Month: July 2023

Our staff looked at 600 possible names for the new accounting software. The first were turtle-based, then other reptiles. Then we brainstormed more business-y ideas.

13% of the names already had websites. 20% belonged to squatters trying to sell their domain name for a profit. 25% were dead links, blank pages or “under construction”. The remaining 42% just need a small fee to use.

Seven of the names seem very good. They’re snappy and appropriate, with open URLs and trademarks. Inside the app, we saved them into a text resource, then added code to show them randomly in the window title.  We’ll test all the names in training videos and on the new website for a week or two. Once it’s clear which works best for daily use, we’ll get it registered and trademarked.

The new text resource was right next to lists of currency symbols, weekday and month names, and one/two/three number names. Goldenseal uses those for currency formats, date displays and spell-outs on bank checks and contracts. Most are obsolete.

Back when we first wrote the Goldenseal code, all formatting had to be done from scratch. It took a few months of programmer time: dates and currencies are complicated, especially for international users. Besides that, Goldenseal had to move all the text into RAM at startup. Otherwise, screen redraws took a few seconds while they checked the disk to decide whether to use $ or €, and where to put months and days.

Nowadays, every OS has built-in international settings that handle the quirks of money, date, time and number formats. Also, everything is 1000x faster, so data rarely needs to be cached in RAM. We already replaced some of the old formatting code, but this week we cleared out the rest of it. Letting the OS handle dates, currency and numbers is easier and better.

Number spell-out for check printing still must be done by hand. There’s no system call to change $15.25 into “fifteen and 25/100 dollars”. That code needed a partial rewrite: text resources are different, and money has changed. Goldenseal stores pennies and dollars as separate numbers, but the new accounting app uses a single 64-bit value. The new format allows smaller fractions (1/1000 penny instead of 1/100), and bigger dollars (800 billion instead of 2 billion).

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com

Last week I used Goldenseal to make a construction estimate for a grand old house in Binghamton NY. It had solid brick walls, R value about 2. To avoid huge heat bills, it needed foam insulation, lots of trim futzing, and moving or replacing radiators. Plus other white elephant repairs.

That was the first time I used our estimating software since the beginning of the pandemic. Sadly, real estate is still hot around here and I was outbid. It won’t be the new home for TurtleSoft.

Looking up current material prices for the work was a revelation.

The bad news is, many Cost Items in Goldenseal are badly outdated. Joint compound now is 4.5 gallons not 5, so Assemblies need an adjustment. Drywall has more options. Some product names are defunct. All material prices are way off.

The good news is, it’s so much easier to update material prices these days. All it takes is a quick search on the Home Depot or Lowes websites.

Goldenseal was built for the pre-website world. Back then you printed a list, begged a local lumber yard to fill it in, then typed in new pricing. By the mid-90s, a few local suppliers offered text files with current prices, so we added a system to match our Cost Items to their codes. It was only slightly easier.

We just added new URL text fields to Cost Item records. It’s step one for automatic price updates via the Internet.

To make it work, we need to write C++ code to parse their html and fetch the price amount. The process will be different for each website. It’s a feature that we’ll add at some future date, after the new app is released and mature.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com

Our new accounting software now runs properly on all three platforms: newer Macs with ARM chips, older Macs with Intel, and Windows. They all can convert Goldenseal files to the new format. We had to rewrite more of the old NeoAccess database code to make that work.

Our staff is now set up to test on every Mac OS from Mojave to Ventura, plus Windows 10 and 11. The new app may run on older systems, but we won’t test it any further back.

We’ve also transitioned from programming to marketing: finishing the website, making videos. At the same time it’s a chance test every detail, and fix any lingering bugs. Then we’ll start paying the annual Qt license fee, and build a beta version to distribute.

Just like the current Goldenseal, the final app will be a single icon to install on your drive. But that’s a lie. Apps actually are packages, with many folders and files hidden inside. Some of it is source code, turned into machine language. Also included are text resources, pictures, layouts for windows and data fields, sounds, etc.

On the Mac, you can see the guts inside any app: just right-click on the icon and choose Show Package Contents. Windows has a more complex packaging system that requires specialty apps to view.

While setting up new computers for testing and debugging, we ran into the down side of packages. There are two apps we use to program on Macs: Qt Creator with 500,000 files packed inside, and Xcode with 750,000. Installing or deleting each of them can take an hour plus because they are so big. We used Force Quit in the middle of one Xcode deletion. It corrupted the file system so badly that the disk needed a total wipe and system re-install. Oops.

Apple and Microsoft are both getting more fussy about app security. There are more hoops to jump through. That’s something we’ll be dealing with between now and the first release.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com