OT: GUI design and "elegance"

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005, Fairlight wrote:
>This cracked me up...had to share.
>
>So I'm finishing a GUI for a client, and I'm showing the results to my wife.
>There was one thing that wasn't possible to do in Perl/Tk, as Windows
>doesn't communicate -all- its events back--notably when you -finish- moving
>a window.  You get tracking the whole way, but there's no way to make it
>tell you when you've finalised the move.
>
>So, since I couldn't "snap" a toolbar window via dragging with mouse or
>keyboard, I went the route of a submenu that lets you snap the window to
>the corner of any of the four quadrants of the screen.  It's fast and
>elegant, and about the best you can do without this missing event.
>
>I was saying to Kelly, "You know, I'm glad I worked this out.  It's not the
>original specced behaviour -exactly-, but I think it's far more elegant."
>
>Her response had me rolling with laughter:  "I thought the point of GUI was
>to -not- be elegant."

Elegant can mean simple and clean.

...
>And that describes GUI design in a nutshell--lots of power, but you can pay
>for it with a -huge- amount of complexity overload.  Some things are better
>off staying out of that environment.  I've always believed that fast data
>entry and data access was one of those things.  Still do.

As Doug Gwyn said, ``GUIs make simple things simple, and complex
things impossible''.  I like them for rarely performed tasks,
and, of course, graphical jobs (e.g. the Gimp), but really prefer
GUIs that are basically front-ends for command line execution.
Ideally they create a log of the commands executed so I can
figure out what's going on behind the scenes.

For fast data entry, I far prefer a clean curses interface, and
am in the process of rewriting our accounting software using
python's ncurses as a front-end to a postgresql database.  This
is replacing a metric tonne of C code on top of Unify's RDBMS.

Bill
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