2008's news archive

I released moneyGuru 1.3.0 today. It has budgeting and improved graphs that clearly distinguishes between past and future data.

I released moneyGuru 1.2.0 today. It has scheduled transactions, improved bar charts, font size preference and it remembers columns size and position between session. moneyGuru's price will go up to 39.95 Friday.

I released moneyGuru 1.1.0 today. It has pie charts, new transaction filters and account exclusion. moneyGuru's price will go up to 34.95 Wednesday.

I just finished setting up my website at Get Satisfaction,a spiffy website for community oriented customer service. I hope it will take off the ground and be the main HS support method in a near future.

E-mail support works, but I often get the same questions. Or sometimes, I get bug reports from more than one person about the same bug. I often receive some great suggestions, but it's from one person at a time. If people can go on the website and see that idea, they could say "I like this idea too!" and contribute to shape it up.

I always tried to avoid the forums thing. There are so many shareware forums out there that are ghost towns. Signing up for yet-another-forum-with-those-archaic-search-functions is just pain in my opinion. Oh, and the spam. I never had to manage spam in a forum, but it seems awful. The search in Get Satisfaction seems to work rather well. You can type your query in a natural english form question and the result you get are pretty relevant. I have to admit that I find the UI of the website a bit confusing. There is no categorization other than tags. But well, this is the new spiffy web! I guess it's just a matter of getting used to it.

So please, if you want to contact Hardcoded Software support, consider doing so through this website. Who knows, your question might already be answered in there.

QIF import woes. It's hard to foresee every kind of QIF files users might have until those users actually try to import them. I release today moneyGuru 1.0.1 which improves QIF import and fixes a little QIF export bug. It's not hard to imagine that there will be other tweaks to make to this part of the application. If moneyGuru can't import your file, please tell me about it. I will fix it ASAP.

After 11 long months of development, Hardcoded Software is proud to present to you... moneyGuru!

moneyGuru is a personal finance management and planning tool with a fresh new take on the user interface side, a transaction system based on double-entry accounting and a strong multiple-currency support. The tricky part is that it's not completed yet (see the moneyGuru page for details on that). Hopefully, it will interest (trust me, it is an interesting app!) enough people to bring some user feedbacks in the loop soon.

I am reconfiguring my server today (going from Gentoo to Debian). There's an expected downtime, but it should be less than a minute.

Now might be a good time to plug Linode. They've been my host for more than 2 years now and I never thought I'd ever be that satisfied of a hosting service. The uptime is good and the staff is very responsive. The linode management utility is particularly awesome. It's easy to manage disk images and configurations. If you have 2 linodes, you can easily move stuff around. This was particularly useful today as I tested my new Debian configuration of my test linode, and I'm now migrating it to my live linode. A little reboot (reboots are very fast on linodes) and everything should be fine (famous last words...).

I released dupeGuru PE 1.4.0 today. The Mac OS X version has iPhoto integration. In the Directories window, you can now add a special item, the "iPhoto Library". When you do, iPhoto is launched and all your photos are scanned. The actions on duplicates all work the same as for normal pictures, except for Send to Trash and Move. Send to Trash will send the photo to the iPhoto trash, not the system trash. Move will copy your photo to the destination, then send it to the iPhoto trash.

I spent the last few days profiling (running an application through a special library that records the time spent by each part of the code. It greatly helps to locate bottlenecks) dupeGuru, something I haven't been doing in quite a while. The result is a greatly improved overall speed in situations where there are a lot of duplicates. Today's dupeGuru 2.5.2 release have these improvements, and upcoming releases of ME and PE also will.

I'm also working on iPhoto integration in dupeGuru PE, a feature that is painfully absent at the present.