Finance
Honestly I never thought that I'd be reviewing another Tip Calculator, let alone one specifically for the iPad. The thing about Tip Calculators is that usually once you have one that you like, there isn't really much more that you need. My favorite Tip Calculator for the iPhone is BigTipper. I love the UI (User Interface) and it has all the features (I thought) I wanted. Also In the beginning I never thought I would have my iPad out in a restaurant. However, more and more I find myself using it especially if I'm eating alone or during a lunch/dinner meeting. When the check comes and I need to figure out the tip I either do it in my head or I reach for my iPhone. Granted, any calculator can figure out a tip. There's not a lot of math going on there. 
What I like about a dedicated Tip Calculator is the ease of use of doing things like adjusting the percentage, not tipping on the tax and rounding up. Although there are several Tip Calculators on the App Store, many of them miss one or more of these basic requirements or their UI's are horrible. If I'm going to have a Tip Calculator, let alone pay for one, then it has to have EVERYTHING I need. After my last breakfast meeting, I started thinking about getting a Tip Calculator for my iPad. Although BigTipper runs fine on the iPad, I want a native iPad App whenever I can get one. I want one that not only works on the iPad, but looks great on the iPad's large display.
CheckPlease for iPad does what I want and even offers a unique feature
Let's start with my minimum requirements: Great UI!, easily adjustable percentage, the option to not tip on the tax, the ability to round up/down, and it has to be fast and easy to enter the total of the check (some of the early tip calculators defaulted to the alphabetic keyboard-doh!), lastly although I never use it, it should have the option of splitting the bill (people just expect to have that option). CheckPlease for the iPad has all of this of course or it wouldn't be getting a review here. However, it has one thing that I never thought of, but did run into recently. It has the option of adding in a coupon or gift card. Just the other night I was at dinner with some friends and I had a gift card to the restaurant that I wanted to use on the bill. The amount of the bill was more than the gift card, so I was going to have to pay the difference. In this situation the waiter/waitress should still get the full tip amount AND once the coupon/gift card is deducted you want to be able to see the proper totals to fill in for the payment. CheckPlease for iPad allows you to easily add in a coupon or gift card with a single tap. It's a small thing, but it's one that I hadn't seen yet on any other App in this category. Lastly CheckPlease for iPad integrates with PocketMoney. I don't use PocketMoney, so this feature doesn't mean anything to me. What I would like to see though is the ability to keep the history of your transactions right in the App like BigTipper does. Otherwise, I'm completely happy with this App!
You can get CheckPlease for iPad here from the 
A while ago, I reviewed Pennies, an application that I really liked because of its simple focus, just tracking your expenses. Normally, this is what I want, being able to see how much I spend on a month and see where the money goes.
Well, I knew of this alternate application, MoneyBook back then but did not take a closer look at it. However, after seeing its development during the last couple of months, while Pennies were at a standstill, I decided to take a look at it.
The Interface
MoneyBook does not disappoint in its interface. The design fits very well on the iPhone and uses both standard iPhone OS design elements as well as own ones, with a good graphical quality.
As you can see, the icon is quite beautiful too and one that will sit proudly on your home screen.
Adding Transactions
The app is very much made to be a quick finance tracker and not the in-depth, full-featured, finance application. This shows in the way you add a new transaction. All you do is click the big, front and center “New Transaction” button.
Get it here on the App Store: 
Tracking your expenses can benefit your financial planning, however it is hard to remember to save receipts for the smaller purchases you make where you perhaps do not use a card to pay. Pennies is an app that aims to help you track your expenses.
Money Meter
In Pennies, you have a main “money meter” as the base of the app. You set a standard monthly budget and then as you get expenses, enter these into the app (more on that later). A meter, that looks just like a gas meter in a car, clearly shows you how much you have left, in a graphical fashion. Above it is shown the actual amount. A very nice graphical touch!
I travel for business quite a bit and any business traveler will tell you that if you forget to expense something, you're usually out of luck. That means that you eat the expense without even realizing it. Most companies can only reimburse you for the expenses you submit. So if you forget to submit something you don't get reimbursed for it. I'm lucky that my company uses American Express for tracking any expenses charged to our individual corporate cards. However, there are many times that I have to pay cash for things such as Taxi rides.
iXpenseIt helps me keep track of it all
With iXpenseIt I can quickly and easily record expenses as they happen. Since I really only need it for cash expenditures or expenses I do on a card other than my Corporate AMEX, I don't have to use it for every single thing I expense. However, even if I did need to record every single expense, it's so quick and easy that it wouldn't be a problem.
Everybody loves RedLaser. I do too. However, there is one thing that RedLaser relies on that's the UPC barcode. So as long as you're holding the item in your hand or know the barcode number you can look up the price of the item. However, if you don't have the barcode info you're pretty much out of luck.
Save Benjis+ does both!
I've been a long time user of Save Benjis.. Save Benjis allows you to do a keyword search to look up the price of an item and compare that price at different locations. Now they have a new version called Save Benjis+ and as you might have guessed, the "+" is Barcode Scanning. Now you get one app that can check the price of an item if you have access to the barcode or if you just key in the name of the item.
This is probably going to be one of the easiest iPhone app reviews I've ever done. The reason that this is going to be easy is because this app is basic, does one thing and does it well!
I often come across great apps for the iPhone/iPod touch that work great and are very exciting to me, however there's a problem. Some of these apps are really only useful to people that have a certain piece of hardware or a certain piece of software on their computer or use a certain service such as a particular bank. If I make one of these apps the iPhone App of the Week, then chances are the app will only appeal to a small segment of my readers. So rather than profiling an app with limited appeal or ignoring the app completely (as I have done in the past), I figured I would group them together from time to time in one post so that there will be a greater chance in seeing something that you can use. So welcome to my first "iPhone App of the Week – Helper Apps!" Here are 10 of my favorite Helper Apps:
My friends keep telling me how much they appreciated My Top 10 Favorite iPhone Apps post. They liked it because I not only said which were my favorite apps, but why they were my favorites. Well I as stated in the post, this list would always be changing. I discover new cool apps all the time. There are over 1,600 apps for the iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store and more and more are coming each week. So I decided to do a weekly review (no promises) of an app that stands out and that I really enjoy using.
This week's app is Save Benjis
Actually it's about saving money (save Benjamins). We've all done it! You're standing there in the aisle of a store. You're holding a product in your hand. You're looking and the price and you're asking yourself, "is this the best deal?" Save Benjis lets you do a quick check right there on the spot! Simply type in the product name or better yet (for accuracy) the UPC number on the barcode and Save Benjis will lookup the product in question at some of the most popular retailers and etailers.
I used it just the last week and saved a quick $10 in Staples. I was buying another APC UPS unit and the price seemed higher than I thought it should be. I whipped out my iPhone and keyed in the UPC number right off the box. Save Benjis revealed that the $74.99 shelf price was indeed HIGH. As a matter of fact it was $10 higher than their own web price and even cheaper just about everywhere else. Since I wanted the unit right then and there (didn't want to wait or pay for shipping), I asked the cashier if they would match their own web price. They said, "no problem." If I decided to get it from one of the lower cost sources I could either have the app take me right to the appropriate page in Safari on the iPhone or email me the link to buy it later when I get home. In this example (not including shipping) I could have saved $25 off the shelf price of Staples by ordering it from TigerDirect.
Get Save Benjis from the App Store here:
