Goldenseal accounting/estimating software is 24 years old. It was designed for the smaller screens of the 90s and early 00s, with pixels at 72 dots per inch. Since then, screens grew bigger and pixels shrank. Expectations of what an app should look like also changed to suit the bigger space.
Our new accounting software needs to fudge Goldenseal’s layouts to make them look OK on modern hardware. It has code for most problems: text expands from 9 points to 12, fields get bigger. The approach is similar to the Magnify feature in Goldenseal, added in version 4.3 to solve the same issue.
Even with adjustments, layouts still looked cluttered. So we added code to shift the right column over by 10 pixels. Plus a few other tweaks. Sometimes Mac and Windows need different treatments.
The code hacks makes most screens look better, but some are still ugly. We’ll need to adjust those individually, using Custom Layouts. Our staff spent the past couple weeks improving it: the work is nearly complete. You now can export layouts to a text file or import them back. Most of the nifty tools are working.
Editing a text file looks like a decent way to tweak layouts. Every value has a label, and most make sense. We also made a few changes to improve the new text-based system.
About the only thing left unfinished is pictures and logos. We did most of the work for those last year, but it’s time to make a final version. I’ll talk more about that in a future post.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
