Our staff has been busy hooking up right-click menus in our new accounting software. They’re a great way to add new and old features.
Add to Favorites is the best so far. It lets you pick which records are visible when you first open the app.
Our current Goldenseal accounting shows each type of records in a separate window. The app remembers their positions when you quit/exit. In theory, you can put Material Purchase in one corner, Estimates in another, etc. That way you’ll know exactly where to find them.
In practice, the interface probably will drive you nuts. Windows keep piling up, until you go on a rampage and close them all. Then, the cycle repeats. Every day, more clutter. For years we’ve been meaning to improve that interface. Now’s the chance. TurtleSoft Pro only remembers what you want it to remember. KISS.
The top bar had some empty space, so we added a Navigate button. It starts out with a few useful links: the About dialog, Help window and Startup Guide from Goldenseal. It took a couple days apiece to get those working. Most likely we’ll add more stuff there, later.
One Goldenseal user turned their Startup Guide into a simple navigation window, with big buttons to open the most common records. It seemed handy, so we’ll add a new Navigator view to TurtleSoft Pro. Another way to get around easily.
We also added tool tips: short help text that appears when you hover over a field. Goldenseal shows the text over on the left, but the new app puts it right below the field. It’s a smidgen better.
Looking to the future, Qt has a QTextBrowser class. It will let us add clickable hyperlinks inside the app. Right now the help window only has plain text, but we eventually it will link it to YouTube videos and pages on turtlesoft.com. We’ll also use QTextBrowser for some data fields, so you can paste links into records.
In general, the new accounting app has plenty of growth potential. After the first version is out, we can add emojis, formatted text, and other built-in features. The advantage of using a framework like Qt is that many improvements won’t require a lot of programming. Someone else has already done most of the grunt work.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
