Account Tracker for Mac update

On By GrahamIn Announcements

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I have spent a fair bit of the Christmas and New Year break working on a Mac version of Account Tracker. I have the high level design done, and the app is happily reading the latest backup file from Dropbox, displaying a list of groups/accounts with balances, and for each one a list of transactions in settings order … etc. You can show/hide reconciled transactions, and filter/search the transaction list.

OS X development is a bit of a nightmare compared with iOS (understatement of the year so far!!), and a lot of trivial things have taken days to figure out. However progress is being made, albeit slowly. 🙂

Next steps are implementing the budgets and reports screens, to provide a read-only version for testing. I will provide another update in a few weeks.

Meter Readings reviews

On By GrahamIn Announcements

There have been three poor reviews on iTunes in the last week, almost all of which are because the reviewers haven’t understood something and they didn’t reach out for help. As a developer this is really frustrating – reviews are completely anonymous so I have no way of responding or helping in any way. The chances of these people reading this post is virtually nil, however in the spirit of helping others …

Sameer9679 – you don’t have to pay for each and every backup, you pay ONCE for the feature and you can backup and restore as often as you want. Almost certainly you have read Apple’s wording as part of the in-app purchase which says something like “Would you like to buy one Backup and Restore”. As a developer I would love to change this wording, but I can’t since its fixed by Apple. It actually means “Would you like to buy one Backup and Restore FEATURE which lets you make as many backups and restores as you want”. I do try to explain this on the previous screen.

Capt Bean – I have no idea what you mean by placeholders (they aren’t needed), and the app most certainly DOES save readings. However you do have to press Save first!! It is really trivial to add readings – simply tap +, set your reading and tap Save. You will then be prompted to move to the next meter, otherwise tap Done. I’m not sure how it is possible to make it any easier!

matcha111 – adding rates is covered on the 2nd screen on the Getting Started tour. It is also right at the top of the user guide (under Meters and Rates). Just tap on the Meters button then use the BLUE buttons next to each meter. The text on the Meters screen even explains this (right in the middle).

Meter Readings has had 354 written reviews so far …

★★★★★ 272
★★★★ 56
★★★ 9
★★ 8
★ 9

2011 highlights

On By GrahamIn Announcements

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As 2011 comes to a close, my apps have had a pretty good year, the highlight of which has got to be Meter Readings being chosen by Apple as their iPad App Of The Week!

Here are some more highlights by date …

26th January – money.co.uk featured Account Tracker in their article Top 10 iPad Financial Apps.

9th February – msn money featured both Account Tracker and Meter Readings in their article 12 great money-saving apps for your mobile.

10th February – busiest day on my website, with 1,433 hits!

13th February – The Sunday Times did a big feature called The Top 500 Apps In The World. Account Tracker was voted the Best Personal Accounting app, and Meter Readings was also featured.

26th February-5th March – following the New Zealand earthquake, appappeal.co.nz was set up to raise funds for the NZ Red Cross. I donated a week’s sales proceeds for Meter Readings and raised £204 (NZ$450).

March – Apple picked Meter Readings as their “iPad App Of The Week” in the UK and Ireland.

June – my website got its 100,000th hit!

29th September – The Register picked Meter Readings as their iOS App of the Week.

November/December – Trail Magazine featured Hill Lists as “Best for Baggers” in their article “Hillwalking apps”.

December – Apple picked Meter Readings as one of their favourite iPhone finance apps of 2011 in the UK and Ireland as part of “AppStore Rewind 2011”.

Finally I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year and a healthy and prosperous 2012!

Support

On By GrahamIn Announcements

I hope you are all enjoying the holiday period, and for those of you who celebrate Christmas, that Santa gave you lots of Apple goodies or iTunes vouchers to spend! 🙂

As a reminder, PLEASE don’t leave questions or support requests on iTunes as developers have no way of contacting you if you do (since reviews are anonymous). A lot of poor reviews are from people who simply get stuck and don’t reach out for help. Take for example this recent 1 star review for Meter Readings: “maybe I’m being stupid, but how do you add the prices per unit?”. I have no idea how they expected to get an answer, however the following steps would have helped them …

1) Account Tracker and Meter Readings both have Getting Started tours that are launched the first time you run the app. They only take a couple of minutes, and the question above was answered on the second screen! You can re-run these tours at any time.

2) All of my apps have built in user guides, covering all the main screens and features.

3) I appreciate that it can be difficult to read a user guide on a small screen, so they are also on my website, together with helpful screenshots. You have already found my website, but for the record there are links from each of my apps and from iTunes (the latter applies to all apps).

4) In the support page for each app, I have answered some frequently asked questions at the top, but there are also lots of user posted questions and answers. Chances are someone else had the same question as you, so you might just find your answer right there.

5) Failing all of the above, please use my contact page to send me an email. I usually respond in minutes (unless I am offline, driving or really busy). If I don’t respond within 24 hours, chances are you mistyped your email address (sadly this happens quite often!).

I hope this helps get you started (or unstuck!), and that you find my apps useful.

Price changes

On By GrahamIn Announcements

I have permanently reduced the price of my PDF Exports in-app purchase, so if you haven’t bought it so far, now would be a good time! I apologise to those of you who bought it straight away – I really thought it would have been a popular addition to the app, but in-app purchases never seem to do that well (at least for me!!).

Also in my “Man 3” app (for building professionals in the UK), the Save Readings in-app purchase is currently on sale for £4.99, which is 50% off. This unlocks the app so you can continue to use it after the initial month of usage.

Meter Readings included in Apple’s AppStore Rewind 2011

On By GrahamIn Announcements

Apple have chosen Meter Readings as one of their favourite iPhone finance apps of 2011 in the UK and Ireland!

The Rewind lists are slightly different this year to last, in that they have focused on favourite apps rather than top sellers, picking five from each category. Last year Meter Readings was the 6th top paid iPhone finance app and the 2nd top paid iPad finance app in the UK and Ireland.

If they had done it on sales alone, perhaps Account Tracker would have been chosen, as it is one of the top paid finance app in the UK (it was 2nd top paid iPhone finance app in 2010). 🙂

Account Tracker 3.5 now available

On By GrahamIn Announcements

Added support for exporting reports as PDF files. This is a one-off in-app purchase, and is accessed from the Balance and/or Cash Flow screens (not available on iOS 3.1.3 or in the free version). All graphs and pie charts are included in the PDF file, as are lists of transactions broken down into spending, income and transfers.

Fixed all known bugs, including issues with iOS release 4.2.1, and exporting settings and data from the free version to the full version.

iCloud and real-time syncing of data

On By GrahamIn Features

As I am getting many requests per week asking about iCloud support and real-time syncing between devices, I thought I’d add this post to explain the current situation.

None of my apps support iCloud today (in fact very few do!!). However they all support the ability to backup your data, copy it between devices, and restore it. Of course what you all really want is the ability to change something on one device, and have it magically appear on the other, perhaps even having two people do updates simultaneously. There are many issues with this, some of which are helped by iCloud …

1) your data files can get quite large, especially with lots of transactions (e.g.). Copying to the cloud, and downloading this again could potentially take minutes or longer. So when do you do this? It would be frustrating at launch time, and you can’t wait until you press the Home button to copy back to the cloud as you only have 5 seconds of execution time for background processing. iCloud helps with this (a lot), letting you copy data locally, and it handles the copying in the background.

2) conflict resolution. While it sounds easy, what if two or more devices are offline for extended periods, all editing the same data. When they reconnect to the cloud, it all needs to be sorted out. This is especially difficult, and Apple have left it up to us developers to sort out (they can’t solve it for us, as we all store data in different formats).

UPDATE (8th December):

I plan to support iCloud in three steps. The first is to use it for backups only, a bit like Dropbox works today. When you make a backup, this will be copied to iCloud and then (over time) pushed to all of your other devices. Your other devices will see this new file in seconds, but if it has not been downloaded, it will be displayed in grey. Tapping on it will force a download, then tapping again will let you restore it. I have all of this working in Account Tracker today, so it will be in my next update (other apps will get this too).

The next step is more complicated, and that is to allow your data to be pushed to the iCloud automatically (without backing up), such that other devices can always be using the latest data. While this sounds simple, there are a few issues to resolve first (like preventing simultaneous updates, and when to copy your data).

Finally, the highly complex issue of syncing simultaneous changes needs to be addressed. This is likely to take time to design and implement a workable solution. Please be patient! 🙂

Photo receipts

On By GrahamIn Features

I am thinking about adding support for photo receipts. While it is relatively easy to take a photo and associate it with a specific transaction, I don’t quite know how to handle backing them up (beyond the usual iTunes backup of my app data). Since photos tend to be quite large (and also numerous!), including them in my current backup solution would be impractical or even impossible. I can think of two solutions …

1) providing an option to copy these images to your saved photos/camera roll, accessible through the photos app, and therefore backed up to your computer separately. While this provides some additional level of security, if you ever had to retrieve them from your synced photos, there would be no way of associating them back to your transactions (because images don’t have names)

2) letting you make your own backups as and when you like. For example, a directory of images could easily be copied to your computer using iTunes file sharing

Of course both of these options are only an issue if you don’t fully trust iTunes to do its job of backing up (it does seem better than it was 2 years ago).

If you have any comments, please let me know by responding to this post.