Our staff spent most of last week making layouts look better in our new accounting software. Screens are wider these days, so we put more space between fields, and enlarged them a bit.
Over the past year, our staff already added tweaks here and there, for things that looked really bad. The problem was, they were in several different places. Sometimes a new fix would break an old one, or make things worse. Sometimes it would just not work. So we moved everything into one place: AdjustPaneForPro. It tweaks the current layouts from Goldenseal, but won’t touch anything in future updates.
Getting printing to line up was especially frustrating. No matter what we did, things stayed wacky. We finally tracked down and removed all the printing tweaks. With those gone, printed forms looked OK again, but too small. A simple multiplier of 1.33 was all it took to fill the page properly. I have no idea why Qt needs that adjustment. A few small tweaks after that, and it now prints decent business forms.
The first release won’t have a way to edit layouts. That’s why we are doing so much fiddling. It lets us keep using layouts from Goldenseal. Fonts, pictures, colors and text are very different, these days. It will take several months to deal with all the changes. Better to tackle them in the version 5.1 update.
Anyhow, the tweaks are worth the the time it takes to code them. Setting up the layouts for data entry screens, printed forms and reports took a full person-year of work in the 90s. We don’t want to do that all over again. A few lines of code to move every popup by a couple pixels is a lot easier than doing it by hand.
TurtleSoft finally has started to use the new app to run our own business. Right now, everything happens twice: once in the new app, then again in Goldenseal. If they don’t match, we fix it.
There still are bugs and unfinished items. But, the code is far enough along that we can rewrite it fast enough to keep up with daily business.
There still is one last, big thing that hasn’t even been started in the new accounting software: networking. Like almost everything else, the old code was obsolete.
Qt has good networking classes, so the new version will be much better. Users will be able to sign in over the Internet. Future small phone apps will also connect. We are talking with subcontractors now, to help speed things up.
The multi-user versions probably will be ready at the same time as the rest of the app. Best guess still is late 2022.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
