Around 4am (Arizona), I woke up to the sound of my iphone doing a staccato dance on my night stand. We have been the target of a Joe Job. Essentially, someone (or more likely a spambot) forged their outgoing spam to have our support inbox’s email address as the sender. Due to the nature of email as a protocol, this is actually pretty easy to do, even if it is pretty evil minded.

This means two things. The first, if you sent me an email recently, I haven’t seen it yet. Mail.app (the mail client I use) has had a rough time even staying connected to our mail server. I will try my best to sift through the thousands of out of office and bounce messages but I might accidently overlook yours in the cleaning. The second, this Joe Job makes it look like we sent people spam. We didn’t. We will never ever send you an email that you don’t want. We hate spam, and more importantly we have ethics.

Here at Reilly Tech, we do our very best to help our users; we don’t annoy them with advertisements in our software, we don’t sunset product features, and we sure as hell don’t send spam.

It’s been over a year since the first release of Moneydance 2007, and we’re happy to present the final release of Moneydance 2008. Final, that is, until 2008r2 is ready.

The high-level list of changes over Moneydance 2007 are:

• Improved matching for downloaded transactions
• Zoom-able home page graph for quickly exploring your income and expenses
• Undo/Redo support when modifying transactions
• Over/under budget highlighting in toolbar graph
• Popup calendar for choosing dates
• New Capital Gains report

…among many other bug fixes and interface improvements. For the download, just hit the usual place: moneydance.com.

Of course we’d like to take a break after this release but there are just too many things on which we’re working. Stay tuned for more impressive features in 2008r2 as well as another unrelated application on which we’ve been working secretly for a while. Can you stand the suspense?!

Cheers,
Sean

Another beta version of MD 2008 is now available fresh from the oven: http://moneydance.com/preview/

It is likely that this release will be the version that is made public as MD 2008. There are a number of changes that I had hoped to include but that got pushed off to MD2008r2. The most prominent of those included remembering encrypted online banking passwords and one-click downloading of all accounts.

The changes since build 603 are below…

Many of you already know Moneydance is one of the few applications capable of directly downloading your transactions directly from your bank. Sadly sometimes it’s not easy as it should be. Setting up direct OFX servers is costly for banks, and many opt to forgo that expense. Many instead use what is known as webconnect.

Webconnect is basically a mere lightweight alternative to true direct OFX. Instead of securely connecting to a dedicated OFX server, applications that use webconnect open a built in browser and then load up a secure webpage. And then it downloads a QFX file into some random folder somewhere on your computer and imports that into the software.

Moneydance doesn’t do this obviously. If you want to import a QFX file (or QIF or OFX files for that matter) into Moneydance, we urge to you to go to your Bank’s website and download it from there. Importing is a simple matter of opening the file with Moneydance. You can also import them via the import options in the file menu.

I like direct OFX connections; they’re simple and easy. Once you set up the connection details, all you have to do is hit download and bam! Your transactions are in your register, and you can go back to making mojitos for your loved ones. It really is nearly effortless.

But not all banks offer this service, because like I said, it’s pretty expensive to set up and maintain. But you know what? I think that cost is worth it. People switch banks to get this service. Right now there is a thread in our forums where someone is wondering to which bank she should switch her accounts. She wants direct OFX connections, and she wants them cheap (read: no fees!). I get several emails asking for the same thing everyday.

There used to be banks that offered free online banking, and not any of that watered down browser or webconnect based nonsense. Big banks like LaSalle and Netbank used to provide direct OFX for free. I wonder if there are any left that see the value in providing customers with such a vital service. Customers are clamoring for it.

It’s been about two weeks since the last beta of Moneydance 2008, and we’ve fixed a ton of bugs in that time. This latest update is build 603 and can be downloaded from moneydance.com/preview/. This is the fourth and possibly final release of the beta series and includes the following changes over build 602:

• Relocated extension functions into the main Extensions menu instead of the extension toolbar popup with ambiguous icon
• Fixed error in homepage income/expense graph when there is no data to graph
• Fixed bug (#1523) with display of expanded/collapsed subcategories in the category window
• Added “Show Transaction Details” entry to register popup which will display the XML encoding of the selected transaction in a text window
• Fixed file saving on Windows (the Windows java broke the new save-to-tmp-file-then-rename function)
• Keep mini-calendar lined up with date field when the field changes location
• Display more appropriate day-of-week headers in mini-calendar
• Get rid of annoying window asking for contact information on the first run
• Fixed bug that caused seemingly random default dates to appear in new transaction editors
• Fixed appearance of loan account register on mac
• Fixed calculation of quarterly (tri-monthly) prorated budget items
• Fixed background color of investment account tabs when not on a mac
• Forced transaction editing fields to use the same font as the register
• Made detailed balance HUD panel colors match the calendar popup
• Changed popup calendar to not hide itself if a date is clicked
• Pressing up or down arrows in the transaction status field will now display the status popup
• Transaction status popup now shows the different status icons next to their label
• Fixed account popup so that it doesn’t keep growing every time it is displayed
• Fixed bug that prevented VAT/GST splitting from being applied to transactions since build 601 (when undo support was added)

Apologies for the infrequent blog postings, but this one should be worth the wait. Moneydance 2008 is now into its public beta stage of release which means that we think it might be ready for general use and there’s only a few more small changes to be made before the full release.

The current version beta is build 602 and was uploaded to moneydance last night. This is the third bug-fix release of the beta series and included the following changes over build 601:

• GUI date-picker for all date fields
• Fixed bugs when editing transaction reminders
• Slightly fade the rest of the register when editing a transaction
• Fixed bug that bypassed normal shutdown process when closing the main window
• Switched back to the curly style thermometer graph zoomer and added some lickable enhancements
• Fix ‘growing account popup’ problem for vertical growth, at least
• Added helpful text to register quick-search field when empty

Build 601 included the following changes over 600:

• Fixed bug that prevented creation of new transaction reminders
• Fixed foreground color of main account popup
• Fixed calculation and display (in budget editor) of budget entries for non-categories. Budget entries for regular accounts (investment, bank, cc, loan, asset and liability) no longer apply to sub-accounts.
• Show appropriate increase/decrease labels in reminder transaction editor
• Fixed calculation of investment transaction total amount when there is a fee and the txn type is a SellXfr or a Short
• File saving now writes to a temporary file and then renames the temp file to the main file after writing has successfully completed. No more EOFException when (auto)file saving is interrupted by a crash.
• Fixed cmd-Y/ctrl-Y hotkey to synchronize tax dates and regular dates in transaction entry
• No longer add asterisk to title bar when there is unsaved data if we’re on a mac
• Dimmed transaction register while editing a transaction
• Fixed bug that prevented online transaction ID for downloaded transaction from being attached to local transactions. This is what caused the little ‘i’ to not appear on transactions that were downloaded.
• Txn editor in register now fully closes (cancels) when the register is filtered
• Added java property (”moneydance.checknum_series_threshold”) to allow people to tell MD to look a specified number of days backwards when finding the previous check number.
• Fixed bug that made already-matched transactions appear as default options when they should be low-possibility options.

Build 600 had too many changes to list, so I’ll use the time saved to go work on the documentation.

[update: I guess I should provide the download URL] moneydance.com/preview

Macworld has just published a review of Moneydance 2007. We’re very happy with the review and would like to thank Macworld for taking the time to do it. As one of the commenters to the article mention, Moneydance 2008 will be arriving soon, and it will address the “interface quirks” that were the only downside described in the article.

Please also note that we have never advertised with Macworld and the review was not solicited by us, so rest assured that the article is not biased in our favor in any way. I especially appreciate how the article mentions some of the less obvious features such as how every amount field in Moneydance can interpret math expressions.

Thanks Macworld!

A few minutes ago I updated Moneydance to 2007r5 (build 587) which includes a few minor improvements over 2007r4. The primary changes are:

Version 2007r5 (build 587) includes the following changes:

• Fees are now applied consistently to buy, sell, short, cover, buy+transfer and sell+transfer transactions
• Fixed register alignment issues on Mac OS X leopard and earlier releases
• Fixed low level error that prevented Moneydance from running on Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier

Many on the mailing list requested the first change on the mailing list and I’m glad to finally make this change public.

Please let us know if you have any issues with the update!

Last year, Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba ran a promotion called MacSanta in which each day a different piece of Mac software was provided at a significant discount. I’m pleased to announce that the promotion is happening again this year and that Moneydance will be taking part.

Moneydance was randomly chosen to appear on the first day of the promotion: December 1st. Depending upon your time zone and when you read this, right now may be the best time to get a 20% discount on Moneydance purchases. So hurry over to MacSanta to claim your seasonally discounted copy of the very best in personal finance software! After you’re done be sure to check back each day throughout December; several of my favorite developers have signed up for this promotion. You won’t want to miss any of them.

(note: In case it isn’t obvious on the MacSanta web site, just use discount code MACSANTA07 when you purchase Moneydance.)

As of last Friday, release 4 of Moneydance 2007 is available to anyone who clicks the “check for updates” link on Moneydance’s main screen. This update includes a few very important bug fixes as well as support for Apple’s upcoming release of Mac OS X, Leopard.

We here at Moneydance HQ are eagerly awaiting getting our hands on the new Mac OS release and can guarantee that any unforeseen problems with upgrading to Leopard will be swiftly remedied.

I’ve also heard good things about Moneydance running on the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon.”