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Money Dashboard's free personal finance software links with your online banks and credit cards, showing you all of your spending in one place, helping you to understand where your money is going.
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There’s no point setting a budget if you don’t have a way to keep track of it, is there? Problem solved with Money Dashboard’s Monthly Tracker.
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Money Dashboard takes security and privacy very seriously and it is at the core of everything we do.
Why Silverlight?
Posted on May 14th, 2010 - 20 Comments
As with any technology - choices have to be made when you start developing and it was no different for Money Dashboard when we started out. Instead of pro's and con's of Silverlight versus other methods - let us share some of the benefits that helped drive our choices.
When we started this project we had the opportunity to plan out our product roadmap over the next few years and put together some great ideas on features and benefits that we wanted to develop. We also had some very clear objectives in the short term - build a rich user experience that was enjoyable to use and build from the ground up with security paramount. One point to make first is that we have always seen Money Dashboard as more of an application than a website, given the functionality and features that we plan to build into the service.
There are a number of reasons as to why we have gone down the silverlight route, these fall into two categories: User Experience and Security.
User experience:
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Interactive - rich and interactive user experience within the user interface
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Integration - seamless integration with application such as Microsoft Office
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Individuality - The ability to dynamically change the user experience based upon your individual profile as we develop this functionality of the system
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Speed - A fast and efficient user experience despite the increasing richness of functionality through the support of multi-threading and a 'Thick client' approach. This really just means that we can speed up everything by using your computer to help out when needed.
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Efficiency - both the application and how it talks to our secure environment is fast and efficient using much less bandwidth than a traditional website based application.
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Cross platform - A consistent experience regardless of whether you're on a PC, Mac or other device due to Silverlight's cross-platform and cross browser support.
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For the future - flexibility in the functionality supporting the product roadmap, both now and in what we want to build in the future
Security
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Seamless data access - instead of waiting for all the data to be returned, or having to wait between page loads, your data is available and updated as needed.
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Local data assembly - even we don't have access to all of your personal and financial data in one place! This is all assembled by you on your PC.
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Double encryption - Money Dashboard talks to our secure environment through a protocol that is double encrypted and transmitted in a binary format with lots of security features such as one time tokens. This was the most secure form of data transmission that we could find.
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No loss of data - say you're on wifi and you momentarily lose your broadband connection, you are still able to view your data and any changes you make are likely to be saved.
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Protected environment - the Silverlight environment helps us prevent against Trojans or other methods that pose a risk to our users.
There are more reasons but these are the some of the benefits that helped make our decision. We are looking to support a variety of other platforms in the future such as the iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile, Desktop widgets, Offline applications and many more. We wanted to make sure we had a solid platform for building the product into what we aspire to be the one place for you to manage your money.
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What people think
I’m certainly more aware of what I’m spending my salary on since using Money Dashboard. I’m less likely to spend money that I don’t have on items I don’t need. It’s also easier to make financial decisions going forward as I have a really clear picture of my incomings and outgoings. Having information from all of my accounts and cards in one place is really handy.
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Comments
I am really excited about using this product, but disappointed that I cannot access it via my iPad or iPhone. This has seriously limited the accessibility and usefulness of this system.
Posted by Lisa W on Sep 8th, 2010
I'm pretty sure that most of these complainers just came here to try and make Silverlight look bad because they don't like Microsoft. I signed up and tried your product out and it works great! I have not seen a web app done with HTML that looks even half as good as this.
Posted by Wayne B on Sep 5th, 2010
i was about to use this, but then saw your will be excluding Linux. Sorry i'll have to find an alternative now. I really wanted to try this service.
Posted by simon on Aug 31st, 2010
Wesabe has shut down so I was looking for alternatives - this looked pretty good. Tried to sign up only to find Silverlight is required, so now I am going elsewhere. Shame.
Posted by Julia on Jul 31st, 2010
I'm glad I've seen this article before I created my account here. Now I know I need to find another solution.
Posted by Dan on Jul 23rd, 2010
I work in the Web Technology and I completely disagree with this decision. The developers seem to choose a pretty UI over a cross browser support. You have completely excluded all iPad users for no good reason. I will have to find another solution.
Posted by Mike on Jul 6th, 2010
With Wesabe's untimely demise, I was excited to find a UK based alternative. Disappointed to find that this doesn't work with Ubuntu/Chrome/Moonlight however. All the best.
Posted by Mark on Jul 5th, 2010
I use Linux, Windows, Macs, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Android, iPhone etc. Access to all my information from anywhere is what I strive for. To me, that's what the web should be today. That's why I use Google Apps and why I wish you'd reconsider your use of Silverlight.
Posted by Scott McKenzie on Jul 4th, 2010
What a completely development-driven choice. What's your mobile coverage? Think it's important? What a shame, you should be hovering up customers now wesabi have folded, but not if people can't even log in.
Posted by Chris Dymond on Jul 2nd, 2010
As a Linux user, your decision to use Silverlight locks me out of your service entirely. Since there are alternatives (e.g. lovemoney.com) that require no more than a Javascript-enabled browser, I'd say your decision is a mistake. (As earlier comments make clear, even among the people who *can* use Silverlight quite a few would prefer not to.)
Posted by Peter Mattsson on Jun 23rd, 2010
Does not work on iPhone and ipad
Posted by Robert on Jun 9th, 2010
I'm happy to install Silverlight, even though I think it's horrible. However the user interface is so slow to respond to clicks and typing, it's frustrating! Also the rotating tabs are hard to control, they keep changing when I don't want them to. At present the site offers nothing except a read-only version of a bank statement. Please keep developing this... it needs it!
Posted by Tom on Jun 1st, 2010
Unable to register, not a good start, the use of silverlight is not convincing for me, silverlight is microsoft version of flash really.I think flash has been used tested and proven for many years,silverlight? concerns with stored local content and authentication.Use on multiple platforms limited.ipad,iphone?
Posted by Jack winter on Jun 1st, 2010
login/registration not working
Posted by Brian on May 31st, 2010
I've tried to register twice and still getting no emails with login details. Looks like the site has a problem with auitomated responses and like most people if I don't get a reply quickly I'll forget about the registation and move onto alternatives - sort out the automated emails problems and your news list page is showing there are 0 comments for this article whereas you can see above there are comments
Posted by Carl on May 31st, 2010
I've had no problem downloading and installing Silverlight - makes a nice change from all the other websites that use Flash and take forever to load.
Posted by Richard Burke on May 31st, 2010
Same for me. I think this site has better features than lovemoney.com but it's just so hard to use. The whole rotating kiosk thing is lame. Using the dashboard theme they could come up with some really great UI elements. Sadly I won't find out. Thanks for trying. Chat is of course that the reason they use Silverlight is that they got a lot of money from Microsoft. Good for them. Hope it works out. It didn't work for me though.
Posted by T on May 28th, 2010
Ben makes some spot-on points - Silverlight was a key reason I asked for my account to be deleted. Subsequent security concerns mean I regret even trying the service
Posted by Chris on May 26th, 2010
Also, how can you seriously cite 'speed' as a feature of your site? It can't even keep up with me typing things (slowly) into forms!
Posted by Ben on May 21st, 2010
Citing 'security' as a reason for picking a particular technology is poor reasoning. Any approach can be secure or insecure. You don't magically gain security by picking Silverlight, you have to design it in to whatever and however you do things. Your post makes it sound like you've picked a technology off the shelf and now you are secure, without any extra thought. That is worrying.
Posted by Ben on May 21st, 2010