Sums is another one of those apps that looked at all of the lofty aspirations of finance apps, stuck its ear to the ground, and just decided to be more down-to-earth. For $4.99 Sums provides a modified notebook that is split up into two columns so that it’s always ridiculously easy to keep score, track your expenses, or just count things.
Look at this sum! Tee hee!
Excel? More like A Cell
Ignore that lame header if you like. There are exactly two columns in Sums: one for text, and one for numbers (positive or negative). As you fill a sheet out the last row will update itself to show you the sum. It’s really that simple — and I think — a little too simple, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Creating entries requires only a tap and a type (I’m aware that’s not really correct, but it should be real English by now!), and and deleting entries or entire sheets uses the usual swipe to delete method we’re all familiar with. Should you want to back up or send a sheet off, any sheet can be e-mailed as tab-delimited text so that it’s easy for other number-y programs to read.
Please, sir, I want to see sum more
While I don’t necessarily need things like recurring numbers or pie charts, I could really use something in the app to help me keep track of time. I’m not talking about a watch, but rather a way to let me know when I made certain entries within a sheet, since I think the app could be a really cool and easy way for me to track my spending. I’m a little tired of all of those categories in more powerful finance applications, but knowing how much I’ve earned and spent is only useful to me if I know when I entered those numbers. I could enter the date or time in the text column as I add a note, or add it as its own in the row before an entry, but that takes away from the simplicity of the whole process and the iPhone isn’t great for switching to the numpad mode on the fly.
Why would anyone want to delete a hot dog?
Saving sheet view
Sums saves your place within a sheet as you leave the application so that you can come right back to it when you next load the app. This is a great feature, since it takes away some of the sting of iPhone sans multitasking. I don’t know if this is an SDK limitation, but I’d love for this feature to be extended to sheets to make working with multiple tallies easier.
One of the examples shown on the App Store is of the scores in a Scrabble game. This is a decent idea since you don’t really need to know when a word was scored, but you have to scroll down to the bottom of the list every time you want to add a new entry. It seems like it would be easier to just save the place in both lists — or have an automatic “scroll to bottom” button of option.
example of exported list
Conclusion
It’s true that great design is as much about how many features you exclude as you do include, but I think developer Skewsoft is making Sums a pretty tough sell at $4.99 since it’s “only” a notebook with addition and subtraction thrown in. I think the $2.99 neighbourhood might be better, because although Sums features a clean and usable interface, it’s not necessarily anything that’s more intuitive or amazing than a list or finance app you may have used before — it’s just simpler. Paying for a long list of features is one thing and isn’t necessarily correct, but paying $4.99 for baseline simplicity doesn’t quite sit right with me either.
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Skewsoft provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Sums. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
As for buying the app, you can pick it up for $4.99 on the App Store.
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TAGS: list, notebook
