Re: [tlug] !!!OT!!! raw cd copy

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Myers <q90004@example.com> writes:

    Dan> You would always rather type in long strings with pipes
    Dan> instead of clicking to speed things up? I guess that is just
    Dan> my business mind hard at work, trying to make things ever
    Dan> efficient.  ;)

To take your own example, I suppose _you_ don't have a keyboard, but
instead mouse about "hunt-and-pecking" with a GUI representation of
one?  ;)

GUI still poses a lot of unsolved problems.

1. Clicking speeds things up only if what's under the icon DWIMs or
happens to DTRT.  In admin issues, the devil is in the details so DTRT
is unlikely, and DWIM is actually an acronym of Japanese expletives:
dame! wasurechatta! ittai-nani! mashiin-no-baka!  (Corresponding
English acronym: WTF?!!!?)

2. GUI is only efficient if all of the more than rarely used options
are toggles or selections from small enums, there are few enough that
you can see them all on a single uncluttered dialog, and if you do the
same custom operation multiple times in a session the required options
change rarely.  And as soon as you have more than one text field, it
hardly has any advantage in terms of data-entry efficiency (although
it may be prettier, and thus be nicer on the eyes, etc).

3. GUI currently requires that you have all the options more or less
hard-coded in the GUI.  Anybody can generalize "cat | sort" to "cat |
sort | uniq" (and with a decent shell, doing both requires only 1 more
keystroke than just doing the second, so experimenting is cheap).  How
do you add `uniq' to a GUI that doesn't already have it?  "Drag the
text to WordPad and edit out the duplicates."  Not a big win.  ;-)

So GUI just is not adapted to problem-solving tasks, least not yet.
What GUI does well (often) is "solved-problem" tasks.  And what GUI is
_great_ for is _restricting_ interfaces to what management wants the
peons (subordinates or clients) to see.

Note that, not unlike Chris, what I do with my spare time is work on a
project which is all about GUI capabilities to a power tool.  It's not
a question of hating GUI per se.  It's a question of demanding that
GUI pass the same test that everything we work on has to: empowerment.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
              Don't ask how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.