Reckoner Update January 2024

Happy New Year everyone! Reckoner was released late last month! I was motivated to get it out by Christmas and managed to finish it up on Christmas eve.

🚢 Releases

Reckoner v1.0.0 was shipped! There were a few UI updates I added after a review with the Reckoner Brain Trust. Other than the UI changes, there was a lot of database cleanup. What this means is that I need to be careful and very purposeful about database schema updates. I don’t plan to update the schema often, but there will be changes to incorporate planned future functionality.

📚️ Documentation

I will be spending quite a bit of time over the next several months creating the documentation website for Reckoner. Right now, this is a work-in-progress. If you see something incongruous, then there is a 90% chance that I know it is that way and have a plan to address it. In my experience what differentiates a one-off project from a long self-sustaining project is proper documentation.

📱 Application Store Releases

As of this point, the only way to install Reckoner is to manually download from the release page or use the official web app. However, I want to make the app available on the app stores people use for their operating systems.

🐧 Linux

The first app store I want to target publishing to is Flathub. This is the de-facto repository for Flatpak package system. This will make Reckoner available to nearly all Linux platforms. The big exception here is Ubuntu and its spins. While uses can install flatpak, Ubuntu pushes uses toward Snap packages. I’m not going to get into a debate about these packaging formats, but I stopped supporting Snap due to packaging issues with flutter_secure_storage. I might revisit packaging the binary in a snap instead of trying to build with snap in the future. The release also has an AppImage available to download.

🤖 Android

When people think of Android, they generally think of the Google Play app store. However, there are a multitude of other application stores available to Android. There are app stores from other big companies like Amazon AppStore, Huawei App Gallery, or the Samsung Galaxy Store. Similarly, there are app stores from smaller providers with a questionable model like APKMirror, APKPure, or Aptoide.

While there certainly is a use case for publishing your application directly to one of the other aforementioned stores above, I will be targeting the Google Play store and F-Droid. F-Droid is an application installer which can use multiple repositories similar to how Linux software works.

I use Android and personally use Obtanium which I would term a meta-app store. This application is basically an automation system which can check multiple app stores and download and update applications.

🪟 Windows

While not currently available on the releases, I do plan to add Windows support for Reckoner. This will be released to the official Windows Store. While I could also create a downloadable executable file that includes self-updating similar to a lot of current Windows applications, that requires more work on my end and is a practice that is easy for malware distributors to take advantage of. There is the rather infamous case of Google search returning malware downloads for OBS.

🍎 Apple Devices

For now, I don’t have plans for iOS and Mac OS. Developing for these OS require that I have a Mac and they’re quite pricy compared to Linux and Windows counterparts. I will develop for those platforms if I receive funding through these efforts to buy the hardware needed to develop for the platforms.

What’s Next

This recurring section is going to disappear as I just detailed what is the plan going forward.