Reckoner Update November 2023

Inching ever closer to a stable release!

🚢 Releases

There was one release last month. It included a new data type: Merchants! Merchants can be thought of as the external accounts which a user doesn’t control through which they exchange money. So if you buy things from Walmart they are a Merchant. If you get paid by you job in the City Water Department, they are a Merchant.

The other big change this release was the addition of encryption to the sync service. Currently I am going to support AES256 encryption as that is the current gold standard. To guarantee a 256 bit key, I am going to use the SHA256 algorithm to take an arbitrary length string and make it 256 bits.

There are a few improvements coming in the next release. I’ve found Flutter packages which can use native system hardware encryption/decryption which should speed it up on supported platforms.

🔄 Sync Updates

As referenced last month, I have now unified the ID structure between internal IDs and the ID we set on PocketBase. Everything is working well and I only had to handle a couple of conner cases. One such case was the user settings table which only had one item. Another such case was proper deduplication of reports.

At this point there should be no other changes to synchronization except for bug fixes.

📊 Reporting Work

Most of the focus on the v0.5.0 release (the upcoming release) is on improving the report display. In particular, the default coloring and contrast for the graphing package I am using has poor contrast. However, almost everything about it is customizable. Thus I can change the colors and contrast after figuring out how to do it. Most of the online documentation is lacking so I have to use the example app which seems to have provided enough examples for me to mostly figure it out.

What’s Next

After the v0.5.0 it’s just going to be bug fixes and stabilization.

General Tasks

Version 1.0 (Future)


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