SpendThriftrob colonna: July 2007 Archives
Hello.
After leaving Version 3 to its own devices in the wild, and after two months of me having to really haul ass at the proverbial day job, I have found a little time to make a quick update based on some of the concerns people have voiced.
First and foremost, any reports of corrupted data concern me, and while I've only had one, I consider that too many. It was something of a concern with the old version. Always something that I heard about, but never saw, despite the fact that i used it every day, and I hated that I generally couldn't help the few people that reported it.
As you no doubt know, I'm a hobbyist developer, self-taught, with precious little free time; this is one of the big reasons that SpendThrift is and always* will be postcardware, because i don't really know when i'll be able to fix some stuff.
So, having said that, I have taken great pains in this new version to make sure there's no opportunity to corrupt data. There's a ton of stuff behind the scenes that simply doesn't happen anymore; it's just simpler, period, and trust me, this helps. Beyond that, now I've added a check for file integrity to the saving process. It's a new preference checkbox that's on by default (Preferences > General > Verify files before saving), which basically takes the data that's about to be written to disk, and does the same things that SpendThrift would do to load it from disk; if it sees any problems, it warns you, and won't save it.
If for some reason you should see this warning dialog (and you never should), first, make sure you've used the Backup tool in the Preferences dialog. Next, try modifying a transaction, and check out the balances, category listings, and Rollback behavior. If that all looks good, chances are, whatever was wrong worked itself out; try saving it again. Even if that does work, email me, please, because i want to know how often it occurs.
I hope this helps.
(*well, for the foreseeable future, at least)
