OT: GUI design and "elegance"

[Fairlight]

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."

The funnier thing is, she's not joking.  And I agree with her in many ways.

This all ties back to fP's attempts at GUI (and any number of apps) that
don't actually "belong" in a native GUI framework.  GUI is -not- always
elegant, and it's certainly not always efficient.  It offers options, but
a lot of what it offers is also unnecessary complications that are...less
than elegant.  And it's actually that way by design and by nature.  GUI is
a lot like Apache's mod_rewrite.  To quote the docs for that:

     ``The great thing about mod_rewrite is it gives you all the
     configurability and flexibility of Sendmail. The downside to
     mod_rewrite is that it gives you all the configurability and
     flexibility of Sendmail.''

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.

Just thought that it was not only amusing, it carried a core truth in the
middle of it that was worth reflecting on a bit.  Thought I'd share the
ponderance.

mark->
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