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

I'm getting confused here.  Seems to me that the difference between "text
based" and "GUI" other than the obvious cosmetic one is modality.  (Another
word I never thought I'd use in polite conversation)  I mean the traditional
green screen approach where the application guides the user through a
process one predefined step at a time and any given step can only follow its
defined predecessor and can precede only its defined successor.  I've seen
text based applications that were just as flexible as anything I've seen for
windows, atari, amiga, mac, or you name it.  Admittedly we can't do the
cosmetic stuff on a text based screen.  What we can do is try to design
interactive applications that allow the kind of freedom people associate
with spreadsheets and word processing.  There are a lot of things we can do
with the tools we have to make our applications easier to use even if they
are harder to code that way.      

If you look at web sites that sell stuff, you'll notice that they're
cosmetically enhanced green screen applications.  Get a screen full of data,
respond to it, maybe let the user go to the next screen.  The flexibility
and ease of use is about the same as any application that leads you through
a series of menus or menu like screens until you reach your goal and agree
to save.

###########################################
The above is my personal opinion and is not intended to represent good
programming practice or the product of a sound mind.

Joel Fritz  
-----Original Message-----
From: boothm@earth.goddard.edu [mailto:boothm@earth.goddard.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 5:05 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons



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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