April 2018 Update – Speed and interface overhaul

We have released a major update to the Brixx app which dramatically increases the speed of several actions in the interface. Along with speed increases, the update also fixes a number of known bugs, software compatibility issues and improves the responsiveness of plan building with some subtle but much-needed UI improvements.

Here are the changes in full:

Speed improvements

Basic plan building actions that previously took seconds to complete are now almost instantaneous. Here are the main areas you should feel the improvement:

• Opening components.
• Saving your data.
• Navigating between sections.
• Copying, deleting and moving items.
• Turning items on or off.

Generally, everything should feel far more responsive. For example, opening a component to view the data before took 2-4 seconds and is now under a second!

Dashboard/Report load times

The dashboard and reports used to take 2-10 seconds to load even in small plans. Now dashboard and report states are saved so that the dashboard and reports remember their previous previous saved states. If the plan is the same as from this previous state then dashboard/report load times are almost instant in small plans. For example, if no changes have been made since the dashboard/report was last loaded, or something has been turned on and then off again, the dashboard/reports will load very quickly indeed.

We have further optimisation to do to improve the load time of reports for large plans, but we’re working on it!

Drag and drop

Rearranging your plan is now easier since we’ve tidied up drag and drop appearance. The indicators for what you are dragging and where it is being dropped are far clearer than they were before.

Timeline improvements

The timeline has received a visual makeover to make it more responsive and more obvious how your actions impact the timings of your activities.

• Tooltips show start and end dates for timeline rows when you hover over them.
• As you drag timeline rows, either from the anchors or the central bar, the date tooltip will update as you move.
• Dragging from the central bar now snaps by month.
• The start and end anchors have had their appearance updated to make their role clearer and they will hide when dragging from the bar so they don’t cause confusion.
• The calendar control has been revamped so it’s clearer and quicker to use.

Bugs fixed!

It’s almost 2 years since we launched the Beta version of Brixx back in April 2016. In that time we’ve made a huge number of changes to the app and the software that sits behind it. This update is, in fact, a total rebuild of the ‘front-end’ of the application. This lays the groundwork for future features we hope to release this year. But it also means we have eradicated several long-standing bugs with the interface. Certain software setups, including 125% screen resolutions, caused problems for some users, which we hope we will have seen the last of with this update (the problems… not the users! We just hope you’ll have a better experience now).

Working in this new front-end will also allow us to develop new features more quickly, and improve their responsiveness.

New website!

As you may have noticed, we have also revamped our website. You can still sign up, sign in, contact us and visit the forums, but hopefully, it all looks a lot more unified now.

The very place you are reading this, the blog, has undergone some noticeable changes. As our resident writer-in-chief, I’m pretty pleased with the attention given to this particular part of the website 😉

Application URL

We’ve changed the app URL to https://app.brixx.com/ in keeping with our new URL structure.

A look ahead…

I’m looking forward to the year ahead. It’s the start of our third year and we plan to make it a memorable one for the app, and deliver a lot of useful speed-ups and new features.

Right now we’re working on adding a free trial for new users, and improvements for the following components:

• Loan – will have the ability to enter manual interest and capital repayments.
• Asset – multiple asset purchases within the same asset component, new depreciation options
• Investment – % growth and %/amount fee options, as well as more investment sale options.
• Employee – increases/decrease number of employees over time in each employee component.

On the horizon we also have…

• Comments on component forms
• Subscription component (recurring payments, churn and refunds)
• Investor component (capital introduced and capital drawings)

Our further plans for this year include:

• Actuals vs forecast with variance
• Plan sharing
• Longer plans
• Flexes
• Xero integration

So much to look forward to this year! We’ll keep you posted on these new developments here, or by email if you subscribe to our blog.