Introducing v23.0

I'd like to start off by saying, welcome to the blog! We're integrating big changes to our site to provide you with tips and guides to getting the most out of Transakt. Let's start diving into v23.

Our biggest obstacle

We've redesigned major—actually, 99%—of the app to give it a new look and feel. Previously, with expo 49, a certain version in our animation package (reanimated 3.3.0) had major issues, which had animations working for a short while and then randomly stopping after a couple minutes. This was a huge issue considering the major packages we wanted to use also depended on reanimated.

To combat this, I resorted to using native modals solely for their animations. This, of course, was a simple workaround, but in the end, it caused disruption in the development flow as it was just a mess in the file tree.

Thankfully, with expo 50 this isn't the case anymore, and we can start getting the most out of Reanimated. Now enough complaining and ranting, what's changed with Transakt.

Colors

The feel for Transakt should be that of professionalism, speed, but also fun. Budgeting shouldn't be boring, and I live by that statement. We've integrated vibrant colors, one because it helps distinguish transactions / accounts better, and two because color psychology is a real thing. I also believe these new colors are super attractive and easy on the eyes. Transactions have a set of colors, let's introduce these colors and their meanings.

(Pending transactions have their transaction type color just dimmed.)

• Red: Expense
• Blue: Transfer
• Green: Income
• Orange: Reconciled
• Purple: Awaiting Approval
• Gray: Upcoming Transactions

Each transaction serves their own purpose, and we believe we can show that purpose and give it its own story through colors.

Components

Previously we mentioned issues with Reanimated 3.3.0. Our current version of Reanimated does not have any issues I am aware of (tested thoroughly through previews).

This allows us to create components that have strong user feedback, which I believe is essential. We used to combat this with haptic feedback, but I think I overused it way too much. Now most components have animations when you press, or long press them, which I think is a much nicer edition to having no feedback at all.

Most components were redesigned to fit our company colors (blue).

Graphs

We're including graphs (finally). Subscribers will have access to more detailed and more powerful graphs, this is a work in progress. However, spending bar graphs will be free for everyone which is a super nice edition. Bar graphs should your weekly (Working on monthly and yearly) spending and compares your current week spending to your previous week spending. It calculates in percentage how much your overspending or underspending.

Payees

Payees are now highly customizable and a feature I plan on expanding on. Payees can now be customized while creating a transaction or simply in your settings tab.

Tap on a payee to use it in a transaction (while you're creating a transaction), long press on a payee for more actions such as editing a transaction.

The big issue with payees

Previously, payees were rendered on every prop change, which is not great for performance. Realizing this a little to late, performance was a big issue when it came to payees, either when scrolling, or when filtering them out by search, it was a huge cause for concern and something I did not like.

The fix

Normalizing the payees data, prevents re-renders and has improved speed tremendously. This has allowed us to do inline editing which I a much greater experience than creating a new modal for each edited payee. It allows us to be more creative with payees too as we can eventually integrate selecting multiple payees and merging them in the future.

The other features

I could sit around and explain each new feature to you for days, however, I refuse to believe many of you will even enjoy reading an updates post (lol). Let me just list out the new amazing features that make up this major version of Transakt.

• Renamed marks to flags
• Flags have tremendous bug fixes
• Multi Selecting transactions have speed improvements
• Increased security
• Redesigned most search bars to be consistent across app.
• Redesigned onboarding for new users.
• Integrate new animations for empty states
• Performance boost for accounts list
• Dedicated page to reorder your accounts
• Edit your account by long pressing on the card, or going into your account's dashboard.
• Converted drawer settings page to modal settings page. (Gear icon on the top right)
• Fix issues with dark mode and light mode
• Removed ability to set your name in the onboarding process for new users.
• Allow tabs to be displayed in accounts dashboard.
• Integrate all transactions tab.

That's all the features I can think of as of now! There's may too many and I'll update this list when they come back to me. Anyways, welcome to the blog! I hope you find value in some of these upcoming posts!