eTax status report

[Ben Stanley]

Hi,

I have now completed using the eTax program from the Australian Taxation
Office (http://etax.ato.gov.au) under wine, and have some concluding
remarks.

* Yellow Note Popups over buttons: these notes pop up almost immediately
you put your mouse over a button, and if you click on them, the button
does not respond. This causes great user frustration, as you point the
mouse at a button, click the mouse, and nothing happens because the
popup note appeared and stole the mouse click. Perhaps this could be
solved by moving the popup note position so that it's not directly under
the mouse pointer? I don't know if this is an etax problem or a wine
problem. Workaround: move mouse over button and click again, or be very
quick with your mouse click the first time.

* ListView (tree): when hovering over items with long names, the same
popup note appears, and also greedily steals mouse clicks, preventing
you from selecting the item underneath. The note must pass the mouse
click through for proper handling by the list item. Workaround: Wait for
popup to disappear and then click on list item.

* I had some refresh issues with the print preview section of the
program. When it draws a page for the first time, all form fields appear
to be filled in correctly, but when scrolling the form fields are often
left blank when they should be filled in. This may be verified by going
forward and then back a page, to force a complete re-draw of the
original page, and verifying that fields which were previously blank are
now drawn properly.

* I didn't try to submit the tax return under wine, as I did not know
about the wine integration of the web browser which would be used to
perform the submission. (I failed to download the security codes under
Mozilla, so I resorted to a Windows box for downloanding security codes
and submission.)

* Help problems, partly to do with launching winhelp from within etax,
and also partly because WINE help can't yet read the etax help file
properly.

I used etax in the desktop windowing mode, as I had problems with both
the managed and unmanaged modes. I set all dlls to builtin (except for
"*").

This is the first year that I have been able to use eTax to do the tax
return. I want to thank all of the wine contributors for making it
possible! Last year I gave up and used a Windows box for the whole
thing.

Ben Stanley