Re: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence -- MIDRANGE-L

Without wanting to sound as if I am completely negative, I could not
disagree with you more.  I am of course only looking at this from the
perspective of our industry, and more time is wasted playing with the g-d
forsaken mouse and clicking on buttons than anything else I have ever seen.

Will all due respect, there's absolutely no reason that a GUI applicationcan't be keyboard controlled. No GUI application that's even halfway wellwritten requires a mouse.

GUI can do every single thing that a green screen application can do. Andit can do it in exactly the same way, if you want it to.

Saying that GUIs are bad because of the mouse is like saying that 5250 isbad because of the need for a field+ and field- key. In both cases, youcan design your applications so that they aren't required.

But it ALSO adds additional capabilities (by the score!) that green screencannot do.

There are loads of productivity killers in green screen applications. Forexample, what happens if the cursor is positioned on a spot on the screenwhere no input fields exist? When the operator types, where do thekeystrokes go? A GUI can prevent this type of mistake.

When you type data into a field in a GUI you can have the programimmediately validate the field and print information on the screen withoutstopping the operator who is keying. For example, after keying in aninsurance group number, it can automatically print the name of that groupon the screen, or report an error, without the user having to press enteror stopping their typing. This way, without pause, the typist can verifythat he/she typed the correct group number. It ENHANCES productivity fordata entry.

I'm tired of the "green screen is better for heads down data entry" excusethat people keep using. You may have had some bad experiences withsoftware where the user interface wasn't well-designed for heads down dataentry, but that's certainly not because 5250 is "better."

The advantage to 5250 applications is that you already know how to writethem, and that you can write them extremely quickly. Their verylightweight, and they work very well over a slow network or communicationslink.

But these advantages aren't good enough for your major, importantapplications. When users sit in front of a computer all day long everyday, we should give them the most productive, easiest to use, least errorprone system that we can. And there's no question that this will be a GUIinterface.