The App Store Expense Monitor: Be scared. Be very scared.

I know that we're between Christmas and New Years, but it seemed more like Halloween when I checked out The App Store Expense Monitor from WetFish Software. It scared the Yuletide right out of me, taking me from Ho Ho Ho to OMG No!!! This free Mac application looks into your iTunes library, finds the apps you bought under all iTunes accounts on your computer, searches for the current prices of the app, and then gives you the bad news in some detail.

It's scary how all those innocent little $.99 US charges add up, but it might not be as bad as it seems. Regardless of what you paid for an app, the Monitor finds the current price and uses it to total up your cost. If you have a bunch of apps that you got when they were free and they were later were changed to a paying basis, your total won't be accurate. That should be okay for most people. But if you want to make your accounting perfect, and you remember what you really paid for an app, you can edit the prices; quite a nice feature.

It's also possible to also export the information to a .CSV file for viewing in a spreadsheet, which would be a very nice feature if it actually worked. The program tells you that you can sort the information ranked by developer, name, category or price, but in actuality, your resulting spreadsheet file is two columns wide with most of the information jammed into column A. Not very useful... Update: The output CSV file appears to use semicolons as delimiters, as pointed out below, rather than the commas that are customary in the US. Adjusting your import settings to match will improve your results.

In setting up the App Store Expense Monitor, I found another stitch dropped in the attention to detail department. The program expects to find your apps in the ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications folder, which is not where they live in the current version of iTunes. You'll need to change the path to point to the ~/Music/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications folder. That's not the biggest deal, but an oversight like this should have been caught and corrected, even in a free program. Update: Sorry for any confusion over the paths noted above. It looks like it's my machine that is idiosyncratic, as our commenters and my fellow bloggers report that the first path is indeed correct on their machines.

Regardless of the minor glitches, the App Store Expense Monitor is still quite useful in giving you an idea of what you spent on all your apps, while affording you a reality check on the implications of tapping that Buy Now button.

[via lifehacker]