Making a fancy main window like our competitor :)

[Rob Browning]

Robert Graham Merkel <rgmerk@mira.net> writes:

> I haven't seen it myself - Bill, Rob B, and Linas have, and they
> think it's a good idea, and the idea of letting the user set up what
> financial information they'd like to see by default when they start
> up GnuCash seems like a good idea.

Further, the current "chart of accounts" is not only not flexible, but
it's arguably not even giving you correct information (Carol pointed
out that the values there don't follow the accounting equation unless
you mentially factor in income - expense as unrealized equity).

In general, we'd just like to make the reporting system (using the
word "report" in a fairly broad sense here) much richer, and then
treat the main window (and perhaps other windows you might want handy)
as "live reports".

For example, it might be a lot more useful to many people to have in
the main window contain a few subtotals showing summary values for
their overall finances, a few crucial stock quotes, and perhaps a set
of links to their main account registers rather than a giant list of
all their accounts.

This would also allow us to add something like a much clearer
"brokerage" window, etc.

Hopefully you get the idea.

> You're absolutely right, though - you don't just blindly copy the
> features of your competitor's product.  That's what got us commercial
> bloatware in the first place.

No argument here.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930