https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/1w8rfxz/balance_a_native_iosmac_app_for_ledgercli_and/ announcement
Cc'ing my notes from reddit:
This looks very complete and well designed. Congratulations on 1.0 ! Thanks for sharing it.
Quick feedback:
During the "payment" flow, on a phone: Mentioning that you won't actually be charged during test would be nice
Twice I saw slightly alarming unclear popups asking for my password - one "for [?]" and one "for (my email address)". They both turned out to want my apple account password (despite being already signed in to icloud) and were probably system popups not under your control.
The discussion of how to verify network isolation builds confidence.
The docs on the website have plenty of LLM-speak, but are very good nevertheless.
In the export/share flow, I noticed a "Collaborate" option, which sounds interesting eg for shared expenses.
After purchasing on phone, I installed on mac, and it didn't automatically recognise that I had purchased. Clicking the Restore Purchases button fixed that.
Using the default icloud storage, I entered a transaction on the phone and saw it show up in the mac app right away, with zero extra setup. That's awesome.
I read that overwriting can happen in case of contention. Easy to avoid, but I'm sure you'll add some kind of warning or safety belt later. And actually, appending transactions should be always safe. But I think the app allows editing past transactions as well.
Working with existing hledger/ledger setups:
Precise location info in the journal load error messages will help a lot.
Supporting 'comment' and an optional 'end comment' will help a lot.
It would be great if it reliably reloaded automatically on file change. It seemed to do it sometimes, other times I had to click Try again. And/or, some clear visual hint when it attempts a reload. I was saving from Emacs.
Journal entries with 1 or 0 postings are valid in hledger, if their sum is zero. Balance won't read a file containing these.
I couldn't get it to accept multicommodity transactions, eg my opening balances; perhaps that's not supported yet. That's a big limitation.
Not supporting
includeis another limitation; many people use that. I expect a common workflow will be print a single-file copy to icloud drive on mac, and import new transactions from there back to the existing setup (and reconcile edits in some other way, perhaps involving VCS). Here's my WIP export script (with hledger 1.99.4):# export to the Balance app (overwriting its data), and switch to it. balapp: hledger run -- accounts --directives -- print -x all:cur:\\$ > ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~com~mkociola~Balance/Documents/journal.ledger open -a Balance