October 2007 Archives

After a year and a half of work, SpendThrift 3.0 is done, and ready for release on 31 October 2007. Why Halloween night? Why not? If you're new to SpendThrift, welcome. If you've been using SpendThrift 2.1 for a long time, well, thanks for sticking with it; i hope it's continued to be useful to you, but moreover, i'm also sorry for not getting a newer version out sooner. If for no other reason than because i enjoy working on it.

At the same time, i definitely don't want to give people the wrong impression--i am not any kind of software professional. i'm a mechanical engineer, who has taught himself to program a bit, and managed to write something that i use every day, which other people might also find useful. So, there may be bugs. There may even be bugs that are beyond my ability to fix (although i have some smart friends i'll call on...). It may take me a long time to fix things--my day job is pretty intense, sometimes. There's a reason that it's postcardware--if i charged people money for it, there's an implicit promise of maintenance that i'm just not able to keep.

Having said all that, i have tested this version for months now; the stuff i use every day works well. i am fairly proud of my work, if i do say so myself. That's not to say there won't be a point release in the next couple weeks if something comes up, but there's a lot of cool stuff in SpendThrift 3. Read on, and i hope you'll agree. Contact me at

and i will do my very best to help. That i do promise. Without further ado, SpendThrift 3.0:

Pick a category. Any category. You can view transactions on a per-category basis. It's nice for keeping track of how much i spend on beer.

Reports in SpendThrift 3 can be customized to show as much or as little as you want. Show a report of the whole account, or just selected transactions. Month-by-month breakdowns, and categorized breakdowns are also new to SpendThrift 3. And it all looks nicer, too.

Printing just plain works better now. It works better and looks better. There's even a nice grid for the printed pages, and better yet, you can easily pick and choose what to print. It should always have worked like this. Printing isn't something i uses, myself, so if anyone has any requests for printing enhancements, by all means let me know.

Setup information for individual accounts, including names, descriptions, opening balances, and passwords can all be found in one easy place now. Not exciting, but surely less confusing.

Scheduled Transactions are back. They're simpler, too. There's some stuff that it used to do (badly) that i took out. If you used it, let me know, and i can try to re-implement it better, but for the time being, i'm going on the philosophy of no feature being better than a crummy one. Scheduled Transactions should also work better and more smoothly than before.

The new interface of SpendThrift posed some interesting questions as to how to keep password-secure data out of view until such time as the password has been authenticated. It was a lot of work, but i think i got it right. Personally, i don't even use it. i'm insufficiently paranoid. But if you do use it, i hope it does the job.

Incidentally, i also did build in a way to get into your accounts if you forget your password.

Well, i used to think the rollback function was pretty slick until i saw the Time Machine thing in Leopard. Guess i've still got work to do. On second thought, i think it still pretty much does what it needs to. Rollback allows you to take an account and push it back into the arbitrary past, to see old transactions, and what your finances were like at any time in the history of the account (Sorry, it can't help you if you weren't using SpendThrift at the time).

We've got a Spotlight plugin for SpendThrift documents, although ironically, i think I've dramatically reduced the usefulness of it with the multiple-account interface.

It's easy to forget about it, since SpendThrift has had this feature since day one, but dynamic categories are nice. No editing any silly list, trying to predict how you're going to organize things. Organization is a thoroughly mutable process, and you really never know until you've been doing it for a while what the best way to classify things is. So create categories to your heart's content. SpendThrift will keep track of them for you.

Back in SpendThrift 3: Bar graphs, Pie charts, and Line graphs in all their resplendent glory. Well, maybe that's overstating it. Some of the code for the charts and graphs was cleaned up. They should draw a bit better most of the time, and run a lot faster. There are a lot fewer wonky controls for them, and they're a lot more streamlined. Mostly, though, they're the same as before. Polishing up the look of them is definitely on the to-do list, but it's not done yet.

Some users felt a little bit limited by the information that you could enter in earlier versions of SpendThrift; i suppose that's fair. The usual suggestion was to use the 'Location' field for something other than its intended purpose, if someone wanted to add a note, a memo, billing information, or whatever. Well, it was easy enough here to add two custom fields to the document format. You know what that means, once you save files in SpendThrift 3, they will not be backwards compatible. But on the bright side, now you can immortalize all those clever things you put in the 'memo' field on checks you write.

Commonly used stuff like saving the file or account options are right in the table!

Remember in SpendThrift 2.1, where there were all these silly controls on all the graphs to determine the range of dates they displayed? Somewhere in the process of re-coding all of that, i had an epiphany, and hit the Delete key.

SpendThrift 3 uses on-the-fly selection for nearly everything. Graphs, charts, reports, printing, whatever. If more than one thing is selected, the displayed information is going to refer to the selected transactions. As a result, it's ridiculously quick to see a month's transactions, or all of them that begin with 'Dunkin', or whatever.

Kicks self for not thinking of this sooner...

Since SpendThrift has evolved past an entirely window-and-menu single-document program into a more sophisticated tool, we need some more sophisticated controls. SpendThrift 3 introduces a toolbar, just like the toolbar in many programs for Mac OS X. Except i made the icons for this one. With my mad phat Illustrator skillz. Actually, i rather like them. On the other hand, i tend to keep a pretty sparse toolbar, myself. Your mileage may vary, but that's also kinda the point.

The old Dock icon was a product of a number of things. First, i was so pleased with myself at having managed to draw the balance on it, that i left it alone. Even though it was ugly and buggy. Second, the icon itself was done using CAD software at work, and photoshopped from there. It looked every bit as amateurish as it was. The Dock, even though we're used to it, still looks pretty sweet, and an ugly Dock icon sticks out like a sore thumb. Sorry about that, kids.

We've fixed it, now. Between my phat Illustrator skillz, and my fussed-over balance-drawing code, the Dock icon for SpendThrift 3 doesn't have to be embarrassed to sit next to the cool kids anymore.

For years, SpendThrift was built as a fairly standard document-type program, requiring multiple windows to be open, one for each account. A great many users wrote asking how one could have multiple accounts in SpendThrift. The answer was always a separate document. Still is, actually. What's happened in the time since SpendThrift was created, though, is the popularization of the iTunes-like approach to document handling, which is to say, you pretty much don't anymore. Open the program, and the program worries about the data.

As a result, SpendThrift now picks a directory, and opens every SpendThrift file in the directory. The single window displays every one of these documents in a list, with convenient information as to their status, just like Mail and iTunes. Switching from one to the other is a single click away, and you need never know where the files are if you don't want to. This was a major philosophical switch for me, as i'd always thought of SpendThrift as valuing simplicity above all else, but then i realized that in addition to my bank account, i should probably keep a closer eye on things like credit cards. Voila, a multi-account interface.