What's New after an upgrade: release-notes digest, optionally a short in-app tour of the changes

[WMP]

Problem

After a container upgrade, the app says nothing. Features ship silently and users discover them by accident (or never) -- e.g. the loan overpayment simulator's goal-seek, or the support backup, are easy to miss unless you read the GitHub release page. We already tell users an update is available (UpdateAvailableBanner + UpdatesService), but nothing tells them what they just got once they've upgraded.

Proposal: a "What's New" screen after upgrade

Phase 1 -- release-notes digest

On app load, when the running version is newer than the version the user last saw, show a What's New dialog with the release notes for every version they skipped, and stamp the seen version on dismiss.

Almost all the plumbing already exists:

• UpdatesService already knows currentVersion (backend package.json) and there is a per-user version-stamp precedent: user_preferences.dismissed_update_version. Phase 1 adds a sibling last_seen_version.
• Release notes are already written during release as curated Markdown in docs/release-notes/<version>.md (CI publishes them as the GitHub release body). They ship inside the image, so a small backend endpoint can serve the digest for the traversed version range with no network dependency -- unlike the update check, this works fully offline.
• The digest can reuse each file's intro paragraph + section headings as the short form, with a "read the full notes" link per version.
• Opt-out in Settings: a preference toggle (Settings -> Preferences, e.g. "Show What's New after updates", on by default) disables the dialog entirely for users who don't want it -- stored next to the other notification-style preferences in user_preferences. The tour offer from Phase 2 respects the same switch.

Phase 2 (optional) -- a short in-app tour of what changed

The What's New dialog can additionally offer a "Show me" tutorial: a lightweight spotlight overlay that walks through the release's highlights in the UI itself -- navigate to the changed screen, highlight the new control, one sentence of copy, next.

• Per release, an optional small manifest (route + anchor + i18n key per step) checked in alongside the release notes; no manifest, no tour -- Phase 1 alone still works.
• No heavy dependency (no react-joyride etc.) -- a small overlay component; steps whose anchor is missing are skipped gracefully.
• Steps' copy goes through the normal i18n flow, so tours are translatable even though the long-form notes stay English.
• Pick the areas you care about: tour steps are grouped by application area (loans, transactions, budgets, investments, ...) and the "Show me" offer lists each release's touched areas as separate, individually startable mini-tours -- not one forced walkthrough. Someone with no loan doesn't want the loan-simulator tour, but may very much want the multi-currency transactions one because their holiday money is in another currency. The dialog can preselect areas by relevance (e.g. offer the loans tour only when the user has a loan/mortgage account) while still letting anyone start any of them.

Open questions

1. Digest length: intro paragraph + headings per version, or the full notes scrolled in the dialog?
2. Multi-version jumps (e.g. 1.10 -> 1.12): concatenate all skipped versions newest-first, or only the newest with a link to the rest?
3. The Markdown notes are English-only today. Fine for a v1 (with a note), or should the dialog show a translated summary while linking to the English notes?
4. Should the demo instance suppress the dialog (it resets nightly)?

If the approach sounds right I'm happy to build Phase 1 first as its own PR, with Phase 2 as a follow-up once the manifest format is agreed.

Research and drafting AI-assisted (Claude Code); grounded in the current UpdatesService / release-notes pipeline.

[kenlasko]

A good idea that I agree should be part of Monize. Here are some thoughts:

Phase 1

• I think it should show the entire release notes with the intro paragraph and each section heading and underlying subheadings.
• The user should be able to click on any given subheading to show the detail under the selected subheading.
• They should have the ability to expand/collapse all.
• Don't show the All Changes section
• Provide a link to the full release notes
• Make the popup come back at every login until the user selects Don't show this again or conversely Show this at next login. This will help users who may be in a rush to do something, but still want to revisit the What's New at a later point.
• Make the two places where we show the current version (login screen and bottom of the User Settings page) clickable links that open the What's New modal again. Anywhere else we should show the version number other than those two places?
• Ignore multi-version jumps. Just show the notes for the current version
• Let's stay with English for now. I imagine translating this text to 20 languages will both be a fair bit of work plus might be inaccurate. (BTW, how are the Polish translations in Monize?)
• Don't show it in the demo instance

Phase 2

• Create reusable functions to reduce duplicated code
• We pick the top X new features to provide a demo
• The tour works by showing expanded tooltips that lead the user through the feature demonstration (using multi-currency as an example):
  • Highlight the Transactions heading with a tooltip that says "Go to the Transactions page"
  • Highlight the New Transaction button with a tooltip that says "Create a new transaction"
  • Highlight the currency button with a tooltip that says...etc and walk them through creating a transaction in a different currency
  • Highlight the Account Details button.....blah blah blah

This could also be useful as a New User Introduction

[WMP]

BTW, how are the Polish translations in Monize? Very good, but I see something weird words, but it isn't really bad and I skipping fix this :)

Highlights code had been written with clicking to ai verification links, we can reuse it.

I don't feel that I can do this feature now, I can test and write little fixes.

[kenlasko]

I'll do the Phase 1 and then create a new release then.

[WMP]

All will works if someone make big upgrade, for example from 1.13 to 1.18?

[kenlasko]

No, it will just show the release notes for the latest version. Otherwise, it will get very large, very quickly. They will have to look at the release notes for previous releases, if they really want to.

[WMP]

And what about phase 2?

[kenlasko]

Got an initial walkthrough done. Currently building the "What's new" feature highlight for foreign currency transactions. Will have the beta ready in a few hours

[kenlasko]

Beta is updated. Try it out and let me know if you see any issues

[WMP]

I can do this is few next hours

[kenlasko]

Forgot to mention that you'll have to explicitly set the version to 1.13.0 in backend/package.json to see the "What's New" and tours

[WMP]

Maybe you should think again about i18n?It looks really strange, especially when it’s phase 2.

Additional, please make github links when its #number

Do you think to change style in this link?

and this "- -" is in other steps

- border width should be allign to button after translation. And button in polish is: "Nowe konto" not "Dodaj konto"

- border should be also in amount

step 10/15 (i have problem with screenshot uplaod and i lose it) - where is X? And border should be smaller

- this helper window goint into top left, and then goint into botton right. Then i but here "back" this window go away and i cannot continue. After 20-30 seconds page automaitcal go to into step 11/15

[kenlasko]

Feel free to fix and submit in a PR

[WMP]

Multicurrency transactions:

Here is: "Credit card", but you can also use "debet card" or mobile payments. This should be "Select account" and in topic: "select account". And in next steps albo you use "card".

- i think you should remove: "as usually"

- After select details there isnt step 12.

[WMP]

After end multicurrency tutorial i dont know how to open changelog to see other tutorials. It reopen when i remove pods. When i want to click "Show me" in Whats new section, what new window going out.

[kenlasko]

Now available in v1.13.0

[WMP]

I think they attachments should have short tutorial, to show how charged are in this release. Also, I think that new features should we release in major (X.Y) upgrades, not minor (X.Y.Z)

[kenlasko]

I follow semver versioning pattern: major.minor.patch.

Major is reserved for breaking changes. Minor is for new features.
Patch is for fixes to existing features