Latest update: January 12, 2023
“Happy New Year!” section recaps my efforts and progress last year, includes information about new iKeeper updates, and looks at what is still to come for the Finance app rewrite in SwiftUI in the new year.
Happy New Year from YENCO.COM! I’d like to thank everyone for their continued support and patience as I continue to upgrade (completely rewrite) my apps and learn more about SwiftUI as I transition from SuperCard. Last year was a pretty good year. I was finally able to release iKeeper 6 for macOS and the bonus versions for iOS and iPadOS all while keeping the same one-time low price (which now covers all three platforms). I also worked on Finance and reached a stopping point right before the holidays which included all of the basic checking, savings, and credit card features.
To start the new year, I have just released an update to iKeeper that incorporates some of the improvements and optimizations I made while working on Finance. This includes fixing a bug that could prevent initial iCloud-synced data from showing up unless you quit and reopened the app (or switched between the password and product list views), a potential crash if you deleted the last record in the password or product list as it tried to display the welcome view, and addressing some list refresh issues when updating records in iOS & iPadOS 16.
I’m also back to work on Finance! There are still some major features to add such as itemized transactions, the entire budget section, the import of Finance 8 data, and a whole lot of smaller details to address. I’m very excited about what lies ahead, but at the same time recognize that this will not be easy and will definitely take some time as I work through adding these features with SwiftUI. I’ll be posting more about the progress here when there is progress to report.
Archive 8 and Finance 8 were created using an amazing third-party developer tool called SuperCard. Unfortunately SuperCard is a 32-bit app that creates 32-bit apps and with macOS Catalina 10.15 and beyond, Apple requires applications to be 64-bit in order to run. While the makers of SuperCard have expressed interest in developing a 64-bit version, it remains unclear at this time when that will happen. It is certainly no easy task to rewrite any app, and especially one with the complexity of SuperCard which, as a developer tool, needs to be many things to many different people. While Archive 8 and Finance 8 WILL NOT RUN on macOS 10.15+, they continue to work exceptionally well with macOS Mojave 10.14.6 and earlier. If you rely on Archive or Finance, I can only recommend holding off on upgrading to newer versions of macOS at this time until I can bring my apps to 64-bit. As of July 10, 2021. Apple removed Archive 8 and Finance 8 from sale on the Mac App Store. While I am disappointed, I can fully understand where Apple is coming from on this. I can only press forward in my efforts with SwiftUI to rewrite my apps.
If you must upgrade to macOS 10.15 or later, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND turning OFF password protection in my Finance 8 and iKeeper 5 apps (if you are using that feature) BEFORE you upgrade macOS (you WILL NOT be able to do so after installing 10.15+ because the apps WILL NOT RUN). There are two reasons for turning off the password protection: First, it will ensure that you can, at the very least, use any 64-bit SQLite database app to access your data (although it won’t be as organized or useful as a dedicated app). Second, it will let you to import your data to new versions of my macOS apps built with SwiftUI. The new versions of my apps do not have a password protection feature and there is currently no way to do so that is backward compatible to what I did in my SuperCard-based apps.