Last October, TurtleSoft hired a subcontractor to write networking code for our new accounting software. It was a three-part contract: first for desktop, then for Android phones and tablets, then for iPhone and iPad.
The desktop part finished in December. It lets multiple users access the same file over a LAN (local area network), similar to what Goldenseal does. Even better, it also works over the Internet. Connect a laptop to Wifi, enter the IP address for the server machine, and it’s just like you’re at home.
Part two of the contract was to build a prototype app to run on Android. That just finished last week, much later than expected.
The good news is that we probably can run the full desktop app on Android tablets, plus a smaller, simpler version on Android phones. The bad news is that programming it will be hard. Getting Qt, Android and Java to play nice with each other is no easy task.
Part three of the contract starts next: building a similar prototype for iPad and iPhone. Hopefully it will be easier.
The projects for mobile devices were mostly just “proof of concept”. We wanted to see if they could work at all, how they would feel to use, and how hard they’d be to program. Final work on them will wait until the desktop version is released and stable.
Meanwhile, testing on the desktop app still turns up up plenty of bugs. We used it full-time to run our own business for a while, but had to revert and re-enter a couple weeks of purchases and sales, all because of a serious bug in bank transactions. They were missing some important data that only showed up when we added running totals to the display.
If the iOS project goes quickly enough, we plan on a first public release of the new accounting software for Mac and Windows desktops, soon after it’s done. If iOS bogs down as much as Android, then we’ll launch the desktop version before it finishes.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com