September 2013 – The Splitwise Blog

Android Tokenized Auto-Complete, a New Splitwise Open-Source Project

gmail autocomplete in Android 4 — This is what we’re going for.

For the past few months, Splitwise has been hard at work making much-needed improvements to our Android app. We released a faster, less buggy build in late August, and since then we’ve devoted nearly all our developer resources to a pristine 3.0 candidate that we can’t wait to get into your hands.

To achieve Android awesomeness for 3.0, we needed to build a Gmail-style autocomplete field for selecting friends when creating expenses. I was expecting to find this fairly easy to do with the Android SDK. Lots of apps must need this need, and I was aware of the AutoCompleteTextView and MultiAutoCompleteTextView classes. How hard could it be?

The short answer: Pretty darn hard! Hopefully, not anymore. We’ve just released an open-source version of the code on GitHub! Go grab the Splitwise TokenAutoComplete project to have your own wonderful, tokenized autocomplete view up and running in about half an hour. It works on Android versions all the way back to 2.2 (Froyo). More on my process below the fold. Continue reading Android Tokenized Auto-Complete, a New Splitwise Open-Source Project

Splitwise in TIME’s 50 Best iPhone Apps

This morning, we were delighted to discover that TIME has included our app in The 50 Best iPhone Apps, 2013 edition. We’ve spent a lot of time polishing our iPhone app to make it as delightful as possible, and it’s wonderful to get this kind of recognition. Sometimes, it’s hard to see the wonderful parts of the app we’ve made; we are mostly focused on all the flaws we want to fix.

We also know our Android app is simply not this good yet. If you’re one of our Android users, you know we’ve only recently started making updates to the app again and they’ve seemed pretty small.

The secret is that I’ve been laying the groundwork in those updates to get the Android app up to the level of quality you see in the rest of our software. Right now, most of the engineering team is in the middle of a major redesign of our Android app that I can’t wait to get in your hands.

The 2010 US Census Population By Zip Code (Totally Free)

US Population By Zipcode / ZCTA — Population by ZIP code / ZCTA from US Census 2010. Why was this so freaking hard to find?

I’m going to kick off a multi-part series on US Census data by offering a totally free download, in XLS or CSV format, of something strangely hard-to-Google: the 2010 US Census population by Zip code (technically, by ZCTA). Splitwise is offering these files free of charge and in the public domain, and I can’t believe how many other sites are charging for them!

But the difficulty I had in creating this data set and using the US Census website has inspired me to write a bit more about how to use one of the world’s most interesting open data sources.

Continue reading The 2010 US Census Population By Zip Code (Totally Free)

Introducing Settle Up With Splitwise And Venmo

We’re excited to announce a payments integration you’ve been clamoring for: Splitwise and Venmo. As of today, iPhone users in the US will be able to directly settle up Splitwise debts using Venmo, as well as cash or PayPal.

Our goal has always been to include great, diverse payment options within Splitwise. Venmo was popularly requested in our user-fueled suggestion forums, and the folks at Venmo have provided a great new API and iPhone SDK to open their platform to us; it only seemed natural to use these developments as impetus to execute the often-requested integration.

Using Venmo within the Splitwise app works the same way as using Paypal. When you hit ‘Settle Up’, Venmo will be an option, joining the ‘Record a cash payment’ and ‘Pay with PayPal’ buttons.

Continue reading Introducing Settle Up With Splitwise And Venmo