Welcome, BillMonk Refugees! (In Which We Import BillMonk Data)

Welcome BillMonk refugees!

[Edit: As of Friday, September 14th we now have our Simplified Debt feature live, which is known on BillMonk as debt shuffle. Information on Simplified Debt can be found here. We updated the importer Tuesday, August 21 to handle debt shuffles and multiple payers. If you imported before this, go through the import again and it will pick up the debt shuffles correctly and won’t import duplicates. ]

Like many of you out there, I’ve been waiting for BillMonk to load.

Why am I waiting? I’ve been testing our new importer for BillMonk data.

In the last week, BillMonk has sadly gone from slow to unbearable. While this is painful for their users, we hope we can provide a fairly painless process to move from BillMonk to Splitwise.

For those of you eager to try it out, go export from BillMonk and import to Splitwise. Otherwise, let me tell you a little more about the benefits and limitations of our importer. Continue reading Welcome, BillMonk Refugees! (In Which We Import BillMonk Data)

Take (time) off with TestFlight

If you’re like me, you probably have this interaction at least once a month:

It’s 11:30 pm. You’re unwinding after a grueling day of coding. Cue cell phone.

CEO: I just met [VC/Angel Investor] and I need to show them our app. Is the latest code up on TestFlight?

Me: No, it’s two weeks old. Do you need this right now?

CEO: Yes! I talked to this investor a few weeks ago and need to show some progress.

Me: Ugh. Ok, let me pull out my laptop and update the build.

…ten minutes of fumbling…

CEO: Can we just keep this more up to date? [VC/Angel investor] had to move on.

Me: Sure, whatever, it’s up to date now. Can I go to bed?

I got sick of these phone calls, so I decided to see if I could find some solution to change the conversation. TestFlight has an API and with a little elbow grease, you can get this whole process down to one step.

Continue reading Take (time) off with TestFlight

The New Monthly Summary And Google Charts

An example of the new monthly summary graphics in action.

If you are a Splitwise user, you might have noticed this month that we added pie charts to our monthly summary emails. Ryan and I figured out how to do this the night before the emails went out – we were surprised how easy it was to do with the Google Charts API. Technical gibberish after the jump.
Continue reading The New Monthly Summary And Google Charts

Fixing Non-English Names inside Splitwise

Hi non-English Splitwise users,

We’ve noticed that our database upgrade caused some people’s names (users with non-English letters in their name) to be encoded weirdly.

There’s an easy fix: just correctly re-type your name in the “My Account” settings at the top right of the screen. Sorry about this, and thanks for your patience. Walk-through after the jump. Continue reading Fixing Non-English Names inside Splitwise

Making Splitwise Faster

(Updated 3AM) Splitwise just went through some “impromptu scheduled downtime” to make improvements to our server, and Splitwise is now way faster. We still are gathering data, but it seems to be about a factor of two more snappy. We apologize only giving a few minutes advance warning, but it’s so much snappier and it finished right on time! You’ll love it.

Thanks so much for bearing with our growing pains, and sorry to any users affected in the last hour or two. Technical details after the jump. Continue reading Making Splitwise Faster

Developing Multi-Currency Support for iOS

Managing currencies in any language is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve been down this dark path, I’m sure you are familiar with the dearth of good recommendations for how to deal with this. Given our focus on group travel, managing different currencies is part of our nuts and bolts.

What follows is an iOS development blow-by-blow for multi-currency support. If you are a fellow developer, please enjoy! To celebrate our second geeky technical article, we’re kicking-off a new article category, “Dev Blog.” Continue reading Developing Multi-Currency Support for iOS