Tally 2.2: dark mode, keyboard shortcuts and 40 fixes

Tally 2.2 is a release about the small things. There is one feature you can see, dark mode, one you can feel, keyboard shortcuts for everything, and forty fixes for problems you told us about.

What's new

• New: Dark mode. Tally follows your system setting, or you can choose light or dark yourself.
• New: Keyboard shortcuts for every common action. Press ? anywhere to see them.
• New: A command menu. Press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K) to jump to any dashboard, chart or setting.
• Improved: Charts use colours that work for people with the most common types of colour blindness.
• Improved: Tables scroll smoothly with a hundred thousand rows.
• Fixed: Tooltips no longer cover the value you are pointing at.
• Fixed: Renaming a dashboard updates it in the sidebar straight away.
• Fixed: Exported PNGs keep their fonts.

Dark mode

Dark mode sounds simple and is not. Every chart colour, every shade of grey, every border and every warning had to be chosen twice. We did not want a dark theme that is just the light theme upside down; we wanted one that is comfortable for a whole evening of work.

A few things we learned along the way:

1. Pure black is too harsh. Our background is a very dark blue, which is easier on the eyes next to bright chart lines.
2. Colours need to change, not just flip. A green that reads well on white looks radioactive on black. Every chart colour has its own dark version.
3. Shadows do not work in the dark. We use slightly lighter surfaces instead, so cards still look like cards.

Shortcuts and the command menu

We watched a dozen customers use Tally for an hour each. The most common thing they did was click the sidebar, scroll, and click again to find a dashboard they had opened five minutes before.

The command menu fixes that. Press Cmd+K and start typing. It finds dashboards, charts, events, people and settings, and it remembers what you opened recently.

I did not know I wanted keyboard shortcuts in an analytics tool until I had them. Now I cannot use anything without them.

Early tester

Colour blindness

About one man in twelve and one woman in two hundred has some form of colour blindness. Until this release, two of our default chart colours were very hard to tell apart for the most common type.

The new palette was tested with simulators and, more importantly, with five customers who are colour blind. Lines now also have different dash patterns when a chart has more than four of them, so they can be told apart even in a black-and-white printout.

Forty fixes

The full list of fixes is long and not very exciting to read, which is how it should be. Thank you to everyone who reported a problem. Eleven of the fixes in this release came from a single customer, who asked to stay anonymous, and who now has a very nice Tally hoodie.

The shortcut we almost did not ship

The most-used shortcut in the beta was one we nearly cut: pressing E to edit the chart you are looking at. It seemed too simple to matter. But watching people use it, we saw that it removed the most common three-click journey in the whole product. Small things add up. Two testers told us that E alone made Tally feel twice as fast.

Performance, quietly

This release also includes a lot of work you will not see. The dashboard page now loads 30% less JavaScript. Charts that are not on the screen do not draw until you scroll to them. And the sidebar no longer reloads when you change dashboards. None of this appears in a list of features, but together they make Tally feel lighter, especially on older laptops.

Accessibility beyond colour

While we were changing every colour, we also went through the whole app with a screen reader and with the keyboard only. Every chart now has a text summary that screen readers can announce, such as "Daily active users, last 30 days, up 12%". Every menu can be opened and closed without a mouse, and focus never gets lost behind a dialog. We are not finished, but Tally is now much easier to use for people who do not use a mouse or cannot see the screen well.