tldr: Join us on slack, major loading improvements, and more bug fixes.
This release has taken a while to finalize because of a major life event: my wife and I had a baby almost two weeks ago! Now that we're coming out of the fog, it's time to ramp up work on Actual again.
This release includes some major performance improvements with loading the app. Additionally, a Slack workspace has been created to involve the community better.
Slack
This release includes some pretty major changes to critical parts of the app, and I wanted a way to interact with the community better and be alerted of any major problems with the new version. Slack will also allow a community to build and easier discussion of new features.
I'd love to chat if you are using Actual and have ideas! Head over to slack.actualbudget.com to join.
Major Loading & Importing Improvements
Previously, when the app loads it recomputed the entire world. This happens to make sure the app was always correct and made it easier to track down bugs. Now that the app is relatively stable, I've implemented a caching mechanism so that future loads of a budget simply reads from a cache.
For budgets that span a long period of time (2+ years) and contains lots of transactions, recomputing the entire world is very expensive. It gets worse the more data it has. With the new caching mechanism, loading a budget should take less than a second no matter how much data it has.
I tested with a budget with 6 years worth of test data and loading went from 35 seconds to 0.8 seconds.
Additionally, importing a budget from YNAB has been greatly optimized and will be anywhere from 2-5x faster.
If you tried importing an existing large budget from YNAB before and the loading time was unacceptable, please try it again!
Bug fixes
-
If you try to add a category with a name that already exists, an error will be shown.
-
A bug was fixed that caused the first category group to always be in the editing state after a certain sequence of actions.
-
Fix a bug in the backup logic that would cause it to always think you were viewing a reverted version (and would erroneously offer the option to go back to the original version)
-
New technique for cleaning up after itself when the app closes. Previously it was possible (although rare) for the backend to shut down after resuming your computer from sleep.
As always, please let me know on twitter or at hello@actualbudget.com if there are any problems! Or even better: join slack!