Saturday, April 28, 2012

No Linux version

I switched my desktop computers to Linux about 2 years ago. Everything works fine, even hardware support is now great.

Of course, QHIM does not run on Linux. It runs so crappy on Windows, why would I expect more. I wish I could easily switch to some other program if only it would allow me to import my inventory database from Quicken (2000+ items).

A friend of mine advised me to try running it under Wine, but it does not really work. Apparently, all the custom UI stuff I wrote about before is not standard Windows API, so it cannot be ported. Oh, well.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

(no) Item images

Storing pictures of items in you inventory database is really important for multiple reasons:

First, you might want to scan the receipts, insurance policy, and other important papers and keep that close to the item data. It's a proof that you bought/obtained the item at some price. In case you need to prove anything to your insurance company, this is the real hard evidence.

Second, searching through a bunch of items with same or similar name can be exhausting. This is especially true for clothes, but also jewelry, furniture and all other things that are much easier to spot by sight than explain by words. If only QHIM had a feature to browse through item thumbnails combined with textual search/filter, like some programs from 2007 already do.

Intuit made a mild try to fix this in the latest release, and failed flat on their nose. The latest version of QHIM still loads the super-small thumbnail and if you move database to a different computer, you're doomed. Those small thumbnails are next to unusable. Not that you cannot print them, you cannot really read them in case it's an invoice, bill or other printed document related to the item.