An alternative GUI, a detailed proposal - GSOC 2011

[Christian Stimming]

Dear Nitish,

Am Sonntag, 3. April 2011 schrieb Nitish Kumar:
> Thank you Christian, I have posted it on the GSoC website.
> 
> *    jsled talked about making registers default to auto-split. It does
> give a clear picture by showing all the sub-transactions involved right
> next to the main transaction which is responsible for invoking all the sub
> transactions in the ledger. I think having a consolidated ledger as though
> about earlier in the mockup does make it very clear.

Where did a suggestion from "jsled" come from? Josh left the project some time 
ago (as usual in volunteer projects - there was not a problem with this) so I 
guess the comment is probably rather old. If you think about the best default 
view mode of a register, I think there are many opinions available. For 
example, I myself like the single-line view mode the most, and would *not* 
like auto-split as default. But that's why the default can be chosen through 
the options anyway.

> *    Talking about the auto-suggest feature. It can help in data entry
> speed. But apart from it, since the keywords are registered in a database
> (for example, or xml), it can be used to analyse a particular set of item.
> What I mean is, currently GnuCash offers an excellent way to generate
> report and analyse the activity of a particular "account". By using
> auto-suggest keywords we can produce even better in-depth reports of
> individual items. What are your thoughts about it?  There are many
> non-intrusive ways to collect the keywords.

There are surely good reasons for a better handling of keywords or tags and 
also the auto-suggest / auto-completion feature. However, I think a good 
design in this area is highly non-trivial. I would suggest to pick this up 
later in the summer, but not in the beginning.

Best Regards,

Christian