Our new Goldenseal Pro accounting software is moving into the home stretch. Everything big is done, but there are still plenty of medium and small things to finish.
Right now, our staff is working on lists. Goldenseal includes about 70 of them. They handle all sorts of little details: job cost categories, payroll tax tables, sales tax rates, etc.
In general, lists are simpler than regular business records. Some are just a name, and the others have only a few fields. Because of their simplicity, lists were the first things we worked on, back in 2016 when we first started the conversion to Cocoa (on Macintosh) and MFC (on Windows). Since then, the rest of the software interface has gotten ahead of the lists, so it’s time to catch up.
The current version of Goldenseal has lists scattered all over the place. Most are in submenus, under 12 different menu commands. It’s not always easy to find them. Originally, we planned to just duplicate the interface in our current accounting and estimating software. However, both Windows and Mac are moving away from top-bar menus, and putting controls inside the window instead. So, Goldenseal Pro still does the same stuff, but in just one window rather than many.
Goldenseal Pro already uses an outline view for navigation (similar to how you can organize your desktop files). With it, you can find accounts and business transactions more easily. We just put the lists there too. Now they are located near the business transactions that use them.
Back in 2016, the database code was still primitive. The list interface we wrote back then could show list records, but it didn’t make new ones, or save changes. Now that works, also. All that’s left are a few list quirks that need special treatment.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
