Our new accounting software now runs on Android tablets. It’s not even a reduced version: the GUI is almost identical to the desktop app. You can store your company file on the tablet, and use it just like a cheaper laptop. It’s also possible to keep your data on a desktop machine at the office, and sign on as an Internet client.
We haven’t tested the tablet version yet, to make sure it lives up to the promise. Our staff is still setting up Qt and Android so we can build the app here and run it. Setup is a complicated process. At the moment, all we have is a screen recording showing that the software works.
It may take a fair amount of testing and tweaking to get Android tablets to be crash-free. The app relies on at least 4 layers of code libraries, and they don’t always work well together. Even worse, Android doesn’t have much of a debugger, so we can’t step through the code to figure out problems. It may need much trial-and-error to get everything in order.
Work also is progressing on a phone version. That will be much simpler than the desktop and tablet versions. It only acts as a client, and only does one thing at a time. Getting phone accounting apps to be reliable will be much easier. They probably also will be used more often, simply because everyone has a smartphone in their pocket these days.
Next on the list is iOS apps to run on iPhone and iPad. With luck, programming those will go as smoothly as the Android project.
So far, Qt seems to be performing pretty well as a multi-platform development tool. There’s a lot to be said for writing code once, then having it run on 6 different types of hardware.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
