The Splitwise Blog

Free US Population Density And Unemployment Rate By Zip Code

US Census Population Density By Zip Code — Take a peek: the population, land area, and population density of every zip-code / ZCTA in the USA.

2010 US Population Density, By Zip Code, in XLS and CSV
2007-2011 US Unemployment Rate By Zip Code, also in XLS or CSV

Unemployment and population density are probably two of the most important local statistics you might hear quoted about a city or town. Our US Population by Zip Code post from September has gotten rather popular, and a polite commenter requested population density and unemployment rate. So here they are, totally free and in the public domain, in two different formats (see above).

How did I get this data? Two different Census APIs (the Decennial Census 2010 and the ACS 5-year 2007-2011), combined with the square-footage by ZCTA listings from the 2013 U.S. Gazetteer Files.

I was planning to use this post to document my methods and send everyone on their own journey through the data, but it got too long and I realized that I wanted to talk a more systematic approach. In a follow up post, I will explain how to pull Census data yourself for different variables at different geographical resolution. But if you need a jump start now, my first and most helpful guide was the National Civic Day Of Hacking support slides.

Introducing Expense Comments on the Web

Splitwise wants to totally take the stress out of sharing expenses and creating IOUs with friends. A huge part of that is facilitating communication around who owes who, and for what. We’re always looking for new ways to help you and your friends get (and stay!) on the same page.

That’s why we’re so excited to announce the release of expense comments for the web. This new feature will let group members and friends have conversations within the web app around individual expenses. We plan to bring expense comments to our iPhone and Android apps in the New Year, so you can sort stuff out on-the-go, too.

To add a comment to an expense, click on the expense name in any expense list. In the expanded view you’ll now see a ‘Notes and Comments’ box with a ‘Post’ button beneath. Simply add your questions and thoughts to the box, hit ‘Post’, and await your buddy’s response! We’ve added an email notification setting for this feature; you can choose to get an email every time someone adds a comment to an expense you’re on, or you can opt-out. The default setting has you opted-out. Head to your account settings page (‘Your Account’) to toggle.

We’ve been wanting to build out a commenting feature for quite some time, and our support requests indicated lots of users wanted it, too. We hope to make it even more rich moving forward, while preserving the simplicity Splitwise is known for. We’d love to eventually introduce a full-blown messaging feature, so you can send messages in Splitwise not attached to any expense.

As always, we’re thrilled to be steadily improving Splitwise, and so grateful that you’re here for the journey. Happy holidays!

Buxfer users, come join us!

If you want to switch from Buxfer to Splitwise, we’ve released an importer using their API.

In August 2012 we built an importer for Billmonk data as that service started to have problems. It helped a lot of their users seamlessly switch their expense histories and balances over to Splitwise, sparing them hours of re-entry and even worse, the horror of losing it all. We loved helping die-hard sharers find a new home, and it was a blast getting to know the Billmonk-turned-Splitwise community through the whopping 79 comments they left on our importer blog post.

We’re happy to now release an importer for Buxfer data, which we’ve developed in response to some observations about the service: The founding team appears to have moved on to Facebook, and there have been rather lengthy outages over the last year or so, with very spotty support throughout. It doesn’t seem that the site is going to close down anytime soon, but we wanted to give Buxfer users an easy way to turn over a new leaf if they felt so inclined.

If you’re a current Buxfer user and would like to get started with Splitwise, go import your Buxfer data! Or, keeping reading about the tool and co-founder Marshall’s development process below. Continue reading Buxfer users, come join us!

Splitwise for Android v3: New Design, New Love

Splitwise Android v3 Home Screen — The new home screen! The top row lets you filter by either debts, credits, or all friends.

The whole Splitwise team is proud and thrilled to announce the release of the most wonderful Android app we’ve ever designed – Splitwise Android v3. It’s a whole new look and the result of many months of toil by Marshall, with help in the last couple months from Ryan and Caleb. Testing was carried out by the whole team as well as volunteer testers from our user base, to whom we are very grateful.

To my thumbs and eyes, our Android app has gone from a source of embarrassment to one of the most polished productivity apps in the Play Store. Some highlights from the new build:

Unified logo and color scheme and a look that embodies the Android style
Pay friends via PayPal (for US users only)
Simplified and streamlined “Add Bill” dialog
Push notifications for new expenses and edits
Sidebar menu to easily find balances with groups or people
New friend view, including both group balances and private IOUs

Continue reading Splitwise for Android v3: New Design, New Love

Improvements to Delete Friend Functionality

Late last week, Ryan made a much-needed improvement to Splitwise’s delete friend functionality. Now, you can delete any friend as long as they’re not in a group with you.

Previously, Splitwise blocked you from deleting friends if you had ever added an expense outside of a group with them AND another friend. This was happening because deleting friends deleted all expense records between you two, and Splitwise wanted to block multi-party records from being deleted in case one of the parties on the expense wasn’t all settled up yet. Ryan built a work-around that will enable you to delete the friends you want, without obliterating a piece of someone else’s balance puzzle.

Google trying to patent bill splitting while lobbying Splitwise for patent reform

Google bill splitting patent authors using Splitwise — The Google patent authors hypothetically using Splitwise

Last week, we learned from GeekWire that Google has applied for a patent on our bread and butter technology: tracking groups of bills split with friends. The patent application describes a system of shared balances and payments between friends in a group – exactly what Splitwise and some of our competitors have been doing publicly for years. Google currently has no group-splitting product, and one can only assume they are considering adding a splitting service to Google Wallet. (Google, if you want to integrate Splitwise with Wallet, reach out to us).

A thorough search for prior art — The equally ironic prior art search

Obviously, it’s “not a joke” to have a tech giant submit a patent application for exactly what your business has been doing for years. But we couldn’t help but laugh when, within the same week, a lobbyist paid by Google approached us to ask if we would publicly support a patent reform bill. We are literally being lobbied for patent reform and patent-trolled by Google at the same time. Continue reading Google trying to patent bill splitting while lobbying Splitwise for patent reform

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