Coming Soon: xTuple Smart Desktop

Are you an xTuple user who ever thought it would make sense to put something in that huge blank space below the toolbar?  Yeah, I know you can put wall paper in there, but surely we can do better than that.  Well, we've been thinking about it too.  Read on to learn what's coming in the new "xTuple Desktop."

Thus far we have not put anything in the big blank space because if we do, it becomes incompatible with the legacy "Workspace" mode xTuple can run in.   This is a behavior controlled by user preferences that makes all the windows bound inside that big open space act like old Windows '95 era programs.  That mode is essentially deprecated by all operating systems, Qt and us, but we do have to continue to support it because it does serve a useful purpose in certain testing situations   That said, we have recently quietly shifted application behavior to default to "Free floating mode" where all windows open outside the xTuple workspace.

That now gives us an opportunity to put something useful there... like this:

The first thing that probably grabs your attention is the graphical menu system with workflow cues.   Basically these are a collection of buttons with images and labels that will launch a corresponding window.  The idea of this is to help people that are new to business systems better understand the relationships of various windows in different functional areas and how they relate to each other.  The Desktop shown is for the Sales cycle, but we will also include Purchasing, Manufacturing and possibly a couple more functional areas in the first release of xTuple Desktop.  You can control which desktop you want to see by selecting from the list of items on the left.    

One of the neatest things about these desktops is that there is absolutely zero code behind them.   They were completely built with the embedded graphical screen designer that comes with xTuple using a new "Menu Button" widget.   You just drag and drop a Menu Button on your window, set the action property (the name of the window to open) a label, and an image and you're done.  What this means a non-programmer can easily customize the desktops that come with xTuple, or build their own.  For example see the sales desktop in xTuple Designer pictured here:

xTuple Desktop will be distributed as an Extension package that will include over 3,000 pre-loaded icons to choose from when making your own desktop.

You may also have noticed the other lists surrounding the desktop.  These are called "Dock Widgets" in Qt lingo.  They are simply a collection of business intelligence tools that help give you insight of what's going on in xTuple.  Note one pictured is a list of Sales Activities that will show you the value of Sales Orders in various states, and the one on the tab behind that will show you historical Sales summary information.  Of course you can just click and drill down into the details.  Similar tools for other functional areas will be included for Purchasing, Manufacturing and Accounting. Also on the bottom of the window are, if I may coin a new term here, "Personal Intelligence"  tools.  These are your  lists of To-Do items, Contacts and CRM Accounts of which you are either the designated owner, or are assigned to you, again with clickable drill down.

It's hard to describe this in a blog, but you can drag and drop these dock widgets any where around the desktop or on top of each other and the screen will remember that configuration.  You can also drag them out to a free floating state, as pictured below, which will also be remembered:

Some dock widgets, such as sales history will also be user configurable to summarize on different categories or time frames.

This has all been implemented in modular way so that users or partners can build additional dock widget packages that can snap into the Desktop to satisfy requirements for vertical industries or local cases.  These dock widgets actually do require some code work, but it's all JavaScript and the ones provided will be open source and well commented to help make it easy for a would-be coder to figure out how to make their own.

The xTuple Desktop will be an Extension of the PostBooks project hosted on Source Forge that will work on xTuple 3.5.1 due out late spring. We're very excited about this development and hope our users will be as well!