Category: Feature updates

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

Coming Soon: New iPhone App

5 months ago, we released our initial mobile apps for iPhone and Android. We’ve had great success with the apps and it’s long past time we updated them! I joined the team a month ago and started working on a new app for the iPhone – which is now waiting on approval from Apple and should be available some time next week.

Continue reading Coming Soon: New iPhone App

Splitwise’s Updated Quick-Add Feature

Now live on Splitwise (and within your Splitwise iPhone or Android app) is a big update to our favorite little Splitwise feature: Quick-Add. This feature makes it really easy to add in new shared expenses, payments, loans, and IOUs!

Now with English verbs!

Continue reading Splitwise’s Updated Quick-Add Feature

Giving Helpful Feedback To Awesome Developers

How do you give useful feedback to a coworker who is solving a technical problem outside of your area of expertise? This issue surfaces in all kinds of highly skilled work, from design to engineering to finance to basic science. It’s also highly relevant for technical and non-technical founders of a software start-up. Continue reading Giving Helpful Feedback To Awesome Developers

Welcome, Marshall

Splitwise is very excited to welcome Marshall Weir to our team in Cambridge, MA. Marshall is a mobile development ninja and server/UX dude, with previous experience building and engineering beautiful things at Mobiata. We met him through some singing friends and he’s not a bad singer himself.

Marshall is sitting next to me, right now, programming a first pass at a rewrite of our the mobile user interface. Our mobile apps could definitely use some more attention since launch, so he couldn’t have joined at a better time. But more importantly to us, Marshall is a UX-thinker, back-end hacker, bill-sharing enthusiast, and lover of good mobile products who is fun to hang out with.

It’s hard to overstate our enthusiasm for having Marshall on board. For instance, Ryan is very happy to have a teammate who understands how to write a proper SQL query. And Jon is excited to have another person he can ask about how to write a proper SQL query.

With luck, it will be only a few months (or perhaps weeks) before the delicious aroma of our fresh-baked mobile apps reaches your nostrils and/or thumbs.

Preview: ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Here at Splitwise, we get a lot of emails from users who love our website (thanks!), but we also get some very good questions and suggestions – especially from new users. “How can I see my share of an expense? Why can’t I backdate a payment? What if my group has a dozen people in it? Can I add an avatar?”

We’ve thought long and hard about these problems, and now we’re hard at work addressing them. You may have already noticed some updates – for instance, we’ve added Facebook Connect and Gravatar support on the “My Account” page – but there are more exciting changes to come. Here’s a sneak peek:

Continue reading Preview: ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Splitwise Supports International Currencies

Hello, world! At long last, Splitwise supports non-$ currencies from within our interface. We support €, £, ¥, and even the ₹ symbol for INR. This can be set on a per “apartment” basis, so that if you use Splitwise for travel, you can set your trips to use a different currency.

If you would like to help us translate Splitwise into your local language, or if we don’t yet support your country/currency, please email us at contact@splitwise.com. We really want to support everyone, everywhere, but we need your help to do it, because hiring translators is expensive, and this is a free service after all.  Continue reading Splitwise Supports International Currencies

See all debts at once

Ryan pushed out a mini-update this week for people who manage large apartments and big group trips. The feature lets you see who everyone owes, not just for yourself.

We noticed that if not everyone in your apartment was a registered user, it was hard to tell the big picture of who-owes who.  This is helpful if you manage finances for your apartment, and send out an email each month to settle up all the debts. Or if you go on a big trip and don’t want to bother registering every last person’s email.

This feature doesn’t look very pretty yet, but we felt it was important to have it, and we will be improving it over the next month or two.

I’ve been hearing a lot via email about international currencies recently, which is awesome. They’re coming right up! It’s our top priority once we get mobile apps out the door. Let us know if you want to make sure your currency is included.

For what it’s worth, I will probably be switching my blogging schedule to Monday and Wednesday from now on. With the exception being a post tomorrow.  Till then!

The artist formerly known as SplitTheRent.com

Ryan and I have been hard at work the last few months building this project, formerly known as SplitTheRent.com. We’ve redesigned and updated our bill-sharing platform, added recurring payments, percentage splits, multi-user expenses, and an expense tagging and tracking system. We added a furniture calculator, and adapted the site for Australia and New Zealand. We are finishing up mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

We’ve hoped to write on our blog more often, so with the start of the fall semester, we’re turning over a new leaf. For the next few months, we will be releasing new blog posts on Tuesday and Thursday of each week (at roughly 10am, starting this week). We have exciting data and some fun sharing questions we want to write about!

One issue we’ve run into is that people confuse the rent-splitting calculator and the main bill-sharing app. So we’ve changed our name to Splitwise.com, which refers to both the app and to this blog. From now on, we will use “SplitTheRent” just to refer to the rent-splitting calculator.  Our new name should make it easier to distinguish between our projects, and to explain our project to friends and new users. (This new blog is also now being run on WordPress.)

Thank you again, beta-testers, for all your wonderful feedback and sharing the site with others.  You rock our socks.  Please share with your friends, and let us know if you have thoughts or questions by emailing contact@splitwise.com, or via twitter or commenting on this blog.