Accounting application
Below is a screen shot of part of a Flash application I built for teaching “Cash Flow Statements” which is apparently a difficult part of the introductory accounting course at NAIT.
This is one of my best pieces of work to date but those I show it to are underwhelmed. But I think that is ok. They just don’t see a few things.
First of the all, the base application file size is 16k! Don’t need a preloader. This application has 57 pages of content, how can that be? The application is initialized by an 88k XML file which is a mini-page description language in itself. A new page can be easily added with multiple columns, or just one column with a balance sheet. The balance sheet values and interactivity is defined here as well. Internationalization is easy since all the content comes from this external xml file. Oh and there are external text files too. So the 16k factoid is a little misleading but the content is modularized and designed for web distribution. Plus the ability of this app to pull its content from external sources opens up all sorts of possibilities. I could have taken the easy way out and just created 57 movieclips that show and hide themselves but that would have resulted in an severely bloated application that was a memory hog, slow to load and slow to run. This app is lightweight and snappy.
For the account entries there is logic to format the number as you type so that the comma appears where it needs to. On loss of focus the number is checked to see if it is negative and formatted appropriately and then validated.
As the user clicks from page to page the balancesheet is deleted and rebuilt therefore minimizing the RAM footprint of the application. User entered data persists after they leave a page.
From a design perspective the interface is very simple, intuitive and effective. I designed it to be that way. It looks like it fits in an accounting textbook. I think this explains why people are underwhelmed. “Its Flash, where is the FLASH????” The FLASH is there … in concept, execution and effectiveness. My client, preeminant accounting instructor and author Tilly Jensen, is over the top about the possibilities.
