RE: Re: Accounting Vendors

And I have a set of jumper cables in the trunk of my car, too.

Francis Lapeyre
IS Dept. Programmer/Analyst
Stewart Enterprises, Inc.
E-mail: flapeyre@xxxxxxxx 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hewitt, Rory
Sent: Friday, December 2, 2005 12:19 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Re: Accounting Vendors

Trevor wrote:
 
>>Why would anyone buy a NEW application with a green screen data entry 
>>function? Seems like buying a car with a hand crankstart.
 
If you rode a motorcycle, you'd know (as any fule know), that you always get
a bike with a kickstart in addition to an electric start because sometimes
technology fails... By the same token, web interfaces are great (I design
web-enablement tools for a living), but rely on a bunch of extra technology,
any bit of which may fail. Green-screen interfaces are simple and fast. Ans
they include 'functionality' which is almost impossible to duplicate on an
HTML page without using significant amounts of JavaScript - totally free
cursor movement, for instance, to enable you to use the cursor-up/down keys
to move to fields immediately above or below the current one. Using the Tab
key to move like this just doesn't cut it on screens with lots of fields on
them.
 
Now if your question is more basic - i.e. Why do companies still use manual
date-entry, well then I'd say it's because they have neither the time nor
the resources to change. And some areas are just difficult to change -
timesheet entry will probably aleays be manually entered, because someone
needs to interpret handwriting. It's the same reason they're still using RPG
and COBOL rather than a "new" and "fancy" language like Java
<suppressed-smirk>
 
Rory