Idears for improving the Busines GUI

[Christof Donat]

Hi,

> >> > - Have another tab in the main window like for the reports called
> >> > something like 'customers & suppliers'.
> Or perhaps your English confused me and I assumed that you meant Menu
> Item just like the Report menu.

Sorry. English is not my native language. I really meant a tab.

> You could always create a "Customer List
> Report" which would show up as a tab just like any other report.

The point is that I could not work in that report (edit the contents). 
Everything else like red color, etc. can of course be done in a report.

> The problem is the lack of a phrase-wheel widget.  I've got an
> implementation in python, but I don't know python and don't want to
> learn python.

Generally Python is rather straight forward to read. I can have a try 
transfering it into C code if you send it to me.

> The "Receivable Aging" report tells you this now.  It's easy to see
> who hasn't paid based on which customers are listed in the report.  If
> they're not listed, they don't owe you anything.  Then you can see
> which columns are non-zero.

With a rather small ammount of customers like in my case, that report is less 
easy to survey than a list with all cutomers that never change in position 
but in color. As I said earlier I looked at the UI with my use cases in the 
head: A small ammount of customers and mostly rather similar invioces and 
bills every month, quarter or year.

> See above re: phrase wheel.  Beyond that I don't see how entering an
> invoice is any harder than entering in a bunch of transactions.

It's not entering one invioce but entering five or ten nearly equal invoices 
because the month has ended and the Customers get their monthly invoices. If 
that was like entering a bunch of multipart transactions it would be a lot 
faster to do. I think of one multipart transaction for one Invoice for that 
comparison.

> Sorry, I just don't buy this argument.  You're comparing a context
> menu to the top-level menu; that's comparing apples and avocados.

Well, that was my point. OK, I never use the main menu for stuff I canget 
through the Context menu. Maybe it is really just my personal problem. 

> Also, adding customer-specific
> items to the account-tree context menu WOULD be inconsistent!

I dind't whant to add it to the account-tree. That Context Menu was menat for 
in the List of Customers and Suppliers I talked about In my first mail.

> IMNSHO we've done an excellent job of making data entry fairly
> straightforward and intuitive.

No doubt about that. I wouldn't use GNUcash if there was anything better. But 
should that keep us from thinking if that could be improved?

Christof