This weekend I had a major milestone of the rewrite. All features are working (except edits). I was successful in adding a new feature of allowing for looking at all the cards sent for a specific event, i.e. Show me all the Christmas cards by date and recipient.

This new feature is something I’ve been wanting to add for a long time. What’s great about it is that all the hard work I did recently to allow for a print of all the cards for a single recipient, now also works for ll the cards for a specific event.

After this update, I finally started moving five years of card history over to the new version of the app. This reinforced a big issue I have been ignoring. Space bloat! The app currently takes every card’s picture and attaches it to a specific recipient’s event. Meaning that if two people are getting the same Thank You card, then it takes up twice as much space. As you an image, Christmas cards would take up a ton of space.

To that end, I’ve decided to implement a Card Gallery feature. This will all a user to take a picture (or scan) of a specific card, and then use it for all the people who get the same card. This will dramatically improve performance (thanks to caching by SwiftData), and will also radically reduce storage requirements.

Of course adding this feature means I am going to have to adjust the UI and delay my desired release of the app until I get that (and the edit feature) working. Hopefully the next few weeks will allow me to make major progress.