Feature

[Chris Lyttle]

On Thu, 2001-12-06 at 13:37, 'Mike' M Palczewski wrote:
> 
> 
> I have a feature that I would like to propose for gnucash. Instead of
> opening the registers in seperate windows, how about having them open the
> same way that the report windows open in the tabbed interface, and the ones
> that were open when you last opened gnucash would remain open later.
> Is anyone intereseted in such a feature?
> Did I explain it well?
> Would a patch implementing this be accepted?
> 

Personally I dont think this is a great idea from a UI perspective.
Tabbed views tend to be confusing as you are not visually separating
differing functions of the interface and it also makes it much harder to
do things like compare transactions in different accounts. Tabbed views
work great when you are using them for things like preferences, ie tasks
that have related functionality, even if the tab's do different things.
There is also a limit to how many tab's you can put on a view, once you
go past 6 or so it tends to make the view seem complicated even if each
tab by itself is relatively simple. I would argue for actually ditching
the tabbed view we currently have for having separate windows for
reports and the list of accounts view and leaving the window manager to
manage the document view. Having the report's (for eg) each in a
separate window would allow the user to compare differing information
from separate sources, thus allowing a balance sheet report to be
compared to a profit and loss statement visually.

Gnucash currently has many functionally distinct parts;

- The list of accounts view,
- The transaction register view (accounts),
- The reports view (html)
- The scheduled transaction setup view,
- The price/commodity editor view,
- The find transaction view (this is a good example of what having lots
of tabs in one window would look like)

There may be other parts that I've missed, like the thing's derek is
currently working on.

That being said, one approach to a single window view with multiple
functions that I've seen is MrProject. They separate each functional
area with a icon-sidebar that provides a nice visual clue to the user
that each is a distinct part.

http://mrproject.codefactory.se/
http://mrproject.codefactory.se/screenshots.php

Chris