Tech

Well, since I had quite a few requests for it, I went ahead and implemented a recurring system. It's not 100% perfect, but it's pretty close and it gets the job done.

How does it work?

• You can manually press the postpone button, but its main use is to display which events are recurring, not to be tapped, thus it was on purpose made hard (but not that hard) to tap, to avoid accidental taps on it when selecting an expense.
• The app can do it automatically for you: when you are notified about an upcoming expense, all you have to do is open the app and the expense will be postponed automatically if needed.

Wouldn't I have went free with IAP, my sales would have probably stayed at $1.99 every other day, far from a decent income. And there was no real middle ground either, since Apple does not give us, developers, a way to offer discount or upgrade pricing.

Also, please understand, a developer can't afford to invest time adding more and more features indefinitely, for free. When you, the user, make a purchase, you pay for the app ==in that state== (and future bug fixes), not for the app ==and whatever it will become, until the end of time==.

Yay! A lot of changes on top of the UI facelift, like iCloud sync, export to plain or CSV, Passcode lock and many other minor improvements.

Grab them from the App Store now: Carminder and Expenses Planner.

Update, 29 May 2014: Check the 3.0.0 version here.

I haven't found any proper Passcode classes for iOS 7, so I gave my best at creating one: a simple to use, iOS 7 style (replica, if you will) Passcode view controller (not the Lock Screen one, but the one you get when changing your passcode in Settings). Can be used for iOS 6 too, albeit it might need a few modifications, haven't tested it.

I made it a singleton because if the lock is active, when leaving the app a view must be placed on top, so no data from within the app can be seen in the multitasking mode. This is done under the hood, without having to do anything extra.

Just revised Carminder and Expenses Planner landing pages to reflect the updated, iOS 7 versions. Waiting For Review is going to feel like an eternity.

One of the biggest reasons I was pondering to redirect my search to Google's site:rolandleth.com was their bolding of the searched terms. But here's my take on this, keeping the search local:

Well, it's done. Thanks to the desire to publish when mobile, I had to implement some sort of Dropbox sync, which forced me to implement a database for a better user experience than handling files directly, which, lastly, gave me the opportunity to implement search: a feature that was ==a lot== easier to implement than I've expected: 30 lines of code.

The search form:

<form class="search" action="/search" method="get">
  <input type="text" class="search" name="query" size="15" maxlength="20" placeholder="Search..."/>
</form>

Sinatra's route block:

Ok, so I went ahead and added a database and implemented some sort of sync between said database and my Dropbox folder. It's not perfect, but it works for me.

I created a Posts model and configured the DataMapper:

I tried several text editors for the iPad so far and none really nailed it. Until now. After reading Viticci's review of Editorial, even knowing I won't make much use of it, I still went ahead and bought it. The fact that I had my iMac in service for a few days might have been a huge reason I was enjoying this, but I was enjoying it so much, that I actually went ahead and imported several workflows and created a few of my own and drafted a couple of blog posts for when I had my i

Implementing this, per se, is no problem. But, kind of the same as recurring events, there's no proper way of handling this feature and I'll give a small example below.

Say you have expenses laid out for the next 6 months: how should you enter the income? Manually calculating 6*monthly income? Or just for the next month? If the latter, subtracting all expenses from that doesn't make much sense, and the former isn't too reliable, since your income might vary from month to month. What about adding a new expense that's due in 8 months, but you entered the income for 6? Go and manually update the total? What if you forget? Etc...