I dropped out of Cornell in 1971, bought some empty land and moved there. It was something that people did at the time. The house started out weird and cheap: plywood, fresh-cut maple poles, tar paper, pentagonal. A dirt floor to start but soon, concrete. Wood stove for heat and cooking.
From there, I gradually learned real construction. Partly from turning the shack into a saleable home, and partly from handyman work for new professors and anyone else willing to hire me. The most helpful was a cranky old ex-do-it-yourselfer, wheelchair-bound from a stroke. He talked me through all sorts of stuff, and complained about his wife and kids a lot.
Eventually, I was experienced enough to start quoting fixed-price jobs rather than hourly. First painting, then concrete slabs, then roofing, then full-scale remodeling. Working that way was riskier, but more lucrative. The rules of thumb for those estimates later became MacNail estimating software.
When you work for a fixed amount, you soon get very efficient at cranking stuff out as fast as possible. Save a few seconds here and there, and there will be more $$ at the end of the day. The same math applies to software projects also.
Our staff did the first 3 action dialogs one at a time. That kinda made sense. Reconcile is not like the others. Pay Bills was the first to have a separate window that pops up when you double-click on a line. Deposit Funds needed drastic surgery.
For the rest, it was time to treat them as piece work, and speed things up.
There are 10 or 15 steps needed to format each dialog in Qt, then link it to the existing Goldenseal code. We did step 1 for all of them. Pretty much the same stuff over and over, so it went much faster. After that, on to step 2 for every dialog. Etcetera. Most of it is just copy/paste of existing code, then rewriting what’s different. Already the work is almost half done.
There’s also a new workstation, set up with shelves and two monitors. The current Goldenseal is on the right, and TurtleSoft Pro runs the same file on the left. The process of testing and fixing has begun.
There still is much work left to do. In some areas we finished barely enough to make sure the interface was possible in Qt. Now it’s time to get all the small details working.
How long will it take to finish? It’s still too hard to estimate that. A year with Qt has given more progress than the 3 years spent with Cocoa and Objective-C. And that happened during a pandemic, with an office move in the middle. So it probably will be a matter of months, not years.
As we get further along, it will grow easier to predict a completion date.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
