We plan to abandon or delay a few Goldenseal features, when we update to the new accounting software. Please let us know if you adore any of them, and don’t want to see them go.
Import and Export: Export in the File menu saves data to a text file. It can move the entire company file, or parts. Import reads text, and adds records to Goldenseal. The commands helped us to save sample data before version 1.0. They also came in handy for everyone when the file format changed in 2001. We haven’t used import/export since then. Probably ditto for other users. Rather than take a few weeks to update the interface, it seems better to just retire the commands. Instead, you can make a report, then click Save As Text.
Fonts: Goldenseal uses an ID number for fonts. That is how Mac OS 9 managed them. It worked OK when choosing from a dozen basic fonts. These days, PCs come with hundreds of font families. There’s no good way to number them, so modern systems refer to fonts by name. They can swap in something similar if the requested font is missing. We will add modern font-handling and Unicode in a future rewrite of Custom Layouts. Until then, all text will be Arial. Maybe we can add a hack to offer a few more fonts, but it’ll be better to wait and do it right.
Date/Number Formats: The first release of TurtleSoft Pro will ignore most custom formats for dates and numbers. That’s another thing that needs the new Custom Layouts. Qt is good at international formats, and we can take advantage of that. They also have an auto-translate feature that may let us release versions in Spanish, French and other languages.
Payment Receipts: Goldenseal 1.0 came with an optional transaction to print sales receipts. It was an extra step in between Sales or Billing Records, and bank deposits. Then we added receipt printing direct from the sale or project bill, so Payment Receipts were disabled in 2005. Records in that class will not be imported into TurtleSoft Pro. It may cause error messages if you work with ancient sales records, but the removal won’t do anything worse.
Web Visits: TurtleSoft used these for a while to track raw traffic to our website. It showed the truth about pay-per-click ads: 99% were bots or third world click farms. After that, logging wasn’t worth the effort. Web Visits will disappear unless we hear otherwise.
Multi-User: The first release will only be single-user. Networking needs a total rewrite, and it’s too much to tackle now. Multi-user will be a high priority once the basic version is out.
Time Tracking: I’m pretty sure this feature didn’t survive the update to Mac OS X. It’s only practical over a network, so it won’t be in the first release. Employee time tracking will be much more useful when you can log in from a phone app. Once we have a few of those set up, it will come back.
Chart of Accounts: The very first accounting interface for Goldenseal had a screen full of account icons. You could drag money bags between them. It was cute, but awkward to actually use. We renamed the window to Chart of Accounts, and exiled it to the top of the View menu. Its code is a tangled mess, from a programmer who wrote spaghetti. This is the last of his work that hasn’t been rewritten or removed. Unless we hear a whole lotta love, it’s gone forever.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
