EasyShares v2.1 - Stocks

[jimski]

See new BETA UPDATE at bottom of post

I was browsing Marketplace last night and ran across MSN Money, but when I tried to download I was dissapointed to discover that it is actually a 6.5 widget, not available for my 6.1 ROM.

Took a quick look around XDA figuring that someone had come up with a workaround and instead found EasyShares. I have searched for Stock apps before but found them all to be too buggy, too complicated or too expensive. So if you don't have a Stocks Tab in your TF3D or don't use TF3D, this app may be of interest.

It's a simple app with a bright interface that let's you monitor stocks and indexes as well as tracking your buys/sells/gains/losses. The current "stable" version, 2.1, is about a year old, but the developer just released 3.0 Beta. Even though 3.0 is more finger friendly I did not care for the interface as much (and also found a bug) so I have gone back to 2.1 for now. It uses Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com) for data and took only a few seconds to update my 13 entries.

The main screen lists your indexes/stocks as; Green = Gain / Red = Loss / Gray = No Change, with current price, price and percentage gain or loss. Tapping an entry expands the view to show the Previous Close, Volume and Day's Range. A second tap opens a finger friendly menu that lets you; Delete the entry, Move the entry Up or Down, Collapse the entry, Display a Chart, Additional Details or view the Entry as part of your Portfolio.

The Chart View allows you to select a range of; 1, 5 days, 3, 6 months, or 1, 2 or 5 years. When you open a chart there are controls to rotate 90 degrees, left or right and also zoom in/out. On my Fuze, turning the screen automatically rotates the chart which was really nice.

You can set the app to Auto Refresh at; 10s, 30s, 1m, 5m, 30m, 1h, or 2h intervals or leave it set to manual (default). There are also Options to; Refresh at Startup and Show Gains in the StatusBar. With version 2.1 you can view your entries in; english, french, german, italian or sweedish. Version 3.0 had a few additional languages.

Creating additional XML folders to organize your stocks is simple (Menu/Manage Lists) and you can move between them by tapping the Folder Name at the top of the screen. There is no option to move or cut/paste entries between folders, so the only alternative is to delete and recreate. There is also no option to edit an entry, so if you misspell Microoosoft, you have to delete and reenter. The video (noted below) describes how you can buy/sell shares within your portfolio.

The XDA thread has a link to the developers site which includes changelog/version info, additional screenshots and a couple videos with the app in action. The app requires .NET 3.5. I did get one error when exiting the first time, but that was probably because I deleted the default XML folder, while adding a couple of my own. I have been in and out a dozen times since and have not seen anything unusual.

If you find the app useful, don't forget to to buy the developer a cup of coffee. I will give it my normal 10 day trial, but I think this is a keeper.

The developer has been working on v3.0 BETA and has added several new features:
•Gain for each share is now displayed without to have clicked on the item.
•The first click on an entry expands it, the second collapses it.
•Positive values can now be displayed in red -> see Options. In some countries positive and negative values are displayed inverted.
•The total gain feature is back and can be activated by going into the options dialog (be aware that this features ignores different currencies).
•It's now possible to download financial news to each share you're monitoring (--> More -> News). The news are displayed in the same language as EasyShares is running. If the financial news are not available in your language, EasyShares is displaying them in english.
•The information such as "Previous Close", "Days Range" and "Volume" are now displayed again in share overview with one single click.
•The green color to indicate positive values is slightly darker to better see the difference between green and red.
You can follow the link below to the site to fetch the latest build. I updated the last screenshot to show what the new build looks like.

http://www.easyshares.ch/index.php?o...emid=7&lang=en