Announcing GSoC project: User friendly UI for Gnucash

[Nitish]

Dear developers,

I would like to introduce myself. I am Nitish. I'm one of this year's
GSoC students in GnuCash [1]. My goal in this project is to create a new
improved user friendly UI for GnuCash using Qt. [2]

To explain in a few sentences. The project would allow a user to add
basic transactions using a friendly UI, and be able to see the overall
status in a view called First Person Overview (FPO). FPO would allow a
user to customize what accounts he/she would like to see in a single
window and be able to visually distinguish transactions from different
accounts. A FPO consists of one or more viewlets. A viewlet consists of
two columns, one containing transaction details and the other column
containing total amount of the particular account of the particular date
(might add more customisation options for amount column later).

My first steps were very promising and I like GUI programming in Qt. I
was already familiar with some concepts of Qt like signals and slots,
and since past few days I got familiar with Model/View framework in
Qt. I am still in the process of understanding how to deal with its
datatypes from C++ GUI code.

Currently I am coding up the basic data entry UI. This would allow a
user to easily and quickly add a basic two split transaction through a
form based interface (unlike current check book style). This should ease
beginners to the software to get started with accounting.

I'd like to invite every developer here to have a look at the progress
of my code. Some parts of the code will probably get committed into
gnucash's SVN sooner or later, but the actual development right now can
be observed in my github repository in the branch "txn-entry" [3]. Feel
free to pull from this repository, compile the cutecash code (as
described in [4]) from that branch and tell me what you think of this
development.

I would greatly appreciate pointers, tips on the commits I make (github
allows comments on individual commits). Especially when I could be using
some other and better Qt technique.

Looking forward to a fun and productive summer of code in the coming months.

Thanks and Regards,
Nitish

[1] http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2011-April/031836.html
[2] http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2011-March/031594.html
[3] https://github.com/nishmu/gnucash/commits/txn-entry
[4] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Cutecash