CheckBook 2.2 is on its way and we’ve got some solid, major features you’ve been waiting ages for: insanely better support for Split Line Items and a user-defined Accounts file location so you can do crazy things like, I dunno…sync your Accounts file with DropBox.  Just beware the potential for data loss, power users! We’re always happy when we make you happy but this time around we know we’re letting some of you down because this release isn’t what we originally planned. It’s not the last stop on the road to MoneyBug, our upcoming personal finance manager for iOS, which we announced in our winter newsletter and thought would ship in the first half of this year. MoneyBug has been delayed – again – and this post is our apology.
The truth? Our shop is lean. Three of us, doing what we love, pushing out software and making a living. Randy and I design the apps. I refine the user interfaces, code everything up, make things work. He makes sure everything looks fantastic. Terra sprinkles pixie dust on folks so they’ll try our apps, maybe even buy them.  I also manage the business side of things.  And then…it’s time for tech support. Randy does the email, I take the calls. Something needs fixing? Let’s go on a bug hunt! But bugs can take days to track down and fix…and those days come out of the time we can spend developing.
MoneyBug got its start roughly three years ago. If you think Mac code moves over to the iPhone without a second thought, though, please don’t. I won’t put you in a coma with the technical details but, like everyone else, we spent some time learning what the iPhone could and couldn’t do, then got down to reworking a lot of CheckBook’s back end so it would fit the limitations of the original iPhone. We did that while maintaining CheckBook and Audiobook Builder, our tool for making audiobooks for iTunes, iPod and iPhone. There’s only one coder for our projects – me – so, like I said earlier, fixing bugs or updating CheckBook or Audiobook Builder comes at MoneyBug’s expense. This works the other way around, too – spending time with MoneyBug keeps us from adding features to our current lineup or taking care of bugs before things get ugly.
These days we’re working as hard as we can to get MoneyBug ready for you but we can’t let it out until CheckBook 2.5 is ready – the two apps are just too tightly connected by the need to sync, so changes to the data in CheckBook can reach MoneyBug and the other way around. iCloud, Apple’s nifty, new array of services designed to sync content and data to all of your Mac and iOS devices, can’t really fix this. It’ll get new versions of a data file between devices but it can’t resolve any differences between new data and the data already on those devices. Make new Entries in CheckBook or MoneyBug on two different devices at the same time and you’ve got a conflict that iCloud doesn’t know how to resolve.  Go offline and make a lot of changes and it gets worse.  That’s just the kind of thing we’re teaching CheckBook 2.5 and MoneyBug 1.0 to deal with, though. Figuring out all the tiny details takes a lot of time.
There’s a lot more to explain about how we got here (I didn’t say anything about the fun back and forth over Mac App Store rejections, for instance, but that happens to everyone…right?). Still, I think you know where we’re coming from. MoneyBug is a very high priority but we have to balance it with CheckBook 2.5 and regular updates to everything else.  We had to learn a hard lesson on the road to now, too: the future isn’t certain enough for us to set expectations without being absolutely certain we will meet them. Things happen, time is there – then it isn’t, plans change. We let you down and we apologize. We shouldn’t have given you a release timeframe we couldn’t meet.  That won’t happen again.