Keyboard or mouse – it doesn’t matter!

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time making transaction entry in Prospects 1.2 user-friendly to both mouse users and keyboard users.  I am finally nearing the completion of that piece of code.  It took quite a while to nail down the workflow and get it just right where clicking, tabbing, typing – it all just feels natural and intuitive.  I went through many iterations of making the transfer and category entry in a single table column “make sense”…  I feel that the current version of Prospects isn’t clear as to how it works and how you can have both occur simultaneously.  (And yes, you can now unlink a transaction!)

So after quite a bit of work toiling with Apple’s built-in text completions, I eventually ended up rolling my own because, quite frankly, I just couldn’t make it behave exactly as I wanted.  The result is a very fast entry system that I think will work quite well for everyone.  If you use the keyboard, you never have to touch the mouse to work with the transactions.  If you use a mouse, you will find it as easy as it was before to pull down the category field and work with it.  And when editing categories, as they auto-complete you can press the colon key “:” to complete the current category and jump right to the sub-categories.

This is just one of the improvements in the “workflow” to keep things efficient and intuitive in Prospects 1.2.  I’ve included a few screenshots to show how this new functionality looks:

The new category column:

Clicking the arrows in the column or pressing F5 (Apple’s standard auto-completion key) or the space bar when the field is empty pops up the complete category list:

As you begin typing, the list changes to the categories that match:

Thanks for reading…

Mike