Our staff looked at 600 possible names for the new accounting software. The first were turtle-based, then other reptiles. Then we brainstormed more business-y ideas.
13% of the names already had websites. 20% belonged to squatters trying to sell their domain name for a profit. 25% were dead links, blank pages or “under construction”. The remaining 42% just need a small fee to use.
Seven of the names seem very good. They’re snappy and appropriate, with open URLs and trademarks. Inside the app, we saved them into a text resource, then added code to show them randomly in the window title. We’ll test all the names in training videos and on the new website for a week or two. Once it’s clear which works best for daily use, we’ll get it registered and trademarked.
The new text resource was right next to lists of currency symbols, weekday and month names, and one/two/three number names. Goldenseal uses those for currency formats, date displays and spell-outs on bank checks and contracts. Most are obsolete.
Back when we first wrote the Goldenseal code, all formatting had to be done from scratch. It took a few months of programmer time: dates and currencies are complicated, especially for international users. Besides that, Goldenseal had to move all the text into RAM at startup. Otherwise, screen redraws took a few seconds while they checked the disk to decide whether to use $ or €, and where to put months and days.
Nowadays, every OS has built-in international settings that handle the quirks of money, date, time and number formats. Also, everything is 1000x faster, so data rarely needs to be cached in RAM. We already replaced some of the old formatting code, but this week we cleared out the rest of it. Letting the OS handle dates, currency and numbers is easier and better.
Number spell-out for check printing still must be done by hand. There’s no system call to change $15.25 into “fifteen and 25/100 dollars”. That code needed a partial rewrite: text resources are different, and money has changed. Goldenseal stores pennies and dollars as separate numbers, but the new accounting app uses a single 64-bit value. The new format allows smaller fractions (1/1000 penny instead of 1/100), and bigger dollars (800 billion instead of 2 billion).
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
