RE: Free OS/400 -- MIDRANGE-L


I am probly rehashing alot of things already said but here is my 2 cents

>We went from Action Object (Display screen with choices 1,2,3 to add,
>change delete then pick what you wanted to work on(like customers)
>to Object Action  ie the basis of the Sys/38 and AS/400  Work With screen.

>Do we think that the best methodology has been thought up for the
>GUI/Browser  Interface?    Pull down boxes are nice,  but they are a pain
>if you have to do it repetitively for say 5 things( pull down select it
>disappears,  pull down select it disappears,  pull down select it
>disappears)   The Subfile Work With paradigm is completely missing from
>anything designed from a Non-AS/400  developer.     The ability to do the
>equivalent of putting an Action Option 2,  4, 5,5,5,4,2 on a series of
>items in a list and then process them sequentially is completely foreign to
>the GUI/Browser design Paradigm.

The object action paradigm is an excellent paradigm for application
development.  Particularly developping commercial database applications.
When I develop giu applications today I use this paradigm as much as
possible since it natrually minimizes the number of interactios a user has
to make.

> Is my thinking just wanting it to work like what I've done in the past or
> is what I've done in the past a good/fast design paradigm from the user
> perspective?

Well first off I would like to say that I have built ALOT of Gui versions of
the green screen application.  Here are a few things that are common
experiences of users.

They find the Gui quicker to learn and use for new Users
Power users who can go through the application without looking
After a period of a year or less (depends on the skill of the user) the
Green Screen becomes more productive.  Having to take your hands off the
keybaord and operate a mouse is a productivity killer.
To offset this you can make everything in the GUI accessible via the keybard
with HotKeys this takes some work and more training making the GUI as
powerful as the Green screen but I find that few people (even the power
users) use the hot keys.

This isn't too mention all the inherent problems of distributing an
applicaiton this is just looking at the User experience.  Normally you need
twice (very conservative) as many resources to do a distributed app (Client
server, n-tier).

> I don't mind throwing out old design paradigms that no longer make sense,
> but are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater in some cases?
> I don't know?      We hear that the GUI is more user friendly for the
> unfamiliar/new user,  but the character mode is faster and easier for
> erudite users.     Is there some balance that hasn't been achieved or
> conceived in terms of the new interface design paradigm?
> Ten years from now are we going to look at the current Browser design and
> say,   "Boy,   we didn't know what we were doing,   Look how hard it was
to
> use the things we put out there compared to now"

I think about this one alot and have done alot of research and still haven't
seen it.  I am still the most productive with my Q editor (a dos text mode
editor that does not have any menus or mouse support it is all memorizing
hot keys).

The web broswer was NOT designed to handle business processes it was
designed to make it easy to view data that was hyperlinked.  It is still the
best medium for representig hyperlinked data.  Forms were added as an
afterthought and IMHO are POORLY implemented.  You have to jump through alot
of hoops to get decent application behaviour from a web browser.  I say this
as compared to the few hoops you have for 5250 and a few hoops + for GUI.
It is excellent for light application duty, I love the fact I can get my
bank balance over the net, but I still love quicken for the heads down data
entry.  Maybe quicken will come out with a 5250 version ;-)     I have also
done several conversion from 5250 to HTML where companies decided to
standardize all their applicaitons on HTML and after the first conversion
they scrapped that idea when they saw how ineffective HTML is for any type
of program that a user will be using for more than 2 hours a day.

> What would the "NOW"  be then(in the future)

if you figure this one out please let us all know ;-)


-Glen Marchesani

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