Today, Friday October 21, 2016, there was a major DNS outage that affected an untold number of sites including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, GitHub, New York Times, Heroku (who we use as a server solution) and more which took ClearCheckbook offline as well.

Unfortunately in situations like this there's nothing we're able to do. The issue was with technology controlling how the internet fundamentally works and nothing we actually have any control over.

It appears things are coming back online now. We're sorry for the inconvenience and wish there was something we were able to do.

More information on the outage can be found here:
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/internet-outage-ddos-dns-dyn/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/21/many-sites-including-twitter-and-spotify-suffering-outage/

We're happy to announce that the ClearCheckbook app for iOS is now available for download in the App store.

The app has been completely redesigned from the ground up using the latest iOS development tools and technologies which will help future-proof it for upcoming updates to iOS.

The ClearCheckbook iOS app behaves similarly to the old app and has most of the same features. One thing to note is to edit or delete any accounts, transactions, budgets, reminders or categories, simply swipe the item to the left and you'll be presented with an option to edit or delete it.

This is just the first iteration of the app. We've got a lot more updates for it in the works and will let you know more about those in the future.

iOS Screen Shots:

We want to give a special thanks to all of the users who helped beta test the app over the last few weeks. You provided some extremely valuable information that helped us catch and fix a lot of issues.

If you have any issues while using the app, please use the Contact Us form at the bottom right side of ClearCheckbook.com and we'll work on getting any problems fixed.

We're making some final updates to the last version that was out for beta testing and plan on submitting the app to Apple this week for review. We'll have more information and screen shots when we actually submit the app for approval.

On June 1, 2016 starting at around 10:20am ET, ClearCheckbook was hit by an extremely massive amount of fake logins which overwhelmed our database and caused the site downtime some of you had experienced.

These kinds of attacks are used either by a competing organization to cripple their rivals or by nefarious individuals or groups that use the attack to expose any weaknesses in the database which would let them gain access to it.

We're still not sure what the reasoning for the attacks were but none of your data was compromised while the issues were going on.

I'm extremely sorry for any inconveniences this caused you today. We'll be monitoring our logs to keep an eye on similar attacks and fix them quickly now that we know what to do.

This blog post will cover a lot of new features, mobile app updates and bug fixes that we've been working on recently.

Introducing Account Groups
We just added the ability to create groups to help you organize your accounts. Each group will be separated within your Account Overviews with their own 'group total' balances. You also have the option to exclude a group from being added to your overall balances.

To start using the account group feature, click on Settings at the top right side of the page, then click on Accounts. Below your list of accounts you'll see a new form to add a new group. Once you've added a group you can assign new or existing accounts to them. Note: Account Groups requires an active Premium Membership.

iOS App Update
The developer we contracted to rebuild the app has finished all functions of the app itself. We're now going through and testing all the sections of the app for bugs and any issues. Once that is done we simply need to update the UI and we'll be ready to launch. I hope to have some screenshots of the app with the new UI available soon.

Android App Update
Several months ago one of our users reached out to us asking if they could have a shot at rebuilding the Android app and we said 'of course!' Since they're doing it as a side project of their own we aren't making any promises about a delivery timeframe but so far the app is looking really good. Here are some screenshots from the Alpha version of the new app:


Recent bug fixes / minor updates
Most of the recent bug fixes revolved around input validation to make sure that when you're adding, editing or deleting transactions, reminders, budgets, etc you won't run into unexpected results based on the data you enter. There were also some tweaks to the Import Transactions tool to better recognize data fields and automatically match them on the field verification page. Running balances also got an update that fixed some issues with the balances not showing up correctly if you started paging through your transactions.

Happy Birthday to us!
In addition to all of the above, ClearCheckbook just turned 10 years old today! I launched the site back in May 2006 as a way for myself and some friends to manage our personal finances. The site has grown and improved tremendously over the years due in large part to the suggestions of you, our users.

We'll have more news about the mobile apps soon.

Thanks!

Brandon
Founder, ClearCheckbook