A Bangla-first offline-capable PWA for recording family event gifts in the owner's own Google Sheet, with QR-based family sharing, Excel export, and no application server.
Giftbook is a web application created to make a real workflow clearer, faster, and easier to trust. It turns a focused product idea into something people can use, evaluate, and understand without needing to inspect the source code.
Why Giftbook exists
Bangladeshi families track wedding, aqiqah, and birthday gifts in paper notebooks that are hard to search, easy to lose, and impossible for several relatives to update at once, while generic apps store the family's financial records on a third-party server and ignore Bangla numerals and lakh formatting.
The goal is not simply to add another tool. Giftbook is designed to reduce the friction around that problem and give people a more dependable way to complete the work.
What it delivers
- Families can record who gave what at weddings, aqiqahs, and birthdays from any phone, offline, and see per-event received, given, and unopened-envelope summaries.
- The ledger stays in the owner's Google Drive as an editable spreadsheet, with the app holding only drive.file access and no server-side copy.
- Multiple relatives write to the same ledger through a QR link, and conflicting edits resolve predictably without duplicate rows.
- The complete workflow, including sharing and sync failure simulations, runs in mock mode without Google credentials, and nine automated sync tests guard the merge and cycle logic.
- The app is live at giftbook.netlify.app as an installable PWA with a fully Bangla interface, including numerals and currency.
The experience
A Bangla-language gift ledger for family events that keeps the record in the owner's own Google Sheet, works offline through a local IndexedDB copy, and lets relatives write to the same ledger by scanning a QR code.
The project brings the important parts of the workflow into one coherent experience. Its interface and behavior are shaped around the people using it, while the implementation stays focused on predictable results and honest feedback.
What to know
Every product has boundaries. These are the most important considerations for Giftbook:
- The ledger must live in the owner's Google Drive with no application server or database, so the app may request only the drive.file scope and never see the rest of the Drive.
- Gift entry happens at crowded events with unreliable connectivity, so writes must land locally first and reach the sheet later without duplicating rows.
- Several family members edit the same sheet from different phones, so the sync rule has to be simple, predictable, and safe when two devices change the same row.
- The sheet remains a spreadsheet that people may edit by hand, so the app must detect header changes and stop syncing instead of corrupting data.
- The whole interface, including numerals, dates, currency, and validation errors, must read naturally in Bangla rather than relying on browser defaults in English.
These limitations are presented openly so visitors can understand where the project works well, what it depends on, and what may change in future versions.
Current status
Publicly deployed; Google sign-in limited to approved test users while the OAuth app remains in testing mode. The current release demonstrates the core value of the project and the main end-to-end experience.
My role was product designer and frontend engineer, covering product specification, bangla-first interface design, local-first data model, google sheets synchronization, sharing workflow, pwa packaging, testing, and netlify deployment. The related case study explains the decisions and delivery process in greater depth for visitors who want the engineering story behind the product.