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I was sitting in my living room not too long ago, wondering what the
one thing Linux was desperately missing that would bring it to the
forefront of human consciousness and make it eternally useful to the
masses. As I sat around watching my free TV programming, reading a
newspaper I had taken from my neighbor's front lawn, eating a meal my
mom was cooking, it hit me. Money makes the world go 'round, I'm told
they say. And what is the one thing Linux doesn't have? That's it, a
useful and reliable corporate messaging and workflow program. But
other than that, it lacks a certain little program I like to call
QHacc. So without further ado, I sat down and wrote QHACC--The Q
Home Accountant. Now, Linux is complete. (Well, completer, at
least.)
No, It's not called Q because missiles shoot out of your screen, or
entering transactions into it automatically makes the user fly out of
his or her chair with a jolt of a billion volts a la James Bond
(although that would be pretty neat!). It's called Q because it was
developed using the Qt Toolkit
from Troll Tech. Like Qt and Linux in general, QHacc is free for download and modification. The terms of use are
outlined in the GPL
The main reason I decided to write QHacc was because I've tried using
some of the competing programs out there, and I had a devil of a time
getting them to compile and run reliably. Then, some of them have a
list of requirements longer than my freakishly long gorilla-like arm
(not to be confused with my normal-sized other arm). So, I figured the
best solution was to reject the whole situation and write my own. I
use it myself. It works well, and doesn't lose data, which I've always
considered good. Maybe some others of you will find it just the thing.
QHacc was designed with no principles whatsoever. In fact, one time
while I was coding, I gave to a charity that I just know was going to
use the money to buy crack. I mean, the the name of the charity was
Crack for Kids, for heaven's sake! You'd think I would have caught on
quicker...
To be fair, there were one or two principles by which I stuck. The
most important one for me was keeping the interface mouseless. Sure,
you can use a mouse with the program (it's a windowed program, after
all), but I tried to make everything accessible solely from the
keyboard, too. This means you can add transactions, or create
accounts, or reconcile balances, all without picking up a mouse, which
is good if you're like me, and your mouse works great, except that you
can't find the little rolling ball part. Unfortunately, I haven't been
able to maintain this perfectly--you cannot use memorized transactions
without a mouse. Sorry. I can think of a couple ways to get around
this, but it seems clunky to me, so I haven't. Please forgive me.
I also tried to keep everything simple. If you think this is a Quicken replacement, you've another
thought coming! QHacc won't warn you before you delete the account
that has all your mortgage payments in it. It'll let you make multiple
accounts with the same name. It follows my ideology exclusively--you
are old enough to know what you're doing, and you probably don't need
or want a computer to nag you. Along these same lines, there aren't
any extra requirements to install and run QHacc. You don't need a
special graphics library for the graphs (although my abilities are
sorely lacking), or a special plugin for help (there isn't much
help).
Probably the last design principle (I know I said there would only be
two, but I didn't expect The Spanish
Inquisition!) was that the file formats should be conspicuously
obvious. All transactions and accounts are stored in plain old text
files with no non-printable characters or squirrelly formats. The
truth is, I'm not really a windowing person at all. I love the command
line, and I figure there might be an occasion when you want to write a
perl script to do inserts for you, or
a shell script, or maybe you won't be near an X station and you need
to know whether check #134 was for potato chips, or a deposit into
your IRA. So, everything is out in the open.
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