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  3. November 1999

Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons

  • Subject: Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons
  • From: boothm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 20:05:12 -0500

John, your points are valid and I accept them for that.  Getting excited over radio buttons is difficult.

 On the other hand I've spent two years getting myself up to speed on the client/server solution amd the full GUI pallet that you lay out as the goal, and my reaction is... GUI ain't ready for prime time yet.  The client/server paradigm is difficult to install, difficult to keep in synch, dreadfully expensive to develop, more expensive to deploy, and not yet very fault-tolerant.  I've yet to see really good GUI applications devoted to the businesss model, beyond typical office secretarial services.

Until GUI really is deployable then it looks to me like business will be done on text-based screens.   Even the e-business web applications I've seen are essentially text-based at this point.

 


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Subject:        Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons

Booth,
 
Maybe some of us are having trouble getting too excited because a few clunky radio buttons on a 80 or 132 column screen does not a GUI make. I'd be hard pressed to believe that (as currently implemented) they make an application any easier to use, and they certainly don't give a tired old terminal a sexy new look. These things are an answer to a problem that doesn't exist. My users aren't asking for radio buttons and menu bars on a terminal screen. What are they asking for?
 
They are asking for a GUI - a complete GUI. One that provides the following features:
 
1) Colour - Lots of it, used intelligently to draw attention to different information.
2) More data for each screen. Eighty columns doesn't cut it. And just try to effectively use 132 columns displays in a CA/400 emulation session - it looks horrible.
3) Rich text fields that allow them to emphasize their text.
 
And on, and on, and on.... limited time prevents me from continuing. But these few examples should serve to illustrate some of the elements of a GUI that actually help the user in any significant way. Radio boxes, menu bars etc., are nice touches, but they don't allow you to really do anything that you can't already accomplish using existing techniques.
 
Solving any of these problems would require significant resources, and I don't think that I would like to see IBM wasting any more time on it. I think that they should continue to focus on the more modern tools instead.
 
Regards,
 
John Taylor


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