I just wish Alt+down dropped the calendar part down, like it drops down the list in the combo boxes. The date input field works well enough: each day/month/year component of the date is a separate input field, and you can use up/down, home/end on each to get the result you’d expect (although the home key on the year part gives you 1601, and the end key, 9999 – LOL). There are a couple of things that jar here though. (I’ll also note the title is “Add transaction” which belies the menu option name.) In particular the tabbing works as you’d expect, and the buttons have titles with underlined letters (“Save” is the default button so just works with the Enter key). As a dialog layout, it works well enough for me although I’ll admit I kind of miss Money’s separate dialogs for withdrawals, deposits, and transfers. (That’s what it’s named in the menu.) So why is it not “New” instead of “Add”? Why are there no hints, like I explained/expected? (There are no mouse hover text hints anywhere that I could find.) Why does the tab key not work as you’d expect from other apps?
Ctrl+A? Nope, that selects all the transactions. (Seriously?) Hover over it with the mouse cursor to show a text hint? Nope, nothing happens. Tab only navigates between the transaction grid and the Search box in the top left corner. Any guesses what the keyboard shortcut for it is? There’s no clue (a letter underlined, for example). When you look at the account transaction page, there’s a button at the top labeled “Add”.
After a couple of uses of the app, I have to reset the main window size. Start the app up again, and – boom – it’s shrunk.Įxample: I set the main window to show the total with a bit of white space underneath on the Accounts page, and to be able to easily see the Cleared tick boxes on the right for a specific account. Close the app down (and you assume, since every other app does, that the app makes a note of the size of the main window). Say you’re using the app, and you resize the main window to a size you can work with. This issue is particularly annoying and frankly bizarre (I know of no other app that I use regularly that does this): the app doesn’t consistently maintain the main window’s size. I shall be using screenshots from the demo file that’s supplied with Moneyspire to illustrate them.įirst up, the main window itself. I’ve been using it for a month now, so I’ve had plenty of time to make a list of issues with that user experience. So, it should come as no surprise then that this post is all about Moneyspire’s user interface, its user experience if you like, and, in particular, its shortcomings. We spend a lot of time in the design phase, working out how a particular control should work, not only from the programmer’s viewpoint, but also – and more importantly in my view – from the user’s. Controls like menus, ribbons, grids, charts, dashboards, reporting, what have you. In my main job, I work for DevExpress, a company that designs and writes user interface components for other programmers to use in creating the visual aspect to their applications. (This post follows on from a couple of earlier ones, one, two, as I seek to replace Microsoft Money for my personal financial accounts.)
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