On the way to 0.5

It’s been a bit since my last post about siggy. But don’t worry. That only means that I’ve been working hard on it 😉

I’ve made a real lot of changes to the application since version 0.4.2. And I have some more in mind before releasing 0.5. But I wanted to give you an advance of what I’ve been doing and what I plan to do:

  • Things done:
    • Added some performance improvements here and there, mostly related to avoid unnecessary redraws, and modified the hiding of the dialogs. Maybe you have realized that the more expenses you had in a month, the more it took the new expense dialog to hide. That doesn’t happen anymore, and everything runs a bit faster.
    • Added a new feature to the summary section: Evolution. This option uses the expenses graph to show the evolution of your budget and expenses during a period of months. Is has a monthly and accumulated view as the normal graph. Now you can check during with months you spend more money! 😉
    • Source code restructured, making the appearance of the application totally independent of the rest of the code. Thanks to this, creating new views for the application for different platforms is really easy. This is something a normal user won’t notice but I needed it for other goals ;). Also, this was something almost mandatory for someone who likes designing as I do :).
    • Created a desktop version of the application. Yes, siggy now has a desktop version with a view adapted to the desktop environment 🙂
  • Things to do (in a not relevant order):
    • Create a database updater: I’m a slave of the database schema. I have some features in mind that would break the database compatibility with previous versions of the application. This is something I need to fix. I have in mind a program able to update the database schema and migrate existent data when upgrading to a new version.
    • Implement forecasts: I’d like to add the application the capability to tell you how are you going to finish the month according to your current expense rate. Something similar could be done with a period of months.
    • Remove the packaging stuff from the master branch and put it in a different one. Well, you know, code is code, and packaging is packaging 😛
    • Add an rpm packaging branch.
    • Implement the account password protection feature.
    • And last, but not least, create a MeeGo version of the application 🙂

What do you think? Have I been busy or not? 😉
The only bad new is that I’m not planning to create a new package and upload it to garage and those things yet. I’ll probably just create version 0.4.3 in the repository and wait until version 0.5 to create the new package.

Anyway, feel free to get the source code from gitorious and build it yourself. Just launch build.sh and it will create the package for your platform! 🙂