Launch day!

Hello everyone! 

Finally, after working with Unity and reading C# for more than 8 years (still my main programming language... it's my job), I thought it would be a great idea to learn something new and exciting.

For a while, I have been thinking about getting myself into some basic robotics and hardware automation, and always kept Python as a great candidate for this in the back of mind. Well, today is the day I take the step forward and get into it once and for all!

I have a few (small) exciting projects in mind but before getting into them, I needed to learn Python. To get into the rhythm of programming in Python, I wanted to start with something simple AND a project that I could also use myself.

After testing a few apps for managing my bills (some requiring subscriptions and all...), and being tired of keeping track of all of my bills in an Excel sheet, I decided that creating my own small app for keeping track of my bills would be easy enough of a first project (as long as I keep it SUPER simple). So I did!

I started development a few weeks weeks ago, using some AIs to assist me initially, setup the code and learned my way from there, which was also the very first time I ever even saw Python code. It ended up being super fun and enjoyable, lots of tutorials, community is excellent, most docs I interacted with were great and it didn't take me long to get into the groove.

So, now, let's speak quickly about the app! I found the very fancy name "Bill Planner" and decided to make it as simple as possible: add bills, check the bills you added in a table, have a few extra information (e.g., total monthly cost ($) of all the bills combined), being able to know when the next bills are due, and notify me the day-of by showing a toast notification.

This was pretty much the basics. Of course, I ended up adding a few more things like the ability to edit a specific bill, track potential bills that have remaining amounts (e.g., loans), being able to delete them and being able to provide URLs in case an online payment is required. There is a few more things and I'll go through them next.

One of my goals here was to have the app run in the background (i.e., system tray) pretty much all the time, scan for bills that are due once in a while (currently checked every hour and upon launching the app) and notify without having to have the app open and active on the desktop.

Moreover, this app runs ~99.5% offline. All the data is stored locally (in the same folder as the executable, so basically within the unzipped folder) and the ONLY time internet is required is when the user clicks on the notification (and there is a few conditions that apply here). If the user is offline, a notification should still appear with a custom message saying the internet is unavailable. Everything else is made to be fully offline. No cookies, no worries...

I tried to make it as lightweight as I could with my limited experience and knowledge in Python. I am sure some things could be enhanced and/or optimized but it should be good for the time being.

Since I use this app myself, I will try to update it now and then depending on what I need. I don't want it to be too big and keep its simplicity as is, so don't expect radical changes to happen anytime soon. I don't consider this project in active development but might get some updates at some point in time :)

Of course, if there are any bugs or crashes, I will try my best to get them fixed as soon as possible. Please let me know in the comments :)

One important note: for now, the app is Windows-only! Please, do not buy (not sure if you even can...) if you do not have a Windows machine. I will see to later target other OSs but I will have to change some Windows-only code in order to do so.

Thank you for checking this project out and hope it helps you as much it helps me. 

Cheers!

P.S: In case you arrived on this page first and if you ever wondered what it can do, go check out the main page :)