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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's remarkably similar to website I thinking of making... It was going to just keep track of who owed you what, and what you owed to who. The splitting app on top of it would make it even better.

I'm surprised this didn't take off at all.

(If anyone wants to steal my idea, don't feel bad. I rarely get around to them. And I want the app. lol)

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My take on the problem has been live since end November (yeah, working on the marketing & design side now). http://splitsies.net/

Looks nice!

Android please. :)

Edit: I signed up. Looks like it -just- does splits, and not separate IOUs. Unless I say that I paid, but the cost goes to someone else?

Might be worth having a separate IOU interface to save confusion.

Just a thought. :)

We're looking at it. I'll probably go for mobile web first - 1 developer and a backlog of essential work that needs to be done. But I hear the call for Android, its definitely on the urgent list.

(edit to respond to edit)

What do you mean "just does splits"? It doesn't (at the moment) do a good job of explaining that the IOUs balance each other out: if I buy you lunch, then you buy me lunch, we're probably pretty close to balanced out.

I'm working with a great designer at the moment to try and fix some of the programmer-isms in the UI.

Like, if I just wanted to say "Joe" owes me $20 for a lawnmower. There isn't a split, it's just an IOU. I think I could put at the top that I 'paid' $20 for the lawnmower (it's my mower! lol) and at the bottom that Joe owes that same $20. And that's basically an IOU.

But it hurts my head to work that logic out, for some reason.

Actually, that's a UI issue ;) In the web or mobile app, just click the "delete" icon next to "you" when adding a bill.

And yes, we've got a way clearer and sexier UI in the pipeline.

You might consider at some point in the future (when the backlog of essential work dies down) doing some testing on the impact of displaying the dollar symbol versus the pound symbol in the screenshot of the app. Or better yet based on ip show a screen shot with the currency symbol that is most likely to be applicable.

The first public web app I built does this : http://flataccounting.net/

I built it in mid 2008 to help the flat I was living in split bills. It worked well for us, as we were all geeks and were used to using web apps for everyday tasks.

I don't think anyone uses it, but it's been running for 3 years now.

Thanks for sharing! It looks like it would have done what I wanted.

The other one mentioned is still in development, though, and I think I'll see where it goes.

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