Manage Your Finances With Mint

Summary 8/10

Mint pulls in all your personal finance accounts into one place, so you can manage your money from anywhere. Track your spending, create a budget, and save more.

As a freelancer I’ve gotten into the habit of being very meticulous with my finances. Weekly, I go over my income, spending, and projected income and expenses for the following weeks. I like to paint a two week picture of what my bank accounts will look like.

While I use several tools for this, Mint is what I use for spending, previous data, and organization. If I ever need to check something while I’m out, well, luckily they have a freshly minted (teehee)Android App.

The Mint.com service and this app are only available in the US and Canada.

So what exactly is Mint? From their website:

Mint pulls all your financial accounts into one place. Set a budget, track your goals and do more with your money, for free!

I primarily use the website, but let’s take a look at how the Android app stacks up.

Mint’s first screens

Once you log in, you’re taken to a very nice dashboard displaying your Accounts Total, Budget, Cash Flow, Alerts, Advice, and Investments. Tapping any of these sections will take you to a more detailed screen, which we’ll look at later.

Possibly the best part about the Mint Android app is how easy it is to add transactions. As you’ll likely want to do this right away while you’re out and using cash, Mint has made it incredibly simple to do — just press the “+” sign in the bottom right to go to the Add Transaction screen.

Adding a transaction

Here you can add the amount, what kind of transation it is (income, expense, payment type, and so on), and a category, notes, and tags — Mint will even geotag it using your current location. A really nice touch is that you can split cash transations with your latest ATM withdrawal.

Viewing Accounts

Tapping the Accounts section from the home screen will take you to a list of all of your accounts, each of which you can then tap to view more details.

Viewing accounts

As you can see from the above screenshots, you’ll get a list of your transactions per account. Much like with adding a transaction, you have the ability to edit categories, notes, and tags by opening a specific transaction. My only complaint here is that I cannot add new tags while editing a transaction (or adding one, which is even more important).

The last thing I’d like to note about viewing transactions is that when you’re in the detailed view (which is the same screen you go to to edit a transation), you can easily traverse through transactions by using the left and right arrows at the bottom of the screen. This is much easier than having to bounce back and forth between detailed view and the master list.

Other Features

From the home screen, there are a few other ways to view your transactions organized in a different way. If you check out the Cash Flow or Investments sections, you’ll get two different views of transactions.

The Cash Flow and Investments sections

Under Cash Flow, you can organize transations by category and merchant, which is a nice way to see where you spend the most. Like the Accounts section you can also edit and view more details. The same goes with Investments: this section will give you a view of all the places you have investments and well as the ability to view and edit transactions. I really like that they separated the section out since the money here is not liquid — you can’t really spend it, so it’s sensible to have a separate section and total.

Budgets, Alerts, and Advice

Viewing and editing transactions aren’t the only things you can do in Mint. From the home screen, you can also view you budget totals, alerts, and advice. Alerts and advice are pretty straight forward and treated like an inbox.

Alerts and Advice

My only complaint here is that I cannot mark all alerts or advice as read, I actually have to open each one individually.

This is likely because Advice is advertising on Mint. I really shouldn’t complain as this is a clever, unintrusive, and sometimes helpful way to do ads.

Budgets are a nice way for you to manage your money, and the app’s Budget screen is really nice:

Budgets

It’s color coordinated to show you if you’re over, on, or under budget, and by how much. Pressing on one of the budgets will take you to a list of the transations for that budget. My biggest complaint with the app is related to this section, and it’s that you can’t adjust a budget. I can see it being the case where you notice the spending needs for a particular budget has changed and you’d like to adjust, but you’ll have to wait until you’re in front of a computer, unfortunately.

Settings and Widgets

The last set of features I’d like to talk about are the Settings and Widgets.

Settings and Widgets

These are pretty simple. The Settings area allows you to set a four-digit passcode, and you can grant both phone search and widget access to your data, as well as logout/wipe financial data.

The widget is a simple 4×1 box that displays your cash and credit balances. Personally I’d like to see a bit more customization here — maybe even the ability to pick an account to view, or a 4×3 box with separate account lists, as the current widget isn’t really reflective of my only spending money.

Final Thoughts

All in all, Mint for Android is a great app. There’s a lot of great information right at your fingertips, and since this is a relatively new app, I’m sure we’ll only see improvements moving forward.

While it could use the addition of some big missing features like adjusting budgets, I know a lot of time went into this — especially the design, which breaks from the sterotype that Android apps are not as well designed as some other mobile OS apps. This is a beautifully designed app that give you information as soon as you start the app up.

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Make Banking Easy With Simple

Summary 9/10

The Simple app allows you to manage your account from the completely online bank of the same name. View activity, deposit checks, find ATMs and more.

Let’s face it: we can do pretty much anything with our phones these days — get our location and see what’s in the area, find people nearby, track packages, get traffic updates and flight updates. And that’s just the stuff we can do with Google Now! If we move beyond the scope of “built-in Android functionality,” there’s a whole other world of things we can do, including complete banking. Online. From our phones.

I found out about Simple, a completely online bank, a little over a year ago and could not wait to try it. In January, my wait was over when I got an invite to try their brand new Android app. Since this isn’t a review of the web app, I won’t go into too much detail about the sign-up process, but I will say that since this is completely online banking — there are no brick and mortar locations — it’s incredibly important that the mobile app works in conjuction with the web service to give you a comparable experience. So how does it stack up? Let’s take a look!

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Using Simple

When you sign into the Simple app for the first time, it will ask you for a PIN to use on your device. This measure is there to protect your data while preventing you from having to put in your password each time — which is nice, because mine is pretty long. After you choose your PIN, you’re brought to the home screen, which is a list of your Activity.

PIN / Activity Screen

On the Activity screen, you will see a list of all of your deposits, withdrawals, interest paymets, etc. You can then press one of the entries to view more details:

• Date and time
• Amount
• Category, which it will figure out based on the transaction, or you can specify manually
• and even Memo and Location.

Entry / Categories

Back on the full Activities list, if you swipe from left to right, you will reveal a menu with all of the functionality Simple has to offer. This includes your standard functions like Settings, Log Out, and Account Numbers (standard for a bank anyway), but it also includes a couple of cool features: Deposit Check and ATM Finder.

Deposit Checks

Since Simple has no physical locations, they need to have other ways for users to make deposits. They support direct deposit and Online transfers from other banks, but the app also supports check deposits. This functionality is activated 30 days after you open your account for security purposes. Simple’s support was nice enough to give me access early for this review.

To deposit a check, select “Deposit Check.” You will be brought to a screen where you put in the amount. This is pretty straight forward, but I thought it was a nice touch that they added a “00″ button.

Enter Check Amount

Then you use the camera to take a picture of both the front and back of your check. On my Galaxy Nexus at least, this happens quickly and cleanly. I haven’t had a problem yet. I’ve used a couple of other apps for depositing checks and this one by far works the best.

To verify the check they have you write your account number on the back, under your signature. When you get to the part where you take a photo of the back of the check, the app adds your account number in the corner — this is another nice touch to save you some time!

Deposit a Check

That’s it! They should notify you shortly after that to let you know the check — or at least part of it — has cleared.

The only issue is with depositing cash, which is not a function of Simple but of online-only banking in general. You essentially need another account to make transfers if you want to deposit cash into your account.

ATM Finder

So we talked about getting money in, but not out. Something I haven’t mentioned up until now is that when you sign up for Simple, on top of access to the app they send you a (very sleek looking) ATM/Debit card. This is how you get your money out.

I would love to tell you the app supports NFC, but alas at this point it does not. My guess is this has something to do with Simple being an iPhone app first, as well as NFC not being as popular as we’d all like.

Aside from using the debit card to make purchases, you can find an ATM to withdraw money from. Of course, you’ll want to avoid fees and that’s where the ATM Finder comes in.

ATM Finder

The ATM Finder will grab your current location and find the closest fee-free ATM. This is definitely something all Banking apps should have, regardless of whether or not they have physical locations!

Overall Thoughts

I think the Simple app is really fantastic. It’s beautifully designed, easy to use, has great functionality, and has a lot of little thoughtful additions that make life easier for the users. On top of that, the customer support is top notch.

My wish list for the app consists of only two things: optional notifications for when checks clear or something fishy happens, and the ability to manage goals from the app. On the web interface, you can set and view goals; Simple will put money away that is separate from your “Safe to Spend” balance. I wish I could, at the very least, view my goals from the app.

Other than that, the app is rock solid and I would strongly recommend it. It’s invite-only right now and unfortunately I’m fresh out of invites, but if given the opportunity, you should definitely try it out!

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McAfee: World Class Protection for Your Mobile

Summary 8/10

Backed by the world’s largest dedicated security company, McAfee Mobile Security is the industry-leading mobile security solution in the market.

• McAfee Mobile Security  |  
• $29.99  |  
• McAfee

Windows is a great operating system. It is user friendly, affordable and supports legacy hardware and software fabulously. But it is prone to virus, malware and spyware attacks, often. Without an antivirus and firewall software, your safety isn’t assured at all. This one drawback has tarnished the Windows brand for decades and eventually gave way to the rise of Mac and to some extent desktop Linux.

Now I’m seeing a similar trend with the Android ecosystem. I knew antivirus software existed for Android, but only after researching for our recent roundup did I discover how many of them are available for download in the market. All security biggies from Norton to ESET have set shop. The funny thing is that we are yet to witness mass malware attacks of scale in our green robot community. But that’s a discussion for another time; for today, let us take McAfee Mobile Security for a spin.

Overview

McAfee Mobile Security works on Android versions 2.1 and up. The app costs $29.99 but you can try it out for free for seven days. A 30 day trial would have been nice, but since all the features of the app are unlocked, seven days should be plenty of time to make a decision.

Setting Up

Registering Your Mobile

You will have to verify your mobile number before you can start using the free trial version – I guess this is to ensure that you don’t uninstall and reinstall the free trial without paying up. But what they don’t mention is that the SMS is not free – though, fortunately, it wasn’t an international SMS and I was charged only for a local SMS. Although the countdown timer indicates the process might take about three minutes, within a few seconds my mobile number was verified.

Adding Buddies

Immediately after the verification screen, the app gets down to take care of business. First up, we have the alerts set up for if your mobile gets stolen. Once you add the number of your buddies and your own contact information, the app will alert all of you when someone who steals your mobile phone changes the SIM card.

You can either add the numbers manually or use the phonebook. Once you have added all the information, choose a six digit PIN code to ensure that only you can disable or edit this option. Do note that you wont be able to proceed without adding a buddy number. This is great, but I would have appreciated it more if there was an option to add my second number directly too. The registraton took a couple of minutes and requires email verification.

For the safety of my app, I was willing to jump through the hoops and the app then displayed the login information for the web app. The web app can be used to manage and control your device remotely when it goes missing.

Securing the Device

Action Center

The warning notification and screen make sure that the major holes in the security situation are brought to your attention. The app primarily wanted to be christened the device admin, meaning it would have all rights to reset the passwords, wipe the phone, watch logins, force lock your phone and to see if your passwords are secure enough. Sounds like overkill to me and I chose to ignore it.

The idea behind this doomsday plan is to ensure that the McAfee Mobile Security app isn’t uninstalled by anyone else. So, make the decision based on how valuable the phone and the information stored in it are to you.

Initiating a Scan

The first thing I wanted to do, which I eventually did, was to start a scan. Consider that, although I wasn’t able to root my Wildfire, I have tried heaven and earth, installing every possible APK to get root access fully ignoring the legitimacy of the source. To my delight the scan was complete in a minute. Taking into account that the phone in question is owned by an app reviewer who installs a truck load of apps and never bothers to uninstall them, I would say that’s a huge accomplishment.

A Scan in Progress

As expected, the scan didn’t find any threats at all. However, the developers should consider adding a splash screen or something to let the user know that the scan is complete and an option to proceed to the next screen.

Backup Options

Backup and Restore Options

The app helps you back up text messages, call logs, contacts and media files. Backups can be done manually or you can set up automatic backups which are more convenient and fool proof. Despite claiming to upload “media files”, McAfee Mobile Security only scans and finds images. MP3 and video files weren’t displayed at all.

Final Thoughts

For years, McAfee has been my trusted bodyguard of my desktop PC. They push updates regularly, the system resources were never clogged and no viruses were ever allowed enter PC. Naturally, I expected the same level of performance when it comes to my mobile phone – maybe even better given the relatively lower horsepower in my HTC Wildfire. And the app did a splendid job.

But the real question is do we need to install an antivirus software in our mobile phones? Personally, I find these Android security threat forecasts to be far fetched when they actually try to project Android as weak and vulnerable. But if you are in need of a reliable backup and anti-theft protection, then check out McAfee Mobile Security without fail.

For alternative apps to help combat phone theft, take a look at our article Phone Theft: Some Precautions You Can Take.

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Build a Sprawling Metropolis in Clever Puzzle Game MegaCity

Summary 8/10

A clever and original city-building puzzle game that draws inspiration from SimCity and Tetris.

• MegaCity 1.73  |  
• $0.99  |  
• ColePowered Games

There’s more than one way to skin a city-building game. The delightful Triple Town already showed the world that the basic gameplay concepts and the core mechanics of SimCity could be distilled into a turn-based puzzle game. Now MegaCity tackles the genre, boasting a “Tetris meets SimCity” hook that turns your city into a never-ending carousel of urbanization.

It’s fun, clever, challenging, and original, but the reliance on a luck-based building queue holds MegaCity back from utter brilliance. Let’s take a look.

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Grid Locked

MegaCity presents you with a grid of seven tiles across and six down. Each tile can hold one building. You push buildings from the queue on the left to an empty place on the grid, with the aim of reaching the points target listed on the right in every column. Once the left-most column hits or surpasses that target, it disappears — your score goes up and all columns shift across to reveal an empty one on the right edge.

Red is bad; blue and green are good. Vacant blocks don’t count toward your score.

Points relate to the satisfaction of residents. Each non-residential tile — with the exception of parks — affects the value of one or more surrounding tiles. A prison tile reduces the value by one point of all tiles attached to its corner, for instance, while a library has the opposite affect.

You need only worry about the value of tiles with residential buildings on them, however, since these are what the column totals are based on. It’s important to remember to put at least one residential tile in each column, then — at least until you unlock the demolish move, although even then it’s a risky move.

Your target starts at +4, then increases over time as you clear more columns. It doesn’t take long to escalate to +8 or more, placing you under ever more pressure to plan ahead. Attaining a high score gets easier as more of the 10 extra buildings are unlocked.

Unlockable buildings introduce greater strategy while also paving the way to higher scores.

These unlockable buildings differ from the initial set in that they bring bigger bonuses — the High Rise, for instance, is a residential building worth four times a tile’s inherent value (positive or negative), while Landmark adds +1 to all tiles on screen. On the flipside, a few buildings also come with significant downsides. An airport adds +1 to all tiles in, above, or below its row that are to its left, but reduces the value of three other surrounding tiles.

Tiles Play

A delicate system emerges where you must balance the need to increase land value with that of keeping enough free for residential, made more complex by buildings that have a negative impact on surrounding tiles. A bank might be just the thing you need to get a column over the target line, but the fallout is that the column to the right of the bank takes a big hit.

You’ll struggle to keep residential buildings away from the cesspools that invariably develop around landfills and downwind of power plants. Every move becomes a trade-off between several factors, all weighing on your mind and making you question whether there’ll be enough of the right buildings coming up to keep you alive. It’s hard in a “this is awesome” kind of way.

One of the scenarios in Challenge Mode teaches you about damage control; things can and do turn very bad without warning.

But the very conditions that create this compelling ebb-and-flow tension also give rise to MegaCity’s greatest flaw. Building a city is not a game of Tetris; you cannot just plunk a factory or prison down in the middle of a dense, high-class residential area. In MegaCity, however, this becomes a necessity.

Why? Because buildings amass randomly on the queue. You can pop one in the Save Tile box for use later, but sooner or later you’ll either have to push it out for a more disadvantageous building — reluctantly played as the lesser of two evils — or be stuck with a second tile of this kind — this time without any escape. It adds a sense of chaos and uncertainty, a la Tetris’s propensity to withhold the straight piece when you need it most, but it negates player agency.

You see, town planners actually have quite a lot of say over what gets built — and where. They plan ahead as far as they can, setting up a delicate balance between the needs of commerce, industry, and city residents. MegaCity introduces an element of luck that is completely at odds with its own system of rules.

Sooner or later, it condemns you to live or die by a roll of the dice. A skilled Tetris player, even with that game’s strong random element, can play indefinitely — ability always trumps luck. No amount of skill can stave off eventual defeat in MegaCity, however. You could play a flawless game and the system will still defeat you before fatigue does.

Screwed.

This is the problem with MegaCity. For all its cleverness, challenge, and compelling feedback loops, it eventually leaves you feeling as though the long-term prospects of your fledgling city are beyond your control.

You’re likely to keep playing after this realization — at least for a while — because the rules governing the value of tiles on the grid remain a challenge to conquer in and of themselves. But it’ll wear thin, and this game with so much promise will lose your interest.

Fresh Concept

With mechanics, ideas, and presentation as fun as this, MegaCity should have staying power to rival fellow stripped-down city-builder-cum-puzzle game Triple Town. But it gets something twisted along the way, and now it’s just a passing phase. Granted, it’s one that will keep you engaged and happy in the interim. But MegaCity falls victim to its own futility.

Analysis aside, MegaCity is a riveting and challenging puzzler that puts a fresh spin on the city-building formula. You’d be well advised to give it a shot. Challenge Mode could use more scenarios, and an undo option would help immensely with wayward taps, but the pros vastly outweigh the cons.

MegaCity rises high, then falls only after extended play.

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The Great Fusion: A Disappointing Adventure Game Homage

Summary 6/10

An old-school adventure game which pays homage to the classics of the genre, The Great Fusion looks fantastic but suffers tremendously from poor writing, bad puzzle design, and translation issues.

• The Great Fusion 1.4  |  
• $1.95  |  
• Loading Home

To people of a certain age, point-and-click adventure games hold enormous nostalgic appeal. Millions of people fondly remember the quirky blend of comedy, puzzles, and absurd fun from the likes of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, King’s Quest, and their ilk.

The Great Fusion draws its inspiration from the classics of the genre. But it somehow manages to pull the worst that the point-and-click adventure has to offer, with thin dialogue, illogical puzzles, and a need to read the designer’s mind to get anywhere.

It’s hard to recommend, but the low barrier to entry and copious referencing of graphic adventures gone by make the game at least worthy of consideration.

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Poor Puzzles

Puzzles are the most egregious among The Great Fusion’s crimes against good game design. The trouble is not that there’s seldom any logic to solving them, but that the process by which you arrive at a solution is pure speculation. Nothing is ever as straightforward as it should be — a criticism that you could easily level at the entire graphic adventure genre, but which is particularly pertinent here.

I looked a lot like this when faced with most of the game’s puzzles.

The Great Fusion forces you to take wild stabs in the dark. If you get stuck during the early stages, you can just pull up main character Max’s phone for a hint. At some point that option disappears, however — “you’re on your own,” the game tells you, just as the puzzles get more nonsensical.

Trial and error should not be a requisite strategy for completing puzzles. Yet it comes up time and again, starting with the very first puzzle of the game — which tasks you with getting your landlady to leave by calling her phone. Inextricably, only one dialogue option at each level of the conversation works.

Only one of these will get you anywhere.

I could forgive this if the alternatives brought genuinely funny responses, but some of the jokes come across like an elephant being forced through a straw.

Clever developers long ago devised a method of giving hints without using a hint system. They used dialogue between characters and cheeky descriptions of objects. The Great Fusion sometimes seems to be appropriating such a technique, but it bungles it more often than not.

It may be simply down to a poor translation — there are grammar and spelling errors throughout the script, and probably more serious issues of meaning lost in the transition from the game’s native Spanish. But in English it stinks of clumsy, amateurish writing.

This is pretty typical of the translation and script quality.

Bad Writing

The Great Fusion tries to be topical, with a story laden with fallacious ideas about copyright laws and income disparities. Its nightmare scenario about a society transformed by incompetence might have some merits, but it’s so opaque and unnuanced as to border on painful.

CopyWRONG! Right? Yeah…

What should be a rollicking journey through a future corporate dystopia, where creativity and culture have been all but squashed and piracy has become a worse crime than rape, instead devolves into poo jokes, unlikable characters, ill-thought-out scenarios, and terrible imitations of pop culture heroes.

Classic adventure fans may enjoy a meta-game of spot the reference — there are dozens of nods to the best of Sierra and LucasArts, along with Revolution Software’s Broken Sword and several 90s point-and-click adventures. It’ll be more entertaining than the writing, I guarantee.

Drink every time you find a reference. That way the plot might make sense by the end.

I found the game’s caricatures of Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, and Larry Laffer (from Leisure Suit Larry) especially stomach-churning. When LucasArts tackled pop culture in their 90s adventures, they did so with panache and a remarkable appreciation for the idiosyncrasies of their subjects. Much of The Great Fusion’s dialogue — in the English translation, at least — bungles even the most fundamental traits of Woody Allen’s public persona.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. The game often tries too hard to be funny, in a hit-you-over-the-head fashion. I get that when you take away all artists’ ability to earn a living — however modest — our perception of what constitutes “art” may degrade to a much lower standard, but do you have to take the shit analogy so far?

Sometimes, however, they get it right. Max’s insane boss, who promoted a cat to a vice president of the company, earns a few laughs, as do the corrupt policemen and the cameo from engineer-turned-prostitute Catalina. But these moments aren’t common, and they, too, could use attention from a professional writer who could flesh things out and tie it all better together.

Comic relief comes from unexpected sources.

Quality Presentation

Beyond the uneven writing and illogical puzzles, The Great Fusion actually offers a very competent experience. The hand-drawn characters and backgrounds look fantastic, with personality oozing out of every object and just the right balance between detail and simplicity keeping the visuals from seeming too busy on a phone screen.

Great visuals.

There are loads of short comic-book-style cut scenes spread throughout the adventure, which fill in the gaps in the plot (to some extent) and tease out more of Max and his mate’s personalities. It’s here that you can see the ridiculous leaps of logic behind the synopsis, too. It’s best not to play The Great Fusion with a critical mind — if you let it take you for a ride, you’ll enjoy it far more.

None of the characters are voiced; dialogue is delivered in speech bubbles. You don’t have to adventure in silence, though, as there’s a light-hearted, upbeat soundtrack behind every scene.

You move around by tapping on the screen. If there’s an interactive object nearby, a small blue circle briefly appears over it. Tapping on interactive objects brings up anywhere from one to three icons that correspond to the classic verbs look, take, and use. Your inventory, meanwhile, lives in an expandable drawer just off the left of the screen.

Expect most of these inventory slots to be filled toward the end of the game.

Disappointing

It’s a huge shame that a mechanically-competent adventure title is so stilted by poor writing, illogical puzzle design, and a terrible translation. The Great Fusion isn’t a bad game, but it’s mediocre on so many levels that you don’t have much motivation to push through for the few shining lights.

If you’re desperate for an old-school adventure, give it a try. But you’d be better off installingScummVM and replaying the classics, or picking up the Android port of the excellent Broken Sword.

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