TapExpense 2.6.1: What’s New

In early January this year we released TapExpense 2.6.1. We had some other commitments that required our immediate attention so we didn’t really have a time to write about it. In short, 2.6.1 fixes the crashing problem in 2.6. We feel bad that it took us a while to finally nail down the origin of the bug, and we’d like to thank our users who bear with us.

Oh, we also didn’t mention what’s new in 2.6, which is actually a big update. In short:

• TapExpense now has a file-based backup/restore mechanism. Instead relying on gibberish-looking URLs that are hard to understand let alone use, it now sends you the whole database file as an email attachment. You can open that attachment in your Mail.app, and TapExpense will ask if you want to restore that file. This works across different devices.
• An unnoticed feature is that you can also backup and restore using your iTunes! If you’re familiar with Apple’s Pages or apps like Good Reader, you know how to do this: Just save the “Books” folder to your computer, and it’s done. To restore, drag the Default.db in the Books folder to TapExpense, and next time you launch TapExpense, it will ask you if you want to restore that copy.
• Category, currency, group, vendor lists can now be sorted. Tap the “Edit” button, and a Sort button will show up along with other editing functions.
• Many bugs in version 2.5, such as the buggy landscape mode and issues with the iOS multitasking mechanism are all fixed.

We have received a few emails asking us why we discontinued iOS 3 (formerly iPhone OS 3) support. It’s a tough decision, but the short answer is that we needed the file exchange support which is only available after iOS 3.2 (the first version that supports the iPad, but that isn’t available for the iPhone). We were also in this situation where we no longer had any iOS 3 device to test on. On the other hand, switching completely to iOS 4 enables us to modernize our codebase, and we believe this will be a good thing for the long-term development of the app.