News

Beta testing is finally over and we now have a version 1.0 that can be downloaded from the Download sub-page under the Products section (replacing the beta sub-page, and the old top-level Downloads section is now the web store). It will initially run in trial mode (save is disabled) until fully activated with a serial number after purchase. Unlike the beta, there is no expiration date even in trial mode. You can take as long as you want to evaluate it, you just won’t be able to save until you purchase it, which will only set you back $19.95. And that would of course also eliminate the nag popup at each startup.I really appreciate all who helped beta test FolioCalc! And for the handful of those who actually contacted support with your discovered bugs or good ideas for new features, you should have already received a coupon in you e-mail for a free copy. Also, thank you for your patience!

This release adds a relatively seamless software update capability. When the user selects “Check for Update…” under the FolioCalc menu, a check will be performed via the internet for the most recent version that is newer than the running version, if any. If there is a newer version, the latest release notes will be displayed and the user will be given the option to download and install the update. Once it is installed, the user will be given the option to terminate and relaunch with the newly installed version.Also, in preferences, the user can choose whether or not FolioCalc will automatically check for updates whenever the application starts up. This is initially turned on, and is recommended to keep up with the latest features and bug-fixes.For the curious, most of this functionality is provided by an open-source Framework called Sparkle, and required relatively little code to implement in FolioCalc.

This release includes some enhancements to QIF import and text input error checking and some bug fixes. Here is the change log for 0.9.10 (copied from the Readme file):

• Enhanced QIF import for savings accounts to automatically create a new savings investment if no one currently exists with that name.
• The “Done” button on new transaction and preferences panels will now be grayed out if any fields are not filled in.
• Fixed a bug where the trailer row was not being refreshed when a table column was moved.
• Fixed a bug where URL redirect requests for stock data were not being handled correctly.

Until this release, apparently FolioCalc was not working with “real” QIF files exported from Quicken. The QIF import logic was previously coded and tested with files that conformed to the published QIF standard. Well it turns out that the format of actual Quicken QIF files are quite different than what is published on even their own website! So now FolioCalc can successfully import the broker and bank transaction data from them and it has been tested with actual files exported from Quicken.

CSV files downloaded from Scottrade can now be imported. RhodoSoft now has broker accounts set up with Scottrade and E-Trade to be used for testing along with the Ameritrade and Fidelity accounts it has had for a while now. It turns out that E-Trade does not support either CSV or QIF but only QFX. FolioCalc will probably have support for QFX at some point but probably not until after the 1.0 version. So until then, E-Trade users can either use Quicken and export as QIF into FolioCalc or enter their transactions into FolioCalc manually.

Also QIF and CSV files in various non-ASCII text encodings can now be imported successfully.

Starting with this release, the symbols and formats for the display of currencies and percentages now reflect what the user has selected under the international settings panel in system preferences. A side effect of this is that negative currency amounts now show up with parenthesis instead of a negative sign (for the US at least). This more closely follows the convention for financial tables in the US. Note that no actual currency conversions are done, just the symbols are switched. Dates and times also follow the international settings by the way, but this behavior has been in effect for several releases now.

A few changes were also made to improve the compactness of the column data. For example, currency values over a trillion and percentages over a million now display in scientific notation. This allows huge values to be more easily viewed and without requiring the column to be resized really wide to see them. Although most people could only dream of seeing currency values this huge (but perhaps in the case of some small valued currencies), percentages can get pretty big in the case of annualized return when the investment has not been held very long. Another improvement to the compactness of percentages is now the decimal point and digits after are not shown for whole numbers.

The stock ticker column in the stock view can now be edited. This may come in handy when a stock ticker changes for a particular company. Changing it once in the stock view will automatically update all the transactions and investment records that refer to that stock record to reflect the new ticker. You may still want to manually update the arbitrary label field for any investments that refer to the old stock ticker after a ticker change (unless you change your labels to refer to the company name or something else), or you could just ignore the investment label altogether since it’s just arbitrary text. Note that the stock ticker may be changed to a ticker that is already in use in the document (already shows up in another row in the stock table). In this case, the existing stock record will be deleted after moving all the investments referring to it to the newly edited stock record. This is to insure there is only one stock record per ticker.

We are getting close to a release candidate for FolioCalc. There are a few import file formats that still need to be tested, but thats about it. New feature ideas will probably not go into the 1.0 but may show up in 1.X releases as free upgrades if they are not too major. Then at a later date there may be a 2.0 which would include major new features and require a paid upgrade.