Many yeas ago (geez, it hurts to say years), I had the idea the rework the Microsoft Money application. I got a little ways into it and just kind of stopped. Recently, the idea has been coming back to me, especially with the new Windows Universal apps design.
So, I loaded the code back up and saw that I had a pretty decent base to start with, so I do what I normally do when I have a large, daunting task in front of me. I mad a list of all the steps that need to be done. That usually works for me.
After making a decent high-level list of tasks to be done, I changed gears and started doing mock-ups of screens. I’m probably putting way too much time into the design, because I want it to look as similar to the original as possible.
That kind of design is difficult. If you don’t do it exact, and I mean exact, people will just say it’s a knock-off. But if you do your own thing entirely, people will say it’s nothing like the original. So, it’s really a gamble.
After taking a break from that, I decided I would peek into MS Money’s resource files to see if there were any clues as to what I need to do. Holy shit, bad idea. Microsoft kept all their pop-up forms in the resource file. There are over 600 pop-up forms in MS Money. Just the effort in recreating these forms is entirely overwhelming. Then considering the logic involved as to when they are shown and the processing after they are closed, I can’t process that amount of effort at the moment. Again, if you’re going to copy an application, you sort of have to do the whole thing, or at least have a roadmap as to when it will get done. My list just got a whole lot longer.
So I opened up my list and started analyzing again. I have about 45 top-level screens and most have multiple pop-ups. And I’m not even done analyzing the application yet. One good thing (relatively) is that my original scope was for the personal version and now I’m running the business version, which more than doubles the capabilities of the application. So, I can certainly lower my expectations for a first release if and when it comes to that.
As far as releases go, it would definitely have to be incremental. There’s so much to do.
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