Giving up on Gnucash

[Derek Atkins]

Alex,

Quoting Alex Kohl <alextedkohl at yahoo.com>:

[snip] 
> Perhaps a concrete example would help. Let us look at
> "Bug 144383: font size?" which has been open in NEW
> status since 2004-06-15. I can barely read the text in
> GnuCash on my 17 inch monitor. One would think that
> there would be some sort of option to control the size
> of the font. I would personally think that this would
> be present in version 1.0. But apparently this is not
> as high a priority as OFX Direct Connect or embedding
> Scheme scripts inside of GnuCash. Not all of us have
> 21 inch monitors or 21 year old eyes. If I can't read
> my reports they aren't of much use.

The problem here is that gnucash is still a gnome 1.4 app, so you need a
gnome-1.4 control-center to change the font.  It's not been "fixed" because
there's not a good way to fix it in the current code, and the problem will
automatically get fixed with the g2 port.
 
> Another problem is that in the Accounts Payable
> register the vendor column takes up an enormous amount
> of space and can't be resized (except to make it
> larger.) I can't read the Transfer column or (horror!)
> the Debit column. How am I supposed to get anything
> done if I can't figure out how much money is moving
> around? Every time I try to resize the vendor column
> it just bounces back.

This isn't just A/P -- the issue is that the register chooses one column as the
auto-expand column.  The way to work around this "bug" is to first expand the
transfer column (beyond the size of the window) and then you can reduce the
size of the vendor column.  This is discussed in the FAQ.
 
> I wish I could believe that GnuCash were ready for
> public consumption but I would just be fooling myself.
> Until GnuCash, and free software in general, decides
> to tackle those issues that are important to those who
> use the software as opposed to those who enjoy writing
> it Microsoft, Intuit and other for-profit writers of
> proprietary software will continue to dominate.

Keep in mind that you get what you pay for.  I personally will give you triple
your money back for every cent you paid to acquire and use GnuCash (donations
don't count).  :)

Seriously... remember that nobody is paid one cent to work on GnuCash.  Give us
a budget of $1MM/year and I'm sure we could give you a product as good as
Quicken or others.  But with a volunteer effort (and fewer than one real
man-developer over a half-dozen devs) there's only so much you can get done.

Sorry you're leaving.  Good Luck,

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available