Online auction tool iSale takes much of the tedium out of preparing and uploading your eBay auctions.

With over 200 templates to choose from, building eye-catching listings is a simple task. Photos can be dragged and dropped into preset picture boxes, information can be typed or copied into text fields and the overall layout can be tweaked to suit your needs.

Don't expect full-on DTP facilities though. The template's backgrounds can't be customised, so you're stuck with the original images and colours.

iSale's great at dealing with photos, though. It's easy to add multiple pictures for free by hosting them online, without any awkward HTML editing. You can even embed videos.

This new version, which is free for iSale 5 users, expands the app's research tools. The Research Assistant searches key websites for similar items, and is joined by eBay's new product catalogue, allowing you to find and add product information quickly and easily.

Stability and performance have been improved too. As before, Draft, Running and Finished Auctions are grouped, and you can set up smart folders to sort them. You can relist items no one bought, or edit and reuse old auctions when selling a similar item.

It also monitors running auctions and offers after-sale features, but they're no easier to use than the eBay site.

iSale's strengths lie in the beginning of the process – preparing auctions, reusing old listings and uploading them at a time of your choosing. For that, it's worth the money.

This 'lite' version of equinux's popular eBay tool iSale 5 is great for managing your listings.

After creating and submitting your auction page with iSale express, which is much easier than using the facilities on the eBay site, you can organise your sales via user-definable and smart groups.

Running, ending-soon and completed auctions are grouped, and if an item doesn't sell you can keep the auction and relist it later. You can review what your listing looks like on the eBay site both before and after it goes live, and running auctions are badged with the current sale price. It's also great for building auctions and uploading them to eBay at a later date.

Unfortunately, iSale express is less useful when preparing auctions. It feels too much like a cut-down demo of iSale 5 rather than an entry-level version of the application.

You're constantly shown things you can't use, you're restricted to three templates (but more are promised in a future update), and there's no means of automatically adding a description and images, something you can do on the eBay site, even in Quick Sale mode.

Our advice is to go straight for the excellent iSale 5; it has over 200 templates and a host of features, including a Research Assistant to find pictures, item descriptions and web hosting to avoid eBay's picture fees.

When Apple introduced Numbers on the Mac, it did something nobody had dared attempt before: produce a spreadsheet app that reflects what people actually use spreadsheets for.

Few people, we suspect, use Excel for high-level statistical and financial analysis, compared to those who think of it as an easy way to lay out a timetable or football fixtures list.

On the iPad, Apple has been similarly innovative, and Numbers is actually the most successful of the three iPad apps. Everything that makes Numbers good on the Mac is here; it's friendly, easy to use (once you find your way around the necessarily spartan interface) and tries as hard as it can to make the business of entering formulae unthreatening.

This is because the on-screen keyboard changes to reflect what task you're doing. Enter text, and it's a standard QWERTY keyboard; tell some cells that they're for dates, for example, and you'll get a special keyboard for picking dates; and when you're entering formulae, it changes again to help you do that.

And it's possible to do some pretty sophisticated analyses with Numbers' formulae, especially since referenced cells aren't listed with grid references but are colour-coded and take on the correct names scraped from the column and row headers.

The genius of Numbers on the iPad, though, is its Forms. Tap the + tab at the top of the screen once you've created a table of information, and you have the option of creating a form for easily entering information into that table.

It turns your iPad into what feels like a big clipboard, with the added advantage that all your data is being recorded in a flexible, analysable way, and we can imagine it being tremendously useful in schools, clubs, sport associations and so on. It's also a possible competitor to Bento if your database needs are modest.

It suffers from the same infuriating round-tripping process for sharing files with a Mac that bedevils all the iWork apps and there's no way to email a version of your spreadsheet in Excel directly from the device; you'd have to save it on the Mac version of Numbers.

At least Numbers documents seem to be more resilient in the translations when they're being punted back and forth between the Mac and iPad.

While Apple's new iWork suite (three separate productivity apps) for the iPad is an impressive technical and usability achievement for a mobile device, it quickly begins to frustrate.

They're beautiful apps, yes, and they're packed with clever, though not especially intuitive, gestures and interface flourishes that genuinely begin to replicate what you'd expect a traditional desktop app to do, and all on a glorified mobile-phone-with-a-big-screen.

But while Keynote is fine if you're happy to use the few beautiful themes Apple supplies, you quickly run into limitations if you try to tinker or, worse still, import your own existing presentations. Never mind that the process of getting the files onto the iPad in the first place is a hideous and convoluted mess (see the Pages review); once they're finally imported, you're likely to see glitches.

Carefully laid-out slides can find their layouts messed up, especially if you've created a widescreen presentation that Keynote has to reformat for the 4:3 iPad screen.

Limited scope

Though Keynote comes with 43 fonts, you can't use your own for brand consistency, and heaven help you if you try to export anything vaguely complex from PowerPoint via Keynote on the Mac.

And just how do you get assets onto the iPad to use in your presentation? Local side loading through iTunes is the standard method, but yuck – how finicky. The most convenient method for images, bizarrely, is to copy them from the web and paste in, but again, it just feels nasty.

What about master slides you've created? Keynote ignores them, so your only option is to copy and paste an existing slide unless you want to create each one from scratch.

Presenter notes are stripped out when you copy from Mac to iPad, which is a shame given that with the purchase of the VGA-out connector you can run a presentation from the iPad to a projector. Unless you're happy to create presentations that stick pretty closely to Apple's templates, you're going to find the whole experience exasperating.

We had hoped it would at least be a decent player for Mac-created presentations that you could make last-minute edits to on the way to a meeting, but it's not even there yet.

Given the tattered state of our banks and the tarnished reputation of our bankers, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there couldn't be a worse time to launch a web service aimed at bringing currency trading to the masses. But that's just what eToro is – a trading platform designed to let the average punter play too.

Currency trading is, of course, nothing new. What makes eToro unique is how, to use the well worn internet cliché, it attempts to democratise the business of currency trading.

Traditionally the foreign exchange markets have been a closed shop, the sovereign territory of old-boy bankers with pots of cash and an understanding of how the markets work. eToro, on the other hand, is open to anybody with a credit card or a PayPal account.

Online you'll find thousands of people pushing pennies or virtual stacks of cash around the markets, many of them more than willing to help each other along. You can also practice making money out of less money using the site's training mode, which uses virtual cash.

The site also prides itself on having an interface which makes the undeniably complex business of trading currencies appear child's play.

The second-by-second change in the dollar against the yen can, for example, be shown as a sprint race between cartoon characters. Those old boy bankers would likely see the same thing as a sea of blinking figures and spidery graphs.

Tread carefully

In use the site does indeed make the business of buying this, selling that and keeping an eye on the price of the other appear deceptively easy.

By comparison, some online share dealing services we've used couldn't make the business more frightening and Delphic if they'd purposefully tried to put you off the whole thing.

If you're interested in currency trading, eToro is certainly a cracking tool. Don't be fooled, though: it really is a frighteningly complex business and, as they say on all online trading forums, DYOR – Do Your Own Research.

Follow this maxim and at worst you'll learn lots about the business and enjoy yourself while doing so.

Business Card Composer 5 takes the hassle out of creating pro-quality business cards.

Tedious work like sizing is done for you, so you can enjoy putting your designs together without worrying whether they're correctly configured when you come to print them out.

There are print templates for more than a hundred types of ready-made business card stationery from a dozen top manufacturers, as well as facilities for exporting your layouts or printing at home. This app offers at least 740 ready-made cards for you to play around with and customise.

Or you can start from scratch, using your own clip art and backgrounds or those bundled with the program. A range of card formats are catered for, including landscape, portrait, folding, double-sided and even business card-sized recordable CDs.

The app as a whole is beautifully Maclike, and brilliantly integrated with OS X. Version 5 isn't a great leap forward from its predecessor, but it offers some useful new features.

Business Card Composer 5 integrates with Google Maps, enabling you to print a small street map on your card marking your premises' location.

2D barcodes encoded with details such as your address, URL and more can be produced and presented on your card for reading by a range of devices, and it integrates with iPhoto '09 and Aperture, including support for iPhoto events.

Existing users can upgrade to Business Card Composer 5 for $20, or free if bought after 1 August 2009.

Most personal finance tools seem aimed at the high-net-worth individual, or at least the financially sophisticated one. At first glance iFinance is no different, with its support for multiple currencies, share price tracking, and so on.

But amid these features is a straightforward tool for recording your financial affairs and forecasting them across several bank or credit card accounts. It's easy to set up regular recurring transactions like mortgage payments out and salaries in to get an estimate of how flush you won't be in a month or a year.

A helpful Budget feature lets you see how much of an allocated sum you've spent and how much remains. You can use it to track your monthly grocery bills or for longer term spending like work on your home, and you can be warned when you're running out of budget.

EXPENSES: You can easily manage your budgets and expenses with iFinances' useful features

Dutiful record-keepers will appreciate CSV import and export to keep iFinance in sync with spreadsheets and online bank accounts.

iFinance's interface is not always instantly intuitive. For example, it can be a little awkward to ensure all expenditure is properly allocated to a budget, and typically of such apps, it suffers from a mild case of feature bloat; few users will require monthly profit and loss figures.

But whether you need a way to manage your fortune or just reassurance that your iTunes habit isn't getting out of hand, iFinance does an efficient job. Users of versions 1 and 2 should note that upgrades are free.

While the free version of Box offers just 5GB of space with an individual file limit of 25MB, this can be expanded to 15GB by upgrading to the Professional or Business package.

This amount of space is pretty paltry when compared to some of the other backup services out there. To make matters worse, the web-based interface is somewhat slow and awkward to navigate, and the lack of client software is a major drawback.

Box is not even saved by its online editing and collaboration features. The service is aimed squarely at businesses – as demonstrated by the inclusion of shared work boards and discussion groups – but the system proves too cumbersome and limited to offer much lifespan.

The pricing structure means that any company which could benefit from Box's full feature-set will have a big bill on their hands, particularly if a large number of users are involved.

Box's model attempts to bridge the gap between online collaboration and online storage – but it excels at neither.

The curiously named TimeCache is intended to help freelancers and small businesses track their work and the money they're owed, billing by time or by job. It succeeds well, although it takes patience to set up, and won't be worthwhile for those who have only a few clients and a predictable amount of invoices.

To start, you set up a record for each client and project, assign the projects to clients and set a payment rate for each project.

Then you can get to the heart of the application – the Daily Log, a timesheet where you note the work you've done, either entering hours manually or turning a timer on and off as you move from job to job. This data can then be exported to invoices or viewed in a comprehensive range of report formats, for example by date, client or project.

TAILOR-MADE: Tweak the options to set up records specific to you and your work (Click here for high res version)

The interface is as clear as it can be given the vast number of options available, and there are ample keyboard shortcuts. Plenty of thought has gone into TimeCache: it supports retainer payments and charged-on expenses, for example, exchanges data with iCal and Address Book, gives you more control over invoices, and even lets you track active applications to create an audit trail of your working days. A workgroup version, TimeCache Manager, is also available.

If you have lots of clients, and particularly if you bill by the hour, TimeCache is well worth the effort.

As useful as it is to get someone else to send out your newsletters to a huge list of contacts, and then deal with all the bouncebacks, new subscribers and cancellations, it will cost. However, EmailCampaign is designed to send targeted emails and help you manage your mailing list.

You can design and send messages, with more than 300 HTML and plain text templates to get you started. It verifies the active and dead email addresses on the list, offers flexible send options, deals with bounced mails and processes Unsubscribe requests.

It can extract email addresses into a list, and delete duplicate or badly formatted addresses.

Trouble is, it's not that easy to use. To find a suitable template, for example, you must pick your way through a folder tree and open them one by one until you find something that meets your needs. Replacing dummy text involves editing HTML.

The app can import contacts from Address Book, Entourage and other programs, though you have to configure your SMTP settings yourself – no automatically importing it from Mail.

The PDF tutorial is good, easing you into EmailCampaign very well, but we hope subsequent versions will be more user-friendly out of the box.

EmailCampaign gets the job done, but be prepared to spend time getting to grips with it. It's not tailored for the complete novice, but perhaps it should be.