Discovery -Drag and Drop Accounting:

In researching the general accounting market to determine if a good program was available that UDS could modify to meet the needs of the green industry, we found a tremendous lack of original thinking in this market. We did not want to spend the amount of money necessary to create a Windows product from scratch. We looked at the systems available and were not impressed with the technology. They looked like 1977 Unix programs twisted to fit into a new box. It looked like extreme measures were taken to purposely make them look ugly.

We looked at the programs that claimed they could be modified but found them lacking in multiple areas. If we did modify them to meet our needs there was no guarantee our work would not be destroyed by new releases. We believe our customers want new releases to take advantage of new hardware as it comes out. This industry moves way to fast to have such limits placed on it.

We were stuck.

The only choice we had after serious evaluations was to either use a straight database that did not give us the power we needed or write our own Windows software from scratch. If the scratch option was selected, how could we release the programmers to create something with originality and unique thinking? At the same time how do we include the wealth of applications included in the UDS DOS software.

On top of the unique thinking we wanted to create a system that allowed us to create programs that were self explanatory to anyone that knew Windows and the business applications we write. At that time Drag and Drop was just introduced to Windows users. We wondered if using this technology would help us in pursuit of our lofty goals.

Suddenly all of the things we had learned over many years of programming began to simplify and fall into place with the concept that an application window was actually a view into the data and the data represented information or objects that were related to other data objects. If we created an object that represented the printed invoice and dropped items on it we may be able to simplify the invoicing process down to a combination of drag and drops.

We then created very many test applications and discovered that the teaching of the use of these applications was easy if the learner had a good working knowledge of Windows, knew the application that was being emulated and understood how the data in the tables related to other data. The discovery that drag and drop could work in a complex accounting application, could work and work better then existing character based systems was extremely satisfying because our job changed from a text based top down newspaper type application to a dynamic free and open ended one that befitted Windows.

Drag and Drop accounting is a concept we pioneered and now understand how to implement. We are years ahead of any of our competition. Drag and Drop reduces extremely complex tasks to the process of relating objects to one another and everything is done in on the screen (what Microsoft calls the desktop) in front of you. Editors note: Since this was published we have added the Add To button to make it even easier to use.