Goldenseal Pro now connects from the database to the display windows, which is where our previous contractor got “stuck”. It was very exciting, the first time it showed a list of categories!
The Goldenseal app includes several hundred layout resources, used for data entry screens, reports and printed forms. In the original Goldenseal they were stored as resources, embedded in the application file. The modern approach is to store them as separate files, hidden in an ‘application bundle’. So we wrote some one-time code to translate all the layouts to the new style. Now we are working on the code that reads them, and sets up the fields and buttons on-screen. Getting that to work is the biggest task in the whole project, and it probably will take a few weeks to complete.
At every design step, we need to decide where to draw the line between Cocoa and our existing C++, but we are using Cocoa as much as possible. It means rewriting more code, and spending more time learning the ins and outs of Apple’s framework, but it ought to result in a better interface (and better compatibility with future OS versions). We used a pure-Cocoa setup for the list of categories, and it seemed worth the extra effort.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
Turtlesoft.com
