Antiquated Software

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006, Mike Schwartz (PC Support) wrote:
>I've not gotten into the GUI at all - can someone give me an idea of
>learning curve time, and will all my programs have to be altered in some
>fashion?  What headaches am I in for to give these guys their little
>mousies?  And will they still see my programs as "antiquated"?

As Doug Gwyn said, ``GUIs make simple things simple, and complex
things impossible''.

GUIs have their place, although accounting applications where
heads-down data entry by professionals isn't generally one of
them.  For that type of application, curses based applications
that don't require moving fingers from the home keys or the
numberic keypad are far superior to GUIs.

Graphical applications aside, which are naturally GUIs, GUIs are
well suited to functions that are (a) infrequently done so the
GUIs make them easier, or (b) done by non-professional data entry
people who don't care about reaching for mice, and probably type
by the Bible method ``Seek and Ye Shall Find''.

Web based forms are even worse than GUIs for production work, but
can be invaluable in some applications.  Web based applications,
in theory, are independent of the browser, but, in fact, people
attempt to make them more responsive with JavaScript, Java, or
other ``features'' that tend to work better on some browsers than
on others.

If I'm out of the office, it's often useful to use our webmail
interface to get to my e-mail, but I would hate to have that my
only method of reading e-mail.  My primary mail client is mutt,
an ``antiquated'' character mailer, which I find far superior to
GUI mail clients when dealing with hundreds of messages a day and
mail folders having thousands of messages.  I fire up Thunderbird
a couple of times a day to deal with messages where I may want to
click on links or that have fancy formatting that doesn't work
well when massaged into plain text.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

When the customer has beaten upon you long enough, give him what he asks
for, instead of what he needs.  This is very strong medicine, and is
normally only required once.
    -- The Consultant's Curse: