Y! Finance Review

I want to review at least one app a week, and I wasn't sure what I was going to review this week. But last night when I was running Egg!, I started to see some different advertisements and one of them was for Y! Finance. I clicked the ad and before I knew it I was downloading this on my iPhone. Now normally, I want to review something that I think a lot of people would find useful and enjoy, so a finance app doesn't quite fit the bill. In fact, if I had not stumbled across it, this app would not be on my iPhone (blasphemy for an MBA grad). I have to say, I was very impressed with the design of the app and that is why I am reviewing it here.

This is the summary screen of the app. It gives you a quick look at some of the important things finance people like to look at (DJ, S&P, Nasdaq), and just below some of the top stories. This is the least exciting part of the app, so stay with me. If you tap the small black bar at the bottom, there are a number of options to customize what you see on this summary screen.

Under the quotes section, this is what we see. You can have a bunch of different companies that you want to follow. If you hold down on one, you have the 3 options pictured (Remove, Move, Resize). To move a company, you'll see these blue dots appear, and you tap the dot that represents the position you want to move to. This wasn't obvious to me at first. Initially, I thought the blue dots were anchors and tried to drag them to a new position. As for Resizing, there are 3 options (Compact, Graph, Details). The Apple Inc. box shows the detailed view with the graph and news article headlines below it. The others companies shown are in the compact option, and the graph option is just like the detailed one without the news headlines.

I found this screen by accident, while I was putting my iPhone down. If you turn your iPhone sideways while you're in the quotes tab, you get this sexy graph that lets you compare up to 3 different stocks or indices. You can scroll through all stocks/indices that you are following.

If you tap on a company from the normal quotes tab, it takes you to a detailed view where you can rotate your iPhone for a detailed graph of that company's stock performance. Here you can choose different time scales for the chart, similar to what you see on Yahoo Finance and Google Finance websites. Swiping along the bottom half of the screen lets you swap between news, performance indicators, and industry/competitors. I've shown the performance indicators here.

The last two bits are the Research and Tech Ticker tabs. As you can see the Research tab offers up a wealth of information and allows you to import your own My Yahoo! Portfolios. This is nice, if you have a lot of stocks that you're following and have them setup in Yahoo. It's even smart enough to know if you've already imported a company's ticker and tells you how many new companies were imported and how many you tried to import that were already there. The Tech Ticker tab features videos from the Yahoo Finance portal on current events in business.

I don't follow BlackBerry or Android too much, so I don't know what Yahoo offers on those platforms. But this is the first iPhone app that blew me away. If you have even a passing interest in finance or stocks, or if you want to see how the funds in your 401K are doing, get this app. (It's free).

From a developer's perspective, this app does a great job organizing the enormous amount of financial information in the marketplace and making it easy for users to navigate that information. Yahoo does a great job of customizing their app in a way that builds their own brand image. When you use it, you know it's a iPhone app, but it doesn't look like every other iPhone app out there. This is THE killer app on in the iPhone for finance. It's amazing how far we've come. It used to be that you would have to sit at your computer to get this kind of financial information. Now, it is available at your fingertips wherever you are.

Overal Rating:

I don't expect to give out 5 stars too often, but the information and the way this app presents that information is amazing!

TapWord Review

OK, to launch this blog, I'm going to review an app that's been keeping me up late at night. This app is called TapWord and I downloaded it for free from the AppStore. I don't remember if it was a promotional thing or if it was always free, but I didn't pay for it.

In TapWord, you are given a set of letters arranged in a 4x4 square and you have to use your finger to connect adjacent letters to make three-letter words or longer.

As you make valid words, they are added to your word list, and you are awarded points. If you attempt to make a word that isn't a word then you will hear a drum sound to let you know.

Eventually time will run down, and with 10 seconds left, your iPhone vibrates to let you know its almost over.

After time expires, it gives you your total score and tells you the % of total words you found. It also shows you the list of all possible words. I hover around 14-20%. It's actually easier to get a higher percentage on tough boards with few vowels. If you get to play this, you'll know what I mean.

There are options to expand the board size to 5x5 and increase the minimum word length to four-letter words. I have yet to play the 5x5 board, just looking at it is mind-numbing, but this may be my next challenge.

This game is very addictive and super fun! I have spent hours putting words together. I would put this in my current top 10 iPhone apps.

There is a downside, but I'm still trying to figure out who to blame for this. You see, when the game is over and I get the list of possible words; I think to myself, "Is that really a word?" I was always better at math anyway.

TapWord does a great job of exercising your mind, but it does make your brain hurt after a while. After long sessions, I have to do something mindless like Farmville or Mafia Wars.

Overall Score: