it takes the cashier to print my receipt. It automatically learns how to categorize each payee, and geo-locates each transaction to find or suggest the right payee. What they've done should be the bare minimum.

Not sure what I expected, but maybe someone could point out to me what's so outstanding about this? I mean, it looks good, it's KISS, principles on how to create a solution to a problem/a software were followed... Genuine interest here.

A guy took a dump on a toilet for his master's thesis. The details is not visual identity but makes the design. Got it?

So Mint? You can do nothing but manual expenses with Mint if you want...

"Slick looking"

That's debatable.

so a master’s thesis in graphic design is just.. a quick project?

Didn't try it. Quite satisfied with 'Saved' for iOS and Android: http://lentor.io/saved/

Can you even try it? I mean, I didn't see any download link to any app store. I think he just "designed" it.

"A guy" <- I don't know why his gender is important. Headline could easily have read "Someone designed ..."

Because he's male? The title might as well be "Something happened", going by your logic.

Don't be obtuse. My point is his gender isn't important to the story.

Then why did you bring it up?

“Something happened” would be a nerve-wrecking, Sex-And-Crime spiked turbo version of that article.

This HN trend of portraying everything as sexist is getting out of hand.

I think your getting downvoted because people insert extraneous details all of the time, and it's not a big deal. Telling people what they can and can't say, however is rude.

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