A couple of weeks ago, while digging into our site analytics, we noticed something strange with Safari. We’d just launched Fat Rabbit and were really interested in making sure we measured all the useful  statistics around user growth and engagement. As we pulled out interesting details about website visits (using a combination of Google Analytics and Mixpanel), we started seeing an odd pattern – the average visit length on Safari was half that of our other browsers and the bounce rate was much higher.

Our first assumption was that we had released Fat Rabbit with some Safari specific rendering issues that were causing people to be, like, “Ew!” and abandon all hope of finding a great way to split expenses with their friends. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Our next guess was that it might be Google / Mixpanel lumping mobile Safari and desktop Safari traffic together. Nope, not that either.

We were at a loss. So, like any good engineering team we started Googling. It took us a while, but we finally found a post by Martin Sutherland that explained what we were seeing. Safari’s Top Site feature makes a request to all the sites it lists to accurately render their respective thumbnail. These requests show up as Safari traffic and are full page requests, including executing any Javascript on the page (that is, our analytics code). We were able to implement a fix that allowed us to filter these Top Sites requests out of our analytics reporting. It only took a few days of data to prove that Safari Top Sites had actually been causing the odd behavior.

So, how’d we fix it? We were happy to find the wonderful rack-preview gem. The gem allows us to ignore the Safari Top Sites requests for analytics purposes, but still serve up great content to be previewed.

If using Ruby gems isn’t your thing, all you have to do is look for the “X-purpose” HTTP header. If its value is “preview,” it’s a Top Sites request and you should treat it appropriately. Of course, you’ll still want to serve up a normal-looking version of your page so Top Sites users get a nice version.

Nosey is excited he is a launch mascot!

It’s my great pleasure to announce version 3  of Splitwise for iPhone and web, which Marshall has memorably code-named “Fat Rabbit.” This is a major new relaunch, which changes our look and feel and adds popularly requested features like expense search, offline mode, bill editing, and push notifications. Perhaps most notably, we’ve entered the world of “mobile payments” with iPhone payments via PayPal.

We have decided to relaunch Splitwise today, in spite of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon. We are deeply upset by the attack, and many dear friends of Splitwise were near the scene of the bombing or experienced a near miss. Our thoughts are out to anyone affected by the tragedy. In light of everything, we believe that the most ethical thing for Splitwise to do is to go ahead with business as usual.

If you care to, join us for a tour of the new app.

Layout

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the new color scheme and logo.

The New Splitwise Look And Feel

On the website, you’ll see we’ve switched to a three-column layout that displays the balances on the side and cleans up the top bar substantially. We think this looks a lot cleaner, and it allows the top bar to stay attached to the interface comfortably while scrolling. You can also now scroll the list of friends and groups along with the rest of the page.

The iPhone layout is extremely similar to this, except that the left-hand menu is compressed into the navigation tray that can be opened in the top left of the app.

PayPal on iPhone

On iPhone, you can now pay friends back anywhere using the “Send money via PayPal” feature. You’ll be presented a choice immediately after hitting the Settle Up button.

When we added “Pay via PayPal” to our website in September, we thought it sounded great (“I guess we do payments now too”) but weren’t sure anyone would actually use it. As it turns out, it has been a wonderful feature that we use at Splitwise ourselves quite frequently and users have been loving too.

For now, PayPal payments are limited to $500/wk in $USD for US users only. Of course, any user can make a payment via PayPal or Venmo or any other method and then record it in Splitwise. But the limits of the API permissions have kept us from going further than this for now.

PayPal handles the payments – once you log in and do your business, it will take you right back to our app.

Offline Mode

If you are going backpacking, travelling in a foreign country, or just live in an area with spotty reception, the new offline mode on iPhone is a game-changer. Not only is data cached in the app (so that you can see everything that happens while you are offline), new bills can also be added, even with new friends, and everything will be synched to the server when you do get internet access.

Bills that have not yet been synched will have a category icon that indicates that they are pending internet access. Even the balances update according to the unsyched expenses, unless there is a problem with the synchronization.

There are some limitations: you can’t create groups or invite friends without internet access. Friends you add indirectly (by including their email address in a bill) will get invited, but will only appear on the home screen once the app gets internet access. If there are any problems, dialogue boxes will guide you into editing the bill and resubmitting once you have internet access again.

Push Notifications

We’ll have our people push notify your people.

One frequently requested feature we are proud to start supporting is app push notifications for new expenses! No longer do you have to rely on email for updates about what is going on in your Splitwise account.

When you update to the new iPhone version, the app will prompt you and voilà! You can change push notification settings on the user settings page on either iPhone or the website.

Editing A Bill On The Phone

We realize it’s a little odd to tout this is a major new feature, but with all of the splitting possibilities available to our users, building that form has been somewhat of a challenge. We are happy to finally have it – woot!

Left Hand Menu

You can get to this menu by tapping the menu icon in the top left of the app.

It seems all the cool social networking kids are doing left hand side-bar menus hidden behind a tap, and after seeing how much simpler it made some aspects of navigation, we’ve joined the party. It’s especially useful for quick access to your groups and to get to the new “All Expenses” tab, which shows a list of all transactions.

Team Notes

While I have the pleasure of writing this blog post, it was of course a huge team accomplishment. Vast portions of Fat Rabbit were written by Caleb Oller, and Fat Rabbit’s high level of polish is in part a testament to his skills. The update to the Splitwise logo and color scheme were designed by the ever-talented Nicole Mercer, a friend and fellow Betaspring alumni.

Ryan, Marshall, and Caleb all worked together closely on both the website and mobile app, and it’s been by far our most collaborative release. As Splitwise’s token non-engineer, it’s been a pleasure to watch our engineering culture and process take shape as the team grows.

Coming soon to a t-shirt near you

After two long years of trying to figure out how to make money, Splitwise has finally settled on a sustainable business model that will enhance the user experience of our website and keep ourselves profitable into the future.

Charging money for payments? Lame. Advertisements? Meh. Premium features? What premium features?

The only logical path, as I’m sure you will agree, is to become a web-comic.

Are we joking? Yes. Are these cartoons of Ryan’s life really going to be posted hourly by Ryan every hour for this entire month, even after April fools? Yes.

Is Ryan insane? Definitely, definitely yes.

Awesome Centwise feature – in app calcualtor.

To Splitwise fans using Windows Phone 7.5 or 8, the last few weeks have been really exciting. Personally, I got so excited I purchased a Lumia 620 off of eBay just so I could keep up with these two new 3rd party releases. It won’t be my primary phone, but the Metro UI is very nice.

A few days ago, Centwise (created by Kamran Ayub) released its first version for both Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8, making it the first third party app for long-time Windows Phone 7 fans! It’s a full featured app, with group support, simple IOUs, and lots of bells and whistles. Kamran is charging $1.29 to support his efforts, but it does have a free trial and a couple unique features I really like – including the sweet calculator-within-the-add bill flow pictured at right. Check out the full Centwise feature set here.

Miron adds groups to Splittr – with pics!

Miron has been keeping the awesome updates coming at free Splittr. The 1.1 release, which hit the app store yesterday, adds totally full-featured group support, so you can see all the expenses associated with a group, group balances, and repayment instructions. One neat idea is the ability to directly pin a group shortcut to the home screen. What a cool feature – I wish I had that on Android. I’m told a Windows Phone 7.5 version is submitted to the review queue as well. As of March 26th, Splittr now also supports Windows Phone 7.5, so all Windows Phone users should have two choices – a free and a paid app. Joy of joys!

Want Splitwise on Blackberry, Symbian, your toaster? Email developers@splitwise.com and we’d love to give you early API access. Personally, I can’t wait until we have an Arduino that creates Splitwise IOUs for the office coffee jar.

The issue occurred between about 2AM – 10AM EST, an unlucky time frame for a Providence, RI based team. If this had happened during the day, we would have had it fixed in minutes, but we didn’t catch the error until morning. We apologize to all the non-US users who experienced this problem more acutely.

What happened was a totally preventable human error – we believed our SSL certificate would auto-renew through GoDaddy, but it was not set up that way. This caused the site and apps to be inaccessible, since everything on Splitwise is now behind SSL. I’m sure this was especially worrisome to our former Billmonk users, who suffered with an expired SSL certificate for years. We are improving our alert infrastructure and operations to make sure anything like this doesn’t happen again.

If you have any concerns, please let us know at support@splitwise.com.

Splittr lets you access Splitwise on Windows Phone 8.

We are so excited to announce that Miron Vranjes has developed the first Windows Phone 8 client for Splitwise, called Splittr. It’s free and awesome, so if you use Windows Phone 8, go grab it now!

For over a year, users have asked us “when are you going to support Windows Phone?” Miron stepped up and did it himself, using our open API. Splittr is a 3rd party app not developed by us, but it works with your existing Splitwise account and everything should more or less work with Splitwise as normal once you sign-in with Splitwise (just like a “Login With Facebook”). We like the UI he designed – it’s a very “Metro” look.

A few other notes:

• Miron tells us a Windows Phone 7 version will also be out soon. For now, this is just for Windows Phone 8.
• It has a tax/tip functionality that we don’t have yet – cool!
• This is actually the 1.0.9 version. After a small update, the app now supports supports groups as well as friendships.
• Users who have multiple groups will notice a missing feature – you will not be able to sort expenses/balances by that specific group, as you can in the website or native Splitwise apps. However, Splittr will tell you the group when you view a specific expense, and will let you select a group when you add one.

Miron is a passionate Windows Phone lover and Splitwise user who did this all on his own time and as a labor of love, just to make sure Splitwise was available on the platform.

Our APIs are still not fully public, because as Miron discovered, they are not documented very well and are still changing quite quickly. But if want to build your own app that works with Splitwise, or adds a feature that you think Splitwise should have, let us know and we’d love to send you the link with some explanation on how to use the APIs.

Now with auto-complete, and the ability to change the involved parties without clearing out data.

The form has been completely redesigned from scratch, with two killer new features.

• You can add people into the “With’ field just like an email – without tons of clicking. SO much easier, and much more like the iPhone and Android apps.
• Adding new people will automatically add them into the expense without clearing your existing data (a big complaint in the old version).

If for some reason you hate this new form, a) please tell us why! and b) there will still be a link to the old “Divide A Bill” form for little while, as you can see in the screenshot.

We have also merged the “Simple IOU” and “Divide A Bill” buttons for simplicity. You can expect the same on the mobile apps in our next big update.  If you happen to add exactly one other person to the bill, and you want to create an IOU for the whole amount by changing the hyper-linked sentence:

You can turn a bill into an IOU by clicking on the text link “Split equally” and changing it to an IOU.

Unfortunately, itemized bills still link to the old form (and clears your data – sorry!), which we will definitely be updating as soon as we can. Itemized expenses are surprisingly complicated to support with all of the snappy AJAX and auto-complete goodness. All in a days work!

When I first joined Splitwise, I had one immediate goal: to rebuild the iPhone app. I did have one question, though, almost immediately on seeing our signup page:

What’s wrong with this picture?

Why isn’t the signup button red?

My usual complaint on seeing home pages is that I can’t figure out what to do next. Anyone designing a good homepage for a webservice should have one action for new people coming to the site and one action for returning users. Returning users are a lot more invested in your service, so you just need to make sure their action is discoverable, but new users should know what you want them to do immediately on page load.

Here, the sign up button is the first thing you see, so why would I care if it’s red? Red converts better. In our case, changing to this increased sign up rates by 20%:

Much better.

There are sometimes reasons you want to avoid a sign up button entirely. ZURBlog talks about how burying their signup buttons actually increased sign ups by 350%. In their case, it sounds like most of their users needed time to familiarize themselves with the service before they were ready to sign up, so the hard sell of a big red button was driving users away.

You’ll also see cases of people telling you to pick some vibrant color that fits with your site. I don’t really agree with them. I’m going to leave it up to you to do some thematically appropriate button color if you really want – on the condition that you A/B test it against a big red button.

As we described in the version 2.5 web preview Ryan and Jon just posted, we’ve been trying to make Splitwise continuously more simple and delightful as we release new versions. This is just the beginning, but we’d love to get your feedback, either here, at our dedicated feedback site http://feedback.splitwise.com, or email us via support@splitwise.com.

The iPhone app started in this release cycle with fewer structural issues than the website – it’s already simpler to use, faster to add bills across friendships, and easier to view everything in one place. But we really wanted to add the visual feedback of category icons to the mobile experience (see image right). We think this makes it more fun! The iPhone app also auto-categorizes expenses now, just like the web version.

As you can see in the screenshot, we also (finally) differentiated payments visually from IOUs and expenses – something we have done since version 1.0 on the web version of Splitwise.

We also made some improvements to the expense details view, which was quite an ugly screen in the previous iPhone version of Splitwise. We’re not sure if we’ll keep the “spotted” wording or not (to explain who owes who), but in general we are trying to improve the tense of the verbs so that it’s clear what has gone one with old expenses. More to come on this in version 3.0.

As always, we welcome and encourage feedback on these visual improvements!

The new ways of viewing “friends/groups” data will first be available on the web version of Splitwise, and is not in this iPhone release – it will take us until version 3.0 to harmonize this approach across iPhone and the website.

What about our poor Android users? As Splitwise’s most loyal Android fan, Jon sympathizes. Android users will have to wait a bit longer for these snazzy interface improvements. Developing for Android is more difficult and more expensive than developing for iPhone, in part because there are so many different devices to test on. Splitwise is still a small team, and we are more experienced in iPhone development.

Marshall has been hard at work releasing rapid bug-fixes to Android – the crash rate is now half the rate it was in August, after much hard work and re-writing. If you are a great Android developer yourself, and are passionate about making Splitwise’s Android app kick butt, please send us an email at resume.black.hole@splitwise.com – we’re hiring!

- Jon and Marshall

Since we added the “Friends” feature back in April, we’ve wanted friendships to combine more seamlessly with “Groups.” We’re sorry to anyone who has been annoyed by this. In this intermediate 2.5 release for web, we’ve made it easy to view everything in one place. The left-hand sidebar lets you switch quickly between all your friends, and the updated dashboard shows the net result of who owes who, including groups/apartments and personal expenses.

When you’re looking at a friend, Splitwise will now show you the personal IOUs and expenses you’ve added, as well as the total for each group that you share. You can click on the group to view the list of group expenses.

When you’re looking at a group, you can see the bills that resulted in that balance. “More details” will show you the whole repayment plan, and allow you to toggle “Simplify Debts” for that group.

You may have noticed the “Make Payment” is now called the “Settle Up” button, to make it more clearly a way to restore balances between group members, not about external payments to 3rd parties.

As a bonus, all of your Splitwise bills are now viewable from a master-view called “All Expenses,” so you never lose track of an expense (which makes it easy to find any multi-person bill).

A cool improvement that is not shown here: each expense now has its own currency (as opposed to being set on the group or friendship level)! So, for instance, if you owe someone both dollars and euros, it will display both balances. We don’t do any currency conversions at the moment- Splitwise will just show you the balances as they were incurred.

We’re excited to keep improving Splitwise after this release. Next, we plan to tackle the sign-up process and archiving old expenses, as well as designing from scratch the “Divide A Bill” and “Add an IOU” dialog boxes.

As a wise man once said, our work is never over.