Financier Mobile (Unofficial)

[asromzek]

v0.4.26 released: First release of the year! Although, it's just a small one. Tapping on a positive category balance when the available to budget value is negative will display the option to "Cover Overspending". The amount of money needed to cover the overspent amount, or as much as the category can provide, is unbudgeted from the category and move back to the available to budget amount.

[Billy_McSkintos]

Hi @asromzek, I noticed that if money is unbudgeted in a month (green) it displays in the budget header of the following month as "Overbudgeted in xxx".

[asromzek]

Good catch, that label should change to "Not Budgeted in XXX" when the previous month's available to budget zero or positive, and "Overbudgeted in XXX" when negative. It's on the list of bugs to fix.

[michaelmjd]

Hey @asromzek, love everything you’re doing with the mobile app.

Wondering how hard it is to implement settings to custom adjust the font size. I’m sure it is a formatting nightmare, but I would like the option if it’s possible.

Thanks!

[asromzek]

@michaelmjd, changing font size dynamically may be a little tricky since it's hard coded throughout the app, and most of the text is sized to fit the layout. Do you find the fonts are too small or too large?

Also, what kind of device, OS, and browser are you using?

[asromzek]

v0.4.27 released: Just a few minor updates. Added "Note" placeholder and clear icon in all note input textboxes. The selected month in the budget is remembered when leaving and returning to the budget view during the session. Fixed label text in budget header to display "Not budgeted in XXX" when the previous month's available to budget is zero or positive, and "Overbudgeted in XXX" when the value is negative.

These were a few nagging issues that I wanted to resolve before adding some heavier features.

[michaelmjd]

Font size is a little small for me, but not unusable. I’m just thankful to have the mobile app to use.

iPhone 7; iOS 11.2.1; safari

[Billy_McSkintos]

Agreed.

I noticed that the font scaling on chrome has no affect.

Pixel XL, Android 8.1, Chrome

[asromzek]

I sized the app to fit on an iPhone 4 screen, which doesn't provide a lot of real estate for the amount of data to display. It doesn't make sense to keep the text tiny on large devices, though. The entire front end needs an overhaul under the hood anyway, so I'll add text sizing to the list. I will likely make all of the text throughout the app the same size, and add a drop down or scale to set the desired text size. This may also require some layout scaling to contain the text cleanly in certain areas.

[Joel]

I sized the app to fit on an iPhone 4 screen, which doesn't provide a lot of real estate for the amount of data to display. It doesn't make sense to keep the text tiny on large devices, though. The entire front end needs an overhaul under the hood anyway, so I'll add text sizing to the list. I will likely make all of the text throughout the app the same size, and add a drop down or scale to set the desired text size. This may also require some layout scaling to contain the text cleanly in certain areas.

Who uses an iPhone 4 thesedays? It's 2018!

[asromzek]

I should have said iPhone 5, since they have the same screen width. 

Last night I made an executive decision to break the app into a couple pieces, specifically to separate the core budget auth/data engine into its own library. I should have done that from day 1, but the mobile app was not intended to be as complex as it is now. This will make the data engine available for other apps to use since all front end dependencies will be completely stripped out. And data bug fixes can propagate to all apps that use the library.

This will not be a simple task, but I think it’s necessary at this point, and it should improve the ability to build additional tools.

[asromzek]

Monday (technically Tuesday) Update: I put about 7 hours into building the new core library tonight, and I'm roughly 1/4 o 1/3 of the way through it. This is the easy part: copying files over, reorganizing things, and revamping a few hundred comments. The difficult task is coming: ripping the old data code out of the mobile app, and wrapping it around the new library. It's particularly difficult because I'm fundamentally changing how the auth and budget data is handled, so the mobile app will need some significant refactoring in a few places. Things are not going to line up perfectly. In the end there will be a much cleaner separation between the internal data model and the front end, making it easy to use the data model in other apps.

To be continued...

[asromzek]

Thursday update: Not much to report. I've been at every night this week. After heading down a few wrong paths and backtracking a couple of times the code is starting to come together, piece by piece. I'm going to keep my head down and continue pushing forward...

[asromzek]

FYI, a small amount of mobile app downtime will be occurring this afternoon as the Digital Ocean server that hosts the app is "upgraded". Same specs, half the price.

Edit: Complete.

[asromzek]

Wednesday Update: Finally back in the saddle this week. Made a modest amount of progress last night, mostly consisting of figuring out where I left off, and then tracking down a really annoying, self-induced authentication bug. The good news is that I have most of the code moved over to the separate library, and the mobile app is working with the imported code. However, there are quite a few structural changes that are needed to make the library more autonomous, and that means ripping some more code out of the mobile app and then updating a couple hundred references throughout. It's something that needs to be done in one major series of changes, and I want to make sure I reserve enough free time to do it in single sitting...