Jot Thought

QuickenMobile , a cool little app we built for Intuit, was launched at MacWorld this week. It sends you text messages with balances and recent transactions for your bank and credit card accounts. We built it in JRuby on Rails to interface with Intuit’s java-based aggregation web service and deploy within their java stack. Here’s the beta sign up screen.

In addition to the transaction aggregation and sms capabilities, one of Intuit’s own, Zach “Money” Moneypenny built an iPhone interface for the application. He was working the show when we stopped by - here he was bringing it up on his iPhone.

Have to say, it was cool seeing something we built being demoed at MacWorld. We even heard that a senior member of the Google mobile team found it to be pretty cool. It was also very nice to see the other apps the Quicken team were showing off. In addition to QuickenOnline, which also just launched, they were demonsrating the coming version of Quicken for the Mac. What I found particularly interesting is that the entire program is being re-written from the ground up using Cocoa. From what I saw, it looks great. They’re about to go into Beta and both Ben and I signed up. Here’s a pic of what I like to call Cocoa Quicken…

We didn’t spend a ton of time at the expo, but while we were there it was pretty crowded. The logistics of getting in were terrible - our passes didn’t have promo codes, which the registration software required, there were tons of different lines with the exact same signs above them, and the badging process was a hilarious cluster. I’d be curious to know the results of a process excellence evaluation of IDG’s logistical approach. But I shouldn’t complain - I wouldn’t want to solve that issue for a living.

We did stop by the MacBook Air, though it took some effort to actually get your hands on one. It was kind of funny that everyone one wanted to pick them up and play with them, but you had to keep them over the counter. Made for an interesting dynamic (see pic below:)

Our final stop before heading out was to chat with the folks at NeatReceipts, who were showing off their receipt scanning solution for the Mac. We’re talking to them about integration with Paybackable and our “kinda secret” forthcoming app. Stay tuned for more on that.

We found an interesting bug yesterday while working on one of our JRuby projects. In our application we are downloading transactions from various banks. I noticed an interesting bug while testing against my bank account where transactions with only cents and no whole amount were downloaded incorrectly. A transaction for $0.45 would, incorrectly be downloaded as $4.50. We determined that the issue stemmed from a JRuby bug in BigDecimal. The following test cases showcase the bug.

BigDecimal.new("0.10").to_s("F")
=> "1.0"
BigDecimal.new("0.01").to_s("F")
=> "1.0"

I have created a patch for JRuby 1.0.2 which fixes the issue. I have submitted to the JRuby project and Headius told me it should make it into JRuby 1.0.3 and also the trunk. If you can’t wait for 1.0.3, which is due in the next couple of weeks, you can download the patch I submitted. If you are too lazy to apply the patch your self, let me know and I’ll send you the JRuby jar file with the applied patch that I created for our project.