Billings 3.5 ”Trojan” Released

Product Updates / December 30, 2009 / Alykhan Jetha

We are calling Billings 3.5 the ”Trojan” release because on the surface, it doesn’t look like much has changed. Underneath however, it’s a totally different story.

This release adds synchronization support for the upcoming Billings Touch – Billings’s iPhone brother (submitted to the App Store for approval last week). That’s huge, but you don’t immediately see it. Only a new preference pane, a “Unfiled Slips” source list item and a menu item has been added to support Billings Touch. It’s pretty easy to miss actually.

Underneath this spartan visual change, we changed how the database records changes and how it deals with Address Book.

When we planned Billings Touch support in Billings – we thought “how hard could it be?” I mean, we have considerable synchronization expertise in house (by way of Daylite Offline, Daylite Sync Services, Daylite Touch with over the air sync etc…). It can’t be that bad. Problem was – Billings was never built to synchronize.

After months of effort, Billings 3.5 successfully implements this big change. The beta team has been using it in production for months now (a couple of billing cycles). Along the way, we’ve gained performance improvements for big databases and a couple other small things such as MailPlane support and the ability to print invoices with the Paid stamp. We also lost one thing – Tiger support. With only 6% of our users on Tiger, we decided it was time to drop support. This gave us the ability to leverage the work Apple has done in Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Billings 3.5 is a free upgrade for Billings 3.x users and is required for Billings Touch.

So go ahead and get it by either hitting the “Check for Updates…” menu item in Billings for an easy in-app update, or download it from our newly updated Billings page. Release notes are here.

Until next time…
AJ

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