Dev Log: August 29 Wrap-up

Overview

Today was all about the small details that make an app feel "finished." I spent most of my time in the ExpenseTracker repo, jumping between fixing UX quirks and wrestling with build.gradle to make my development workflow a bit less friction-heavy.

What I Worked On

Putting Rails on Month Navigation

I noticed a weird bit of behavior in the monthly summary screen: the app would let you navigate into future months where no data exists. It’s a small thing, but swiping into September or October 2026 when we’re still in August felt broken.

I updated the ViewModel to check the current date and toggle an enabled state for the "Next" button. It’s much more satisfying when the UI actually respects the linear nature of time. I also dimmed the icon when you hit the limit so it's visually obvious why you can't click it.

Speeding up Categorization with Quick Tags

Manually typing tags for every transaction is the quickest way to make someone stop using an expense tracker. I wanted to make this feel faster, so I added a "quick pick" system.

I updated the Room DAO to fetch all distinct tags I've used in the past and surfaced them as SuggestionChip components in the edit sheet. Now, instead of typing "Utilities" for the hundredth time, I can just tap a chip. It's a simple SELECT DISTINCT query, but the UX impact is huge.

// Fetching unique tags to help with auto-completion
@Query("SELECT DISTINCT tag FROM transactions WHERE tag IS NOT NULL AND tag != ''")
fun getExistingTags(): Flow<List<String>>

Taming the Gradle Build

I finally got tired of my debug builds behaving differently than release builds because of signing issues. I spent an hour refactoring the build.gradle logic to properly validate my keystore properties.

I set it up so that if my local environment has the right keys, the debug build uses the same signing config as release. This makes testing things like deep links or third-party integrations (which often depend on the SHA-1 fingerprint) way more seamless. No more "it works on my machine but not in the APK" headaches.

Full Transaction Editing

Up until now, editing a transaction was pretty limited. I finally bit the bullet and implemented a full edit sheet. You can now change the amount, the date, the category—everything. I also made sure to include an audit trail logic in the background so I don't lose track of when these changes actually happened.

Wrapping Up

The app is starting to feel solid. Version 1.4.3 is out, and it feels a lot more professional now that the navigation is capped and the tagging is smarter. Tomorrow I might look into some better data visualization for the yearly trends, but for now, I'm just happy the build config isn't annoying me anymore.