ANNOUNCE: GnuCash 1.7.6 "Santa's got a brand new bag"

[Chris Lyttle <chris wilddev net>]

Application
===========

GnuCash 1.7.6 "Santa's got a brand new bag"

Description
===========

Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you
to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. It is based on
professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate
reports.

What's New in GnuCash 1.7.6?

- Scheduled Transactions: 
	GnuCash now has the ability to automatically create and enter
	transactions, remind when a transaction is due, give a choice of
	entering a transaction or postponing it	and remove an automated
	transaction after a certain period.
- Mortgage & Loan Repayment Druid:
	Used to setup a variable payment loan scheduled transaction.
- Small Business Accounting Features: 
	GnuCash now can be used for Customer and Vendor tracking,
	Invoicing and Bill Payment, and using different Tax and Billing
	Terms in a small business.
- OFX Import:
	GnuCash is the first free software application to support the
	Open Financial Exchange protocol that many banks and financial
	services are moving to use. The development of OFX and HBCI 
	support has also resulted in an improved transaction matching
	system that more accurately picks duplicate transactions.
- HBCI Support: 
	GnuCash is the first free software application to support the
	German Home Banking Computer Information protocol which includes
	statement download, initiate bank transfers and direct debits.
- New User Manual and Help:
	A brand new user help has been written which focuses on how to
	do tasks in conjunction with a Tutorial and Concepts guide that
	gives the user background information on using GnuCash.
- New Multi-Currency Transaction Handling:
	GnuCash no longer requires separate currency exchange accounts
	to handle multiple currency transfers.
- Redesigned Menu's
	The GnuCash menu's have been redesigned to conform more with the
	new GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

Specifically updated in this version;


 o Welcome to Release Candidate 1
 o Put the build date into the about box for development versions
 o Deal with broken QIF files that give broken bang-fields. In
   particular, handle the case where it supplies "!Type Bank"
   instead of "!Type:Bank"
 o Fix g-wrap test to fail properly if it cannot find g-wrap-config
 o Add "Edit Exchange Rate" menu items to the Actions menu and the
   context menu
 o Fix the amount display so that the exchange dialog always shows the
   "amount" in the the local (register) currency.
 o Add an additional module to check for (LWP aka libwww-perl)
   before attempting to call Finance::Quote.
 o Updated translations, po/nl.po by Hendrik-Jan Heins <hjh passys nl>,
   po/uk.po by Volodymyr M. Lisivka <lvm mystery lviv net>, po/el.po,
   accounts/el_GR by Nikos Charonitakis <charosn her forthnet gr>
 o Major update to generic import architecture/transaction matcher.
 o Change HBCI to using new Transaction Matcher GUI
 o Require openhbci 0.9.4 for HBCI version choosing.
 o When not retrieving stock quotes for an account, dim the price
   source labels as well as the option menus.
 o Consolidate all knowledge about Finance::Quote sources into one
   place. Functions to record whether or not F::Q is installed
   properly, and if so, whether a particular source is available.
 o Change default new SX frequency to monthly
 o Filled in a long-thought of idea for a formula cell: can contain
   text unlike a pricecell, but doesn't really want to do
   auto-complete like a quickfill cell [what we had been using].  This
   allows us to provide the gnome formula cell which can remap the
   keypad '.' character based on locale
 o Disallow the deletion of accounts with ReadOnly Transacation in
   them. You must first "delete" the RO Txns before you delete the
   account.
 o NOTE: As of now you ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE G-WRAP >= 1.3.3
 o Loan Druid re-written
 o Add menu items and code so a user can limit transactions in a
   register to any combination of the
   Reconciled/Cleared/Voided/Unreconciled states.
 o Give user feedback during the rendering of a report.
 o Remove old user docs and tools that are now in gnucash-docs
 o Fix for large accounts overflowing the data types used in the
   register code which are causing crashes.
 o Add support for new GnuCash icon made by Jakub Steiner
   <jimmac ximian com>
 o Connect up help buttons in dialog's to help files
 o Lots more bugfixes

Available at;

http://www.gnucash.org

http://download.sourceforge.net/gnucash