Month: January 2025

Almost a year ago, I announced we were ready for a first release of our new accounting software. However, the app just was not ready then. Testing turned up more bugs than expected. Too much important stuff was still undone. Also, building a finished app able to install on Mac and Windows machines proved to be harder than expected. There are extra hoops to jump through, these days.

After a extra year’s work, code quality is looking much better now. Almost everything important works like it should, and almost all serious bugs are zapped. Last week we fixed about 1000 minor compiler warnings. Most were trivial, but a few future mystery bugs lurked in there. Those are now zapped.

The past couple months our staff has focused on multi-user coding, and now Android. Soon iOS. We found a good subcontractor who is doing the hard stuff. What that is done, we probably will also hire him to set up the final builds for Mac and Windows apps. Most likely it will happen in 2 or 3 months. During that time our staff can do more testing, and iron out more wrinkles.

Being able to run business software on any combination of desktop, tablets and phones will be a big plus for TurtleSoft. Intuit and most other competitors have shifted to online “software as a service” systems. The monthly fees are great for their bottom line, but it leaves a gap that we can fill. Some small businesses will prefer to run locally with their data stored on their own desktops. If they can also use phones and cheap tablets at jobsites and on the road, all the better.

A year ago we assumed the first release would be an “alpha”. Something to look at, but not reliable enough to use long-term.  This year we’ll start with a “beta” release. Some lingering bugs for sure, but good enough to rely on day to day.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com

When thinking about computers, I like to compare them to automobiles. Both technologies have followed similar paths, with a gap of about 100 years.

Cars and computers started out big, slow and awkward: massive steam tractors in the 1850s and 60s; room-size mainframes in the 1950s and 60s.

Then came a half-century of innovation, much of it done by small start-ups. One round created useful vehicles to move people and goods faster than horses. The other built hardware and software to run a business, view cat videos, and do other amazing things with glowing rectangles.

Next was a couple decades of industry consolidation. For cars, most innovators either disappeared, or became brand names at General Motors or Ford. Computer hardware and software followed a similar path, boiling down to Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Adobe, Meta, Intuit.

Then came a long spell of bloat, perhaps because competition was gone. Cars grew chrome, fins and stylish updates, with little focus on being reliable transportation. With some exceptions (e.g. VW Beetle), 1920 to 1970 was filled with gas-guzzlers: dangerous on the road and hard to maintain.

It took a few more decades until cars turned into reliable transportation that just worked, without much fuss. My current Honda Fit is light-years more reliable than my first vehicle in the 70s: a Fix-Or-Repair-Daily pickup truck.

Computers are not doomed to follow the exact same path as cars, but they sure are in the bloated/mediocre stage now. TurtleSoft first faced that 20 years ago, as Apple migrated through chips, frameworks and programming languages. At first we kept up, but each change grew harder. Goldenseal 4.96 was the furthest we could go without a total rebuild.

Coding a 64-bit desktop accounting app was a long, failed slog, mostly because of poor quality tools from Apple and Microsoft. Qt, a surviving scrappy start-up, saved the day.

Right now we’re struggling to build accounting for Android. It relies on code from two other superpowers: Google and Oracle. Setup has been a version-matching nightmare. We still can’t get it to build apps on TurtleSoft computers, despite more than a week of trying. There are too many libraries necessary, and no instructions on how to get them working with each other.

We will persevere, but it’s not an easy task.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com

 

 

Our new accounting software now runs on Android tablets. It’s not even a reduced version: the GUI is almost identical to the desktop app. You can store your company file on the tablet, and use it just like a cheaper laptop. It’s also possible to keep your data on a desktop machine at the office, and sign on as an Internet client.

We haven’t tested the tablet version yet, to make sure it lives up to the promise. Our staff is still setting up Qt and Android so we can build the app here and run it. Setup is a complicated process. At the moment, all we have is a screen recording showing that the software works.

It may take a fair amount of testing and tweaking to get Android tablets to be crash-free. The app relies on at least 4 layers of code libraries, and they don’t always work well together. Even worse, Android doesn’t have much of a debugger, so we can’t step through the code to figure out problems. It may need much trial-and-error to get everything in order.

Work also is progressing on a phone version. That will be much simpler than the desktop and tablet versions. It only acts as a client, and only does one thing at a time. Getting phone accounting apps to be reliable will be much easier. They probably also will be used more often, simply because everyone has a smartphone in their pocket these days.

Next on the list is iOS apps to run on iPhone and iPad. With luck, programming those will go as smoothly as the Android project.

So far, Qt seems to be performing pretty well as a multi-platform development tool. There’s a lot to be said for writing code once, then having it run on 6 different types of hardware.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com