{"id":1363,"date":"2011-06-30T15:54:11","date_gmt":"2011-06-30T20:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2012-04-05T13:16:11","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T18:16:11","slug":"checkbook-and-the-road-to-moneybug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/?p=1363","title":{"rendered":"CheckBook and the Road to MoneyBug"},"content":{"rendered":"

CheckBook 2.2 is on its way and we’ve got some solid, major features you’ve been waiting ages for:\u00c2\u00a0 insanely better support for Split Line Items and a user-defined Accounts file location so you can do crazy things like, I dunno\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6sync your Accounts file with DropBox. \u00c2\u00a0Just beware the potential for data loss, power users! <\/em>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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 MoneyBug has been delayed – again – and this post is our apology.<\/p>\n

The truth?\u00c2\u00a0 Our shop is lean.\u00c2\u00a0 Three of us, doing what we love, pushing out software and making a living.\u00c2\u00a0 Randy and I design the apps.\u00c2\u00a0 I refine the user interfaces, code everything up, make things work.\u00c2\u00a0 He makes sure everything looks fantastic.\u00c2\u00a0 Terra sprinkles pixie dust on folks so they’ll try our apps, maybe even buy them. \u00c2\u00a0I also manage the business side of things. \u00c2\u00a0And then\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6it’s time for tech support.\u00c2\u00a0 Randy does the email, I take the calls.\u00c2\u00a0 Something needs fixing?\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s go on a bug hunt!\u00c2\u00a0 But bugs can take days to track down and fix\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6and those days come out of the time we can spend developing.<\/p>\n

MoneyBug got its start roughly three years ago.\u00c2\u00a0 If you think Mac code moves over to the iPhone without a second thought, though, please don’t.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 We did that while maintaining CheckBook and Audiobook Builder, our tool for making audiobooks for iTunes, iPod and iPhone.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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. \u00c2\u00a0Go offline and make a lot of changes and it gets worse. \u00c2\u00a0That’s just the kind of thing we’re teaching CheckBook 2.5 and MoneyBug 1.0 to deal with, though.\u00c2\u00a0 Figuring out all the tiny details takes a lot of time.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6right?).\u00c2\u00a0 Still, I think you know where we’re coming from.\u00c2\u00a0 MoneyBug is a very high priority but we have to balance it with CheckBook 2.5 and regular updates to everything else. \u00c2\u00a0We had to learn a hard lesson on the road to now, too:\u00c2\u00a0 the future isn’t certain enough for us to set expectations without being absolutely certain we will meet them.\u00c2\u00a0 Things happen, time is there – then it isn’t, plans change.\u00c2\u00a0 We let you down and we apologize.\u00c2\u00a0 We shouldn’t have given you a release timeframe we couldn’t meet. \u00c2\u00a0That won’t happen again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CheckBook 2.2 is on its way and we’ve got some solid, major features you’ve been waiting ages for:\u00c2\u00a0 insanely better support for Split Line Items and a user-defined Accounts file location so you can do crazy things like, I dunno\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6sync … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1374,"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splasmata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}