After about a decade without a single issue, the iCash Currency Manager updating system has stopped working. Indeed, if you open the currency window and click on the ‘Update now’ button or you have activated the iCash ‘Document > Update Currency rates’ at startup preference, you will get the currency list filled with zeroes. So, what happened?
Actually, iCash was fetching currency rates from Yahoo! services. It seems like Yahoo! has discontinued the (private, mostly-undocumented) Yahoo Finance API that many developers have been using for their currency data. All responses seem to be returning “violation of the Yahoo Terms” error. I suppose there’s a chance they may switch it back on, but they don’t officially support that API anywhere as far as I can tell. You can see by yourself clicking on the link below:
http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=USDEUR=X&f=sl1d1t1ba&e=.csv
Instead of receiving the USD to EUR rate as usual now we get that:
It has come to our attention that this service is being used in violation of the Yahoo Terms of Service. As such, the service is being discontinued. For all future markets and equities data research, please refer to finance.yahoo.com.
Same happens to http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?e=.csv&f=sl1d1t1&s=EURUSD=X
So we have to update the iCash system to use a different currency provider. There are several available we are looking at, like Google’s:
https://finance.google.com/finance/converter?a=1&from=EUR&to=USD
Or maybe something like CurrencyLayer, Open Exchange Rate etc.
+ Info: https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Yahoo-Finance-help/Is-Yahoo-Finance-API-broken/td-p/250503/page/3
I welcome your comment on that matter. Meanwhile, we will try to fix that as fast as possible.
[UPDATE] We have decided to use CurrencyLayer as the new data provider. iCash will use a LAMP software we have developed last week running on maxprog.com that will provide this service with a caching and error recovery system. We just finished the testing phase yesterday. Next we will update iCash to use it.
[UPDATE-2] The problem has finally been fixed. You can try the beta right now. It is available here for macOS and Windows. Please let us know if it works properly for you by leaving a comment below.
—
Stan Busk – Software Engineer
at www.maxprog.com