Our new estimating/accounting software now prints invoices. It prints reports. It prints paychecks and regular checks. Yippee!
QTextEdit seemed like it might be a magic bullet for printing, but it wasn’t. So we had to do things the hard way. After a few days of trial and error, printing finally worked OK for reports. After that, our staff completely rewrote the code for printed forms. It was mostly obsolete, and overly complicated. Luckily, a few bits were salvageable, and forms are similar to reports. It didn’t take long. Now the code is clean and simple.
There still are a few printing bugs, but nothing serious. The hardest work is done. It coulda been a whole lot worse.
With that out of the way, our staff has moved on to a long list of small tweaks and bug fixes. Actually, there is no list. We try stuff, fix what’s broken, then move on a bit further. On a good day, the process zaps 5 medium-sized problems or 20 little ones.
Some of the bugs are just ugly screens. Pixel sizes, fonts and window controls have all changed since we wrote Goldenseal. We still read the old-style layouts, but tweak them in code to look better.
Some bugs are workflow. It takes effort to make all the functions move smoothly for daily use. Our software is more complicated than most apps. There are multiple screens doing different things. Some of them link to each other. Juggling all possible paths takes time to polish.
Many bugs are there because code changed above or below them. Over the past 7 years our staff rewrote all the interface code in Goldenseal, plus the database and many basic classes (array lists, text strings, money values, etc). Sometimes that caused fallout that we only discover during testing.
Right now we are testing the Find command. Goldenseal has a design flaw that is fixed in the new version. In the current app, Find uses the regular data entry fields and changes their function. Rarely, it goes wrong somehow and zaps a record or creates a dud. It happens to us once or twice a year, but we never have tracked down where/how it happens. The new software puts Find in a separate panel, so records won’t fail like that. But, it’s a different design. It has new and improved ways to fail. On top of that, some search code was zapped by changes in strings and money.
How long until the new accounting app is ready to release? Still too hard to tell. In another month or so we’ll have a better guess.
There are a few features that won’t be in the first release. Networking is the toughest nut left to crack. We won’t tackle that until after the single-user version is ready to go. Custom Layouts will only have a bare-bones set of features in the first version, if it’s there at all. Printing of mailing labels probably will wait for a future update (unless someone really begs us for it). That was added for TurtleSoft use, but our last bulk mailing was in 2012. Email and web are cheaper and easier now.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
