2010's news archive

It's been two months since the move to Fairware and it's been quite interesting. The most notable fact is that all hours I invest in dupeGuru, its support and the Fairware website (the project name is OpenHS) are easily compensated in full by dupeGuru contributors. That is really cool, as it means that there are fair people all over world!

Do I earn less money than before? Yeah, a lot less in fact. But as I explain in the article announcing the Fairware move, the dupeGuru project was reaching a point where there wasn't much more to work on. Because I always considered that dupeGuru sales compensated my work on the project very fairly, it didn't feel very fair of me to continue asking for money with no work being done on my side. Of course, a lot of people will disagree with me, talking about risk and reward and stuff like that, but don't forget that I talk as someone who doesn't believe much in intellectual property (although it wasn't always the case). All I ever risked was my time, and it has been compensated (except for moneyGuru, but that's another story...).

Another interesting thing is the feedback I receive from the users not wanting to contribute. I put a trick checkbox on the Fairware pop up saying "I don't want to contribute, stop bugging me". In most applications, it just means that the pop up will not show anymore, but with Fairware, it's a trick. It confronts the user to his own reasons for not contributing by asking him to tell me why he doesn't want to contribute. I promise a free registration key for anything reasonable (a promise I hold).

The result is quite overwhelming. I get a lot of feedback from this (a few hundreds so far). A lot of it are confused people who say they want to try the application first (but then, if they only wanted to try the application, why did they check the "I don't want to contribute" box upfront?). To them, I explain the tricky box concept. But most of the feedback is from people who can't afford to contribute. To them, I gladly issue a registration key, as there's no reason for them to be reminded that they can't contribute every time they launch the application. It's simply unproductive. Moreover (I don't want to sound like a calculating bastard here, because I'm honest in my approach), I think I'm building a lot of goodwill, which might pay off in the end (the economic crisis might end one day). Are some people lying about their ability to contribute? Yeah, I guess, but there's no way for me to know. There will always be dishonest people in the world, but being angry at them is very unproductive. Therefore, I assume eveyone is truthful (or at least truthiful :) ) in their feedback.

Although the first two months of Fairware are an encouraging test, it's not a real one because I haven't been working much (I'm busy reading political philosophy these days). I'm still not sure what I want to work on next, but I guess this next project, if it's Fairware, would be the real test since there would be many more hours being logged in the system. Will the contributors be up to the task? We'll see...

Do you have an opinion about the Fairware concept? Critics? Don't hesitate to contact me. I'm very interested in this subject.

Big news! Once again, I'm trying out a new way to do business on the web. I'm taking my last year's move up one notch and I now re-publish my applications as Fairware. You can read about the whole thing in the article I wrote about it

Since moneyGuru now offers Cashculator integration, it makes sense to have a promotion for both applications. Beginning today, people who purchase moneyGuru will receive a 10$ rebate coupon for Cashculator with their purchase. If you already purchased moneyGuru and would like to have that rebate, contact HS support and I'll gladly give it to you.

I'm going to Birmingham for EuroPython today. Yay!

It took a while, but moneyGuru 2.0 is finally there since yesterday. I also made new screencasts. Unlike the old ones the new ones don't have voiceover. It took way too much effort to do those and I didn't feel like it was worth it (my spoken english isn't so good). Those voiceless screencasts are much easier to make and I hope to make more of these (I think they're good for exposing features that are not obvious otherwise. Good for business :).

I'm beginning to work on moneyGuru 2.0 which will, strangely, be a release without new features. However, the 3 changes it will contain will have a major impact on its usage:

New Views System. Currently, the way views are organized is a little limiting. The number of different views I can add is limited by the width of the toolbar. The 6 views that are currently there already fill that toolbar to a point where I'm not sure it's a good idea to add anything else.

Therefore, I'll change this system and have views organized by Safari-like tabs. The tabs can be moved and closed, and new views can be opened through a "Open View" button which would pop a menu of available views.

As I wrote, the biggest advantage of this system is that it allows me to add more views and these views don't have to be "important enough to be on the main toolbar". However, there are indirect advantages as well. One of them is that it will be possible to have more than one "Account" view opened at once. A second advantage will be that moneyGuru will remember which views you had opened when it launches again.

Internationalization. moneyGuru will be available in multiple languages (for 2.0, I'll do French and German).

Speed Optimizations. When you have a lot of transactions, moneyGuru tends to slow down a little bit. The good thing is that most of this slowdown can (normally) be fixed by optimizing a small part of the code (core amount computations), which I'll do for this release.

Questions and comments are welcomed. There's a thread about this upcoming release on Get Satisfaction.

Starting with moneyGuru, HS applications are now available on Linux. I build packages for Ubuntu, but as long as your distribution can install .deb packages, you should be fine. There's also the possibility to build the application from source.

I wanted to setup my own apt server so that HS apps would be automatically updated with the rest the system, but it turns out that setting those is quite complex. So for now, it will be simple .deb downloads.

I'm beginning to work on moneyGuru 1.8 which is going to be another incremental improvement. The list of tickets planned for this release is there. In short, what it includes is:

Re-organized Transaction Info panel. The info panel is going to have 3 tabs (Info, Splits and Notes). The splits will work a little differently than they do now. There's going to be a separate Amount field for transactions, and the splits are going to balance themselves to fit the value in the Amount field. For example, if you have a normal transaction for 100$ in which you add a new split for 10$, moneyGuru will currently add a new unassigned split for 10$, effectively making this transaction into a 110$ transaction. Under the new system, the previous splits would be automatically modified so that the transaction stays at 100$.

Total lines. Rather than showing total information in a label under the filter buttons, these totals will be in a read-only row at the bottom of the tables. This allows these totals to appear when you print transactions. The current total label will not disappear, but they will show totals for selected transaction instead.

Lookup lists. Yes, auto-completion works well in moneyGuru, but there are those times when you don't know what you want to type. You don't even know the first letter of that payee and then you have to scroll back in previous transactions to figure it out. Not anymore! There's going to be lookup lists for all auto-completable fields now. Pressing Cmd-L will invoke a dialog that lists all previous values. This dialog will also contain a search field that does fuzzy matching (so you don't need to know the first letter of the value). This lookup list will also be extended to account jumping. At any time, you can invoke a lookup list containing all your accounts allowing you to fuzzy search it, and then show that account in the Account view.

Auto-decimal point. For faster amount typing, there will be a new option so that decimal point is automatically placed. For example, if your native currency has 2 decimal places, typing "1234" would be interpreted as "12.34".

Customizable Return, Tab and Enter keybindings. It will be possible to customize what Return, Tab and Enter key do (create new transaction, edit selected one, save edits, go to next field).

Saved custom date ranges. It will be possible to save custom date ranges for quick invocation later.

Questions and comments are welcomed. There's a thread about this upcoming release on Get Satisfaction.

I have just released dupeGuru Music Edition 5.7.1 which is the first of HS's apps to be 64-bit on Mac OS X. The rest will follow.