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0 pointsastrange1y ago0 comments

If they're accessible to screen readers they have one. Accessibility is API for apps in disguise.

In this case I doubt they're networked apps so they probably don't have a server API.

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skissane1y ago· 1 in thread

> In this case I doubt they're networked apps so they probably don't have a server API.

I think it would be very unusual this decade for software used to run either a medical practice or tax accountants to not be networked. Most such practices have multiple doctors/accountants, each with their individual computer, and they want to be able to share files, so that if your doctor/accountant is away their colleague can attend to you. Managing backups/security/etc is all a lot easier when the data is stored in a central server (whether in the cloud or a closet) than on individual client machines.

Just because it is a fat client MFC-based Windows app doesn’t mean the data has to be stored locally. DCOM has been a thing since 1996.

halfcat1y ago

Being “on the network” doesn’t mean there’s an accessible API. See QuickBooks Desktop. Intuit forces you into using their API, which is XML-based and ranges from slow to timing out.

Is the idea that someone will always reverse engineer it? Yes, but QuickBooks is brittle as is (you can count on at least one database corruption every year or two). I have zero interest in treading into unsupported territory when database corruption is involved and I’m likely going to need Intuit’s help recovering. We can try to restore from backup, but when there’s corruption it doesn’t always restore successfully, or the corruption was lingering silently for some time and rears its head again after a successful restore, and then we’re back to needing Intuit’s help.

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