Prospects in 2010

January 1, 2010 – 7:18 pm
This is long overdue ... During the past few months, Prospects development essentially came to a halt while I determined how to best proceed with the product.   I did not see the increase in sales I was hoping for with the release of version 1.2, but I continued to develop updates that I hoped would start to drive some sales.   As I worked on 1.3, sales continued to decline and the marketplace began to shift with some interesting changes in the online personal finance space and personal finance applications in general. I did not handle the situation well.   I neglected to answer the majority of support emails and did not respond to postings on the support forums.  This was a large, inexcusable error on my part.   I am sincerely sorry for the lack of support and communication. After much thought and planning, I have decided to proceed with ...

Posted in MotiMotion, Prospects | 5 Comments »

Now on Twitter!

March 14, 2009 – 1:52 pm
MotiMotion is now on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/motimotion (the link is also available above at the top of the blog) I plan on using this as a means to communicate at a lower level what I'm working on for upcoming releases. If you are interested in participating in the development of Prospects, this is going to be a way for you to do so! I will be posing questions and thoughts regularly on specific features I am working on as I work on them. You can respond via twitter to provide your input. I will be monitoring feedback throughout development and hope this can help me make the features as useful as possible from the start. I hope anyone who wants their voice to be heard checks this out! There may be a few bumps in the road as this gets going, but I hope it turns into a great way for people to ...

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Pre-release of 1.2.4 available

March 11, 2009 – 7:53 pm
I have posted a pre-release of version 1.2.4.  It does not include all the fixes I am working on, but there are a few key issues it addresses: Fixes rare issue where balance would sometimes not be saved properly Fixes Budget Advisor so YTD and Average YTD amounts now roll-up sub-categories Improved import duplicate matching Fixed issue where report content would overlap report options Scheduled transactions now record notes when being posted Fixed issue where transfer account would be incorrect when editing a scheduled transaction Fixed bug that caused save problems when deleting categories Recent Transactions ViewPoint no longer shows "new" transaction in list One other key item is that this version has additional debug information in it.  If you experience a crash, please submit the crash report to MotiMotion when the window pops up following the crash and enter a few details about what you were doing when it occurred.  It will help me resolve some of the ...

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It’s Wednesday.

March 3, 2009 – 9:00 pm
Actually - it's only Tuesday.  That pretty much sums up how busy I am these days!  I have a list of bugs I'm working on for Prospects 1.2.4, which I am hoping to release within the next 10 days or so.  If you experience a crash, the best thing you can do is to submit the crash report when the window pops up - but even more importantly, fill out a brief summary of what you were doing at the time.  Without that extra information, it is very difficult to determine what is causing a crash. In the meantime, I am also working on Prospects 1.3.  I've reworked the category panel so you can now edit everything directly in the panel - including the color.  It is much faster and you can do a better job of assigning colors.  You can now also double-click QIF, OFX/QFX files to open them directly ...

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PayPal Now Accepted!

February 24, 2009 – 7:56 pm
I've received numerous requests over the course of the past year to accept PayPal.  Well, it's finally here!  You can now use PayPal, in addition to the major credit cards, to purchase Prospects.  If you experience any problems while trying to make a purchase, please email support! After some additional consideration, I've also decided to enable comments again in the blog since the blog discusses things that are not discussed in the forums or other areas of the site. Mike

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Back on the trail…

February 17, 2009 – 10:22 pm
I had to take a detour from version 1.3 for a few days and work on Prospects 1.2.3.  I was receiving some crash reports that appeared to be quite random (i.e., I could not reproduce them for the life of me!), but then I started to see a pattern...  Eventually a user mentioned just the right piece of information that that led me to the root of the problem and I was able to resolve quite a few crashes and bugs that all stemmed from one major issue. I am really hopeful that I've been able to track down the majority of the outstanding bugs in 1.2.x and fix them in 1.2.3.  I think the application stability is greatly improved and I hope I can move forward with 1.3 without any additional 1.2.x bug fix releases. I'm continuing to refine the details on version 1.3 - what will and will not be ...

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1.2.2 is out!

February 6, 2009 – 12:28 am
Prospects 1.2.2 was just released ... fixes quite a few issues and adds some nice enhancements.  One thing it can now do is attach messages dragged directly from Apple's Mail application.  I think this is a really useful feature since a lot of us receive email receipts for purchases.  Now you can drag the email directly to the transaction to attach it.  It attaches the entire message - including graphics and data.  Simple, but I think it's pretty useful! So now that 1.2.2 is out I am beginning work on 1.3.  The biggest thing going into 1.3 is a major update to the import process.  I am still finalizing the feature list and will post it once I'm sure I can do everything I want to in a reasonable amount of time.  More on 1.3 in the coming weeks... Mike

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1.2.2 Due Out This Week!

February 1, 2009 – 11:40 pm
Prospects 1.2.2 is looking great and is due out by the end of this week as planned.  Although this is a minor release, it has a few really great features that will help users quite a bit. First, importing has quite a few bug fixes.  Thanks to all the users who sent in the problems they were experiencing!  One great new addition is that Prospects will no longer force the transaction dates to be identical when checking for duplicates on importing.  It will now be more lenient and go back a few days during the duplicate check.  This will really help out users who manually enter a transaction on the day it occurs and then import it from their bank at a later date.  Previously, this situation would typically result in duplicate transactions being present following the import since Prospects required the dates to be identical.  The dates would be off ...

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Prospects 1.2.1 Released

January 25, 2009 – 8:54 pm
I just released Prospects 1.2.1 via the auto-update function within Prospects itself (available from the Prospects -> Check for Updates ... menu item).  I am working on putting together the final package and getting up on this site and some other download sites. It fixes many bugs and crashes that users were experiencing!  Next up will be 1.2.2.  I am aiming for a release in two weeks that will including the following: Bug fixes from 1.2.1 (hopefully this will be small in number) Preference to have ViewPoints show data across all accounts instead of only the current account Exporting accounts to QIF files Following that will be 1.3 - which will focus entirely on making the import process better and less error prone. I'll post an update on 1.2.2 in about a week ... thanks for reading! Mike PS - Even though I've disabled comments on the blog, you can always reach me directly at michael at motimotion ...

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1.2 Crashes

January 24, 2009 – 10:55 pm
It was bound to happen with the amount of changes in this release...  even with beta testing, a few bugs slipping in causing crashes in the application.  I am actively working on these and hope to have an update out within a day or two to resolve the problems. In most cases, there are workarounds for the crashes.  Please see this Knowledge Base article for details: http://support.motimotion.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=125&p=445#p445 I apologize for any inconvenience this is causing anyone and hope to have the bugs fixed shortly! Thanks Mike

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