Reckoner Update March 2025

Some good work and development done on Reckoner this past month.

🚢 Releases

Most of the releases done this past month were to address user issues. Version 2.2.5 fixed most of the issue submitted on the repo by end users. Then 2.2.6 and 2.2.7 were smaller fixes based on my own testing and some email feedback from users. I am pretty happy with these releases as they add quite a bit of polish that helps improve some of the niggling issues.

I will continue to address user issues based on priority and time. In my opinion, the issues addressed in the recent releases address a few high priority quality of life issues from end users. While I do have a strong vision for how I want certain aspects of the app to work, no plan survives contact with end users. If you have ideas or feedback, feel free to add it as an issue or send me an email.

🙋 In-App Tutorial

For the latter half of the month I’ve been working on bringing an in-app tutorials to replace the help icon buttons. While creating a website with tutorials is a good idea in theory, it has the issue of being additional work to maintain on top of app development. Among other issues, screenshots can be out of date and any change to the UI needs to update the documentation.

All this is done in preparation for the next big feature release this year.

☁️ Cloud Synchronization

Due to an issue a user had with setting up Pocketbase, I am not going to support Pocketbase as a synchronization target in the future. I am pretty sure I am going to end up with PowerSync as the synchronization method this year. They even address the issue of end-to-end encryption! While the solution isn’t ideal, I’d basically end up creating a table or database in Reckoner which stores the data encrypted which would over double storage, in actuality the size of the database is very small. In my personal use, the database is ~2 MB for a year’s worth of use. This is not going to be a big driver of storage on your machine unless you are using Reckoner to run a large business. Even then, you should really use a solution which has a separate database like MySQL or Postgres.

Getting back on track, the tutorial change should make tutorials more maintainable and then enable me to add a guided tutorial for using the app and setting up cloud services. Using these services, I plan to create a cloud service which I can charge for. Being end-to-end encrypted, I won’t know anything about users other than necessary information for payment. This is also the first step to add financial aggregator support.

Stay tuned for a big change this year!