I skipped something important in the Traveling Sales Rep post. Calculating the shortest path to visit a list of cities is a hard, NP-Hard problem. Finding a “good enough” answer is much easier.
For example, a PC would need 12,000 years to calculate the very shortest road trip to all lower-48 state capitals. But, 20 minutes run time with a simple AI is enough to find a pretty good US capitals loop. It’s the civic way to see the USA! 9 days drive time.
There probably is a shorter path that hits them all. Problem is, if you wait 12 millennia to calculate the perfect route, Providence RI may be under the ocean, and/or Montpelier VT may be under a glacier.
Meanwhile this week, TurtleSoft got a pleasant surprise from the new accounting software.
A while back we decided to postpone Custom Layouts. It’s not something that users need very often. However, the delay will cause problems for training videos, which we plan to make during final testing.
Screen layouts carried over from Goldenseal are the snag. In the new app, some of their fields and captions overlap. Others are off by a few pixels. It’s because Qt fields are not built exactly the same as the ones from CodeWarrior. Also, newer fonts are a bit wider. The screens are usable, but kinda ugly.
We added code to tweak the worst of the problems. That made the screens look good enough for a first user release. Not perfect, but we could tidy up later.
However, if the layouts are going to sit on the Internet for years to come, even being slightly ugly is a problem. Imperfections really irk some people. A two-minute video takes an hour of futzing, so we don’t want to re-shoot anything. That means it needs to look perfect from the start.
Rather than spend more time tweaking appearances with code, our staff took another stab at Custom Layouts. Surprise, surprise, the new version was closer to being done that we thought. After a couple days of debugging, it works! Now it can adjust data entry screens so they look great in the new accounting app, and in the videos.
Even better, the new layout format saves as text, rather than binary. It’s easier to debug and improve. Also, the text format can store new-style fonts, plus file paths to graphics or other documents. That’s two more things that can make it into the first release. Scratch them off the list of delayed features.
It took 2 or 3 programmer-years to build Custom Layouts for Goldenseal. Half that time was for the many bells and whistles it has. I’m sure we won’t get all of those into the first version of TurtleSoft Pro, but we can add the more useful ones.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
