Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

Since then, there has been a significant surge in activity on the GnuCash side while KMyMoney, to an outside observer, appears to have slowed down. Clear goals for the GnuCash 2.0 release have been set, a series of pre-2.0 test releases has come out, and 2.0 final is currently planned for June 11. GnuCash, it seems, is back. Your editor, whose desperate attempts to balance the family budget are made on a system running the Fedora development tree, got a rather unplanned opportunity to try out GnuCash 1.9 (the pre-2.0 test release) when the Fedora hackers quietly slipped it in as a replacement for the stable version. A few months of financial firefighting later, it's time for a quick review.

Those who are expecting a lot of flashy new features from GnuCash 2.0 may be disappointed. The big change in this release is not the heavily-requested animated pie chart feature. Instead, GnuCash has made the (rather delayed) jump to the GTK2 toolkit. This change was a major bit of work for the GnuCash developers, who had to drop some discontinued libraries altogether and reimplement various features (graphical reports, for example) in a completely different environment. So what 2.0 brings is not a whole lot of new features, but a new platform which is ready for the creation of tomorrow's new features.

One thing seasoned GnuCash users will notice early on is the tabbed interface on the main window. In the stable 1.x releases, opening an account results in the creation of a new register window; in 2.0, a new tab is created instead. This behavior is arguably more consistent - even in 1.x, reports showed up in that version's form of tabs rather than in their own window; now everything works that way. But, for users who are used to being able to have more than one register on the screen simultaneously, the new behavior can be a little annoying. Fortunately, there is an option to move a tab into a new window, so users who like their screen cluttered should still be happy.

Other than the new tabs, the GnuCash user experience is little changed from the 1.x release. Things generally work and look as they did before. From your editor's experience, it all appears to be quite stable (though your editor has not spent any real time playing with the business features). Except for a couple of minor keyboard focus issues, the transition appears to have been completed successfully. For those interested in testing the development releases, it's worth noting that the file format does not appear to have changed, making it possible to make changes with a development release, then go back to 1.8.x without trouble. It is worth noting that the PostgreSQL backend is not yet working properly, but that is consistent with the earlier GnuCash releases as well.

Of course, no major release can be completely without new features. The GnuCash developers have found time to implement the use of UTF-8 for better handling of non-western characters and the ability to import the "MT940" files available from some banks. But the most interesting (for users) developments in the 2.x series are likely to show up in 2.1 and later releases. Now that the painful transition to a contemporary toolkit has been made, the developers will have the time to do fun stuff again, and the project should be more accessible for new developers as well.

The free software community has been surprisingly slow to push the state of the art in the personal finance area. One would think this particular itch would afflict a great many developers - even the hungriest of starving hackers has some financial management to do, and we can't all push the work off onto our Windows-using spouses. Be that as it may, the situation is slowly changing. Between KMyMoney and the new, refurbished GnuCash, the community now has two high-quality platforms suitable for the creation of tomorrow's personal financial software. Your editor is looking forward to seeing where things go from here.