Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.Yet another Stocks and Shares tracking utility, I'm afraid, but at least the
genre seems to be perennially popular. Available for S3a/c and Series 5,
Guillaume Dupont's Porfolio is now available through
Palmscape. I've been looking
at v5.06 for the '5'.
Regular readers to these pages will know already that I rarely get excited
by money-management programs, but that doesn't stop me appreciating a program's
good and bad points. Porfolio is well presented and highly polished. New users
are immediately made to feel welcome by Guillaume's inclusion of two 'demo'
shares, complete with enough detail to see how the program works. The
unregistered program's limit is 3 shares, so you get to define one of your own
in the portfolio before having to 'housekeep' the two demo shares away to make
room.
![[Screen Shot]](/reviews/3lib/Porfolio/porfolio.gif)
The reporting and graph screens are fairly standard fare, though prettily
and effectively done. I liked the way you could cycle the main display through
'detail of quotes', 'capital gain' and 'bar graph' modes with one tap of the
pen. The menus are comprehensively designed and laid out, with no expense
spared, and Guillaume's experience with the 3a/3c version has obviously paid
dividends in having mature and stable core code to work from.
Although most things are in place, including a good set of help screens,
this is very obviously a first-generation port to EPOC and the touch-screen and
toolbar are sparsely used in places - no doubt the interface will evolve
further as time goes on. I noticed that switching between menu cards was very
slow for some reason but am sure the author will address this in a new version.
Most of Porfolio's functionality is common to all the machine variants,
making it well worth a try for anyone with a Psion and a portfolio or two to
take care of.
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