Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

I seem to have a problem with the language version. I have Region set to America Latina and Device Language set to English (United Kingdom). Now Buddy is in Spanish even though the rest of the device, including other applications, are in English. It seems Buddy is following the Region rather than Device Language to set the language.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

Hi mate, you've done great job!

I can provide Polish translation if you wish, just send me the file.

BTW I'm having some problems with Win client. When I sync it with phone it's saying that so many entries have been synced and added to database but when you look into expenses, etc it's empty! Have tried importing it by csv and adding entries manualy but it's same scenario everytime. I've played with date format as suggested in previous posts but it hasn't helped. Any ideas?

Thanks for a great app!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

Thanks sEKI ! :)

sure will send it over to you ( pm me your email ) , once complete i'll integrate and release as soon as i get some time.

could you send me the csv files or attach them here ?
also let me know when you make new entries in the app, are you able to view them in the app ?
Im just trying to see if the sync is the only issue.

cheers

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

Yeah no problem but how do I bloody PM?! Just send me the file for translation to gpsq(at)o2.pl
See attached mate, I've changed date format to dd/MM/yyyy as it matches my bank statement and maemo buddy takes it nicely, maybe you could add that format too?
no, only category is visible, looks like date format issue and it applies to manual entry, sync & import...

BTW Any chance you could add an option to clear/remove database? Removing it manualy from opt is not exactly user friendly :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

attached an xml file where you can enter your translated strings inside the translation tags.
<translation type="unfinished"> "type your polish translation here" </translation>
and change the type value to finished when you have entered a translation. Let me know if you need more inputs.

to PM click on the Private Messages link seen on the right frame of the website and you can send a private message.

sure ,can add a few more date formats, its trivial, surely the packaging will take me more time :)

you mean deleting all records from the database ?
or do you mean while uninstalling, since this can be achieved by purging the installed pkg.
If its deleting all records while you are still using buddy, yes thats a nice option to add, will do so in a future release.

finally, don't edit the same post, since I dont get notified on editing of posts , so its better to create a new post so I get notified , otherwise it might just go unread for a long time :D

thanks sEKI.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

I am trying to find the key for the buddy application but cannot seem to find it anywhere

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

read on: http://buddy.passiongarage.co.uk/download.php

krk969 deserves SOME recognition!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Buddy - a budget and expense manager for maemo.
 

So I had some trouble with Buddy today.

First it wouldn't open. It would start up, think for a few seconds, and then die. I had an issue before where the file holding current currency info got corrupted when Buddy got confused from not being able to update the currency online and corrupted its own file. That prevented Buddy from starting again. I figured out that I had to delete /opt/buddy/data/.currencycache to get it to start again. Last time deleting this file allowed Buddy to start normally, but on this occasion deleting it didn't make any difference.

At this point I noticed something strange. There was no .buddy.db in /opt/buddy. Rather, there was a file .buddy.db.encrypted. I knew that I hadn't set a password in Buddy, so I thought that was pretty strange. A week old backup of the entire directory /opt/buddy/data I put on my SD card didn't contain any .encrypted file, just the .buddy.db and some other files.

So I decided I would try messing around to get Buddy started again. I would have emailed krk969 directly, but last time I tried doing that, I didn't get a helpful response, and had to figure it out for myself. I thought I was being careful - I made a backup of the .buddy.db.encrypted file and the other files in the directory, but I made a crucial mistake - unlike last time, when I put the backup files in a different directory, this time I kept the backups in the same directory, /opt/buddy/data, with .bak extensions. Little did I know that after messing a bit, I opened Buddy and it reset itself and DELETED the entire contents of /opt/buddy/data, including all the copies I had made with the .bak extension.

Great. So my entire data is now gone (the week old backup helps somewhat, but that's still a week of budget data gone that I can't recreate). And I never did figure out what was causing Buddy to crash on startup. Now it has simply reset itself AND cleaned out the entire /opt/buddy/data directory, including the backups I had saved there.

Is there any development of this application still going on? It is a paid app, and in fact I have paid krk969 twice to support this app, but I haven't seen any updates for a while, and like I said, last time I tried to contact him with the above mentioned bug he didn't respond and I ended up figuring it out by myself (by deleting the .currencycache file).

This is a good app, with some (strange) limitations, and it would be good to see development continue and ongoing bugs fixed. Especially as it is a paid app.

Problem with Reports > Trends
 

So I have found what appears to be a different and bizarre bug in Buddy.

When I set a budget with a date range that covers two months partially, I don't seem to get the right view when I look at Reports > Trends. Here is an example.

First, I have a budget with a date range spread over two months:

http://raasay.zapto.org/buddy1.jpg

Now I've already some spending on this budget. Let's see how much. First we go to Reports > Trends for the JULY view:

http://raasay.zapto.org/buddy2.jpg

OK, that's nice, we can see that I started the spending a bit earlier than forecast, but in July at least have not used up all the budget. What's going on in August? Let's have a look:

http://raasay.zapto.org/buddy3.jpg

Oops! Something has gone wrong. It should show the green line for the budget continuing at 1600 until the 18th, and the red line continuing at just under $1400 until the 18th as well, but instead it just shows a ZERO for the entire month, for everything. As it happens I have done no spending in this budget in August yet. As a test, let's see what happens if I add a $10 transaction for the 12th (today). The report for July is as before, now here's the report for August:

http://raasay.zapto.org/buddy4.jpg

The transaction (for $10) is shown, but starting at $0 instead of the ending level for the previous month (around $1400) and the budget itself is still not showing.

There is more weirdness.

Here is what I see if I go into Reports > Usage and enter the exact starting and ending dates for this budget:

http://raasay.zapto.org/buddy5.jpg

The budget is shown correctly as $1600, but why does the expense show at $757.76? In the above Trends report it was showing at around $1400 by the end of July. I checked manually, and in fact the total is $1372.76 by the end of July, plus another $10 in August. And if you look at the Trends screen above you'll see that $757 is about what it was by 25 July, then it goes up to almost $1400 on the 26th, which is correct. But the Usage screen for some reason isn't showing that, it's totally wrong.

Furthermore, if I change the dates by just one day, showing the period from 24 July instead of 23, I get this:

http://raasay.zapto.org/buddy6.jpg

So now it shows that I have zero budget for this period, and I am $757.76 down.

All extremely weird and wrong.

Is Buddy now abandonware?
 

I have figured out some workarounds for using with Buddy - for example, only having budgets for whole months or parts of months, i.e., never having budgets for a period that traverses a month boundary, which seems to avoid the issues I reported above. The program is still useful, and with these workarounds, and I can use it effectively to manage my budgets (and there is no real alternative on the N900 bar using an online budget manager).

However, it would be nice to see some signs of life from the developer - especially as this is still a paid application. I downloaded a new copy yesterday for my new N900 (old one stolen), and made a small contribution via PayPal to get my unlock code. I would have made a bigger contribution if I see and evidence the program is still being developed or supported, but apparently it is now abandonware.

For those who might find this useful, I wrote a very simple script that I use with fcron to make a backup of the Buddy data directory every night to a backup directory named with the current date. That way when Buddy crashes and loses data (usually because of a problem with the cached currency values) I have a very recent backup. Here is the script: