News

A column was added for last price quote timestamp to the stock table. Now you can see how stale a price quote is (not including the standard 20 minute delay).

Also switched to a faster and more secure binary data file format instead of XML. What I mean by “more secure” is that now no one can read or edit your data files with a text editor. But it also means the data files can no longer be manually “tweaked” in order to migrate them to the latest version after a data model change. Beta testers will just have to re-enter or import the data whenever the data model version changes until automated data migration gets implemented (see next paragraph). By the way, switching to binary data files from XML was a trivial change in Xcode that didn’t even require actual code changes thanks to CoreData!

Also added data file versioning. FolioCalc will now check the data file version before opening it to check whether it is up to date. Later if the data model changes I will bump the data version and maybe put some code in FolioCalc to migrate to the new version if it’s not too difficult. If data migration proves to difficult then I may have to put it off until the next major release and beta testers would have to re-enter or import all their data in to create the latest files. If they just have to import than this is not that big of a deal. Hopefully I won’t have to change the data model for a while.

Also made closed date show a grayed out n/a for open investments. Also fixed the annual return calculation for savings and stock investments. And I fixed saving of last quoted price to preferences between runs. So now if your internet is down or you just turned off data updating within FolioCalc for a while, you will still get the last good stock price quote whenever you bring up FolioCalc again and until you get data flowing again (as long as you don’t delete your preference file).

So now the beta is about ready to be unleashed to the world via the Apple downloads page. So that means pretty soon I may get a bunch of new beta testers sending me bugs and feature requests and somebody may actually be reading these news updates!

The most noticeable improvement is probably the shiny new piggybank and toolbar icons custom designed by Iconfactory. Also added transfers using cash or savings accounts when adding stock transactions. Also “under the hood” the code for the data updating and the equation dependancy hierarchy is much more robust now and some related bugs were fixed in the process.

I keep changing the website colors but I think I have settled on something that looks somewhat decent now. Also added significantly more info about FolioCalc including features and screenshots. Got the new piggybank icon up on the website now too. I think it’s finally starting to come together now!