SpendThriftrob colonna: September 2004 Archives
since the release of SpendThrift 915a, new users seem to have been coming out of the woodwork, and that's rather exciting. as this is the first really useful piece of software i've ever created, it's something of a new experience, too. i guess that those of you who've just keyed in all your account info don't really want to hear that you're relying on the work of a neophyte (this is why there's an export function).
so, anyway, i've been getting a lot of feature suggestions over the past week (thanks!), and that's going to inform what i do with it from here. this whole thing started for my own use, but it already does everything i need--so now i can work on what other people need. the overwhelming majority of the requests focus on ease-of-use, and more to the point, efficiency of use. the paltry enhancements in the last version hopefully helped that cause a little, but hopefully there will be some more progress in the future. the idea is to make it easier and faster to use, so that it's harder and harder to fall out of the habit of using it, which is about the only easy thing to do with things like quicken. anyway, i don't want to make promises, yet, since all this relies on my less-than-elite skills. but between that, and trying to make it not crash in 10.2.x, i've got plenty to work on.
anyway, the other reason i was writing this was that i noticed that a lot of the emails are coming from overseas, and i'm sure it must be somewhat off-putting to use a program with a big green american dollar sign on it (even if it does have goofy little wings). so, as a result, now there's some new icons available: the pound symbol for the UK, and the euro symbol as well. both with goofy little wings. enjoy!
spendthrift alternate icons (32k). just copy & paste onto the existing application. you'll need to remove it from and re-add it to the dock to get it to update there.
After leaving it alone for a little while, i've made a couple fixes and enhancements to my humble personal-finance tool, based on user feedback (and yeah, there are users that aren't me, smartass). Nothing too exciting, but hopefully it will run smoother and better, with fewer glitches.
I fixed some of the screwiness that would occur if text was highlighted when adding and deleting records. That shouldn't happen anymore. Also, the category auto-completion no longer breaks when adding a new category. Also, I added some more colors for the graphs and charts so that they won't crap out with too many categories. The ones at the end of the list are kinda ugly, though, just so you know.
As for new stuff, there isn't too much. The big one is a little tweak that creates a new preference for highlighting a cell to edit immediately after creating a new transaction. This makes it a lot easier to enter a bunch of records at a time. Less exciting is that there's now some hotkeys for creating and deleting transactions.
So there you go. As for the future? Well, i'm not bored of it yet, so there may be more stuff to come. What, i don't know. There have been some requests that would necessitate a change to the file format, which i'm open to, but i'll have to think hard about it. Thanks for the feedback thus far, and by all means keep it up.
Downloads:
SpendThrift 915a (VersionTracker)
SpendThrift 915a (Apple's OSX download page)
read me file
Source code: available on request
