Dear developers, over the years the gnucash uservoice page http://gnucash.uservoice.com has collected quite a number of suggestions from users about features they would like to see in gnucash. By the "voting" feature of uservoice, those proposals are also in a meaningful ordering.
My assumption is that the vote numbers haven't been manipulated by single individuals (mostly because there hasn't been any incentive to do so), so I think the votes really reflect what "real users" really want. The interesting part in this story is that for new features, us developers tend to think only in terms of "what I want" (scratching my personal itch) and also "what is technically easily possible." However, those uservoice items tell the story in terms of "what a major part of our users want the most". I came to think we should listen to this voice, even when and specifically when those priorities contradict to our developer's ideas about the next new features. Here's the current Top 10 out of 220 items: #1 Transaction Classifications http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1543027 #2 Enable multi-user editing http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1541003 #3 Add Undo Functionality http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1542903 #4 Make it easier for users to work with alternative/non-ISO/private currencies. http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/2047887 #5 Inventory system (mini inventory) http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1540143 #6 Add the ability to attached scanned images to invoices. http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1535933 #7 More charting: Budget vs. Actual chart http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1539341 #8 Type ahead search when entering the accounts to a transaction http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1589607 #9 Better Budgeting http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1562955 #10 Allow the database to be secured by way of a password http://gnucash.uservoice.com/suggestions/1547269 HOWEVER: My thought on this is debatable. Let's take #10 as an example: We used to claim we don't want to do password protection, thus we silently declined this feature proposal so far. However, I want to challenge this our year-long response. If you read the uservoice item carefully, the request isn't about any real encryption. What's asked for is some sort of "mild blurring" so that other users of the same PC cannot directly access the money numbers. If we take this user seriously, we can very well add a feature for obscuring or blurring the data file and at the same time state clearly that we don't do any real encryption here. In my opinion this is something that we can indeed add as a feature. Alternatively, we should add some more honesty on the uservoice page. If requests such as #10 are considered a contradiction to gnucash's goals, we should really set the item on the uservoice page into the status "declined" and openly and clearly say that we don't want this behaviour in our project. But my point is that the uservoice feedback gives us a strong hint about the things that are really important to the users. Those are most likely different from what us developers considered important. I would love to see us taking the user's priorities seriously here. And by taking the user's needs seriously, we might also find that the implementation to meet this very needs can be chosen differently and maybe simpler than what we initially thought. In those cases where the "real user needs" can be fulfilled by relatively simple implementations, I'd like to see those implementations be added to gnucash. For this reason I think all 10 of the above are valid feature requests. We should try to get them implemented. Maybe not in the full-blown glory that some of the comments there were hoping for, but some parts of the features can be done and should be done. Regards, Christian _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
