OrangeSoftware.RuSoftware for Android

New release 1.5.4 available in Android Market. A couple of new options available in the Preferences:

Daily automatic backup

It is disabled by default – you would need to turn it on. And set the backup time.

 Backup Folder

Can now be configured to point to any other directory on SD card. This can be useful to have an automatic backup to Dropbox or any other cloud service which supports syncing files from a specific folder.

Send Backup To..

Can be used to send the backup file to any other app supported by the standard Android intent. For instance, both Dropbox and Google Docs official apps support it. You can also use it so send the file attached by email. Please note that the file is not encrypted, so please don’t put it on any public place.

There are also a few UI improvements including quick action menus in the Accounts and Blotter screens. If you don’t like them you can turn them off in the Preferences.

A note to developers who make integrations with Financisto – the backup file is now gzipped by default. You would have to support both old and new formats.

I’m happy to announce Financisto 1.5.3 update. The main functionality:

The long expected QIF and CSV import

QIF is a cumbersome format but it’s very popular in personal finance software and supporting it was vital for Financisto users (second popular request on our Uservoice). QIF import is still experimental and only supports full import – meaning that all current data will be erased the same way as in Database Restore. Supporting partial import is my next todo item.

CSV import is experimental as well Here are the current limitations: only partial import supported into single account, all entities should already be present in the database (categories, project, locations). We’ll work on fixing these limitations in the future releases. It is important to have correct file format for CSV import – it should be in UTF-8 and has the header line like in this example.

To select QIF or CSV file for import you would need a file explorer installed on your phone. OI File manager is a decent open-source app you can use.

Auto-fill category when selecting a payee

Category is now associated with Payee field. When you select a payee, the Category field will be auto-completed with the last used category for this payee.

Fixed the bug with case-sensitive payee search

It was a problem for non-English languages that the search for payee was case-sensitive. There are still some limitations, but at least it will ignore the first letter, so search for “пар” will return both “парковка” и “Парковка”.

Split transactions have been introduced in Financisto 1.5.0. In a split transaction you can divide up the transaction amount into multiple categories or transfer a part of it into a separate account.

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Unfortunately had to remove Missed Reminder from the Market, sorry. This app was created quite some time ago for G1 running 1.5 and has not been updated since to work with any recent Android version. The fact that it was working just fine for some people is a lucky coincidence :) With so many devices and Android versions (“oh noes, not teh fragmentation sh*t again!”) it was not realistic to keep it stable and working for everyone. And I’ve got too many complains after the latest gmail update which broke gmail notifications again.

A couple of alternatives:

1. Missed Reminder is an open-source project - you can grab the sources, make it work and release under your own name.
2. Give Missed Call a try. It was created ever before Missed Reminder and the developers have put a lot of efforts to keep it up to date.

Just released a total remake for Financisto Donation app.  Added some social features like connection with Twitter and Facebook. And put more ways to engage with the project.

Kudos to GreenDroid library which allowed me to make this UI transformation very fast and easy.

New version 1.4.9 of Financisto has been released.

• Proper currency list. I’ve seen quite a few comments on the Market like “WTF, where is my currency?”. This should solve this annoyance – user will now be able to pick up any from the list of 198 predefined currencies.
• Automatic lock. There was a security concern – if you leave Financisto using Back button and then come back, then it did not ask you for the PIN again. Lock option adds a timeout after which the application will lock itself and ask for the PIN. Have to mark it as “experimental” because current implementation might be little rough on the edges.
• Two options added to the QIF export – amount format and date format. This should solve issues like a space in the amount or incorrect day and month in the date.
• Launcher icons for “New transaction” and “New transfer” have been improved for hi-res.

Enjoy! Next big step is getting Splits ready for 1.5.0 release.

I’m happy to announce that the problem with Google Docs Backup was fixed and it should work again from now on. But there are a couple of changes I had to do to make it happen: 1) you won’t be able to restore data from old backup files 2) you won’t be able to edit the backup files directly on Google Docs. But there are good things too The backup files now much much smaller and should be uploaded faster.

Some technical details on that. The old backup mechanism was uploading backup file in text format to Google Docs and eventually there is 512kb limit for such kind of files – that’s why the backup stopped working after some time when the database became big enough to generate backup bigger that the limit.  And until recently is was not allowed to upload any arbitrary files to Google Docs for standard accounts (it was only enabled for premium accounts). In May Google announced that they’re enabling this feature for all accounts, but developers have to use different API for that. To facilitate backups on Google Docs we’re using non-official android-gdocs-api and this feature was not implemented in the library. So it took some time to investigate how it should work and make the patch for the library. As the format was going to be incompatible with old backup files anyway, it was only logical to make them smaller as well. So now they get gzipped before uploading to Google Docs, which makes the backup file much smaller.

So after updating to 1.4.8 please do a fresh backup on Google Docs. There might be some glitches from time to time, just repeat the attempt and it should work.

Thanks for being patient and supportive on that issue.

I’d like to share some statistics for Financisto. As of today Android platform versions are distributed like this:

About 2.5k people are still using Android 1.5 (out of ~48k total installs) which is about 5.2%. Keeping backward compatibility with this version of Android is not really convenient but was a necessary choice. However I plan to gradually stop supporting 1.x devices in the next couple of releases. It should help to move Financisto forward. Please let me know if you have any serious concerns about that.

If you like Financisto please consider making a donation to support our work and time invested in creating this great app. Thank you!

market://search?q=pname:ru.orangesoftware.financisto.support

As Roman Nurik mentioned in Android Developer Blog it’s very important to listen to users. I noticed that development of Financisto is a bit chaotic and we tend to implement features without knowing how useful are they for our users. To address this situation I’ve created a community feedback forum on UserVoice: https://financisto.uservoice.com. Hope it will help to get some feature prioritization for Financisto users.