Re: Costco still on IBM i?

Hello John,

Am 23.05.2025 um 18:13 schrieb John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>:

Effective user interface design is almost always a collaboration between users and developers.

I think, this could be taken one step further, and take away the UI design process completely away from the programmer. I feel programmers think UIs different than pure users, probably accept programmatic short cuts saving development time, where users find the result clunky, etc.

Apple did this in the early process of rethinking the Xerox PARC workstation prototype to the "Finder GUI" some of us know and fondly remember. This resulted in such tiny enhancements that the mouse cursor was hidden as soon as you typed on the keyboard into a text area. No obstruction of the typed characters by the mouse cursor!

That UI was remarkably consistent for the user, and if you read the manuals — yes, back in the day, you got a printed manual how to actually use something — there were many tricks one could learn. One of my favorites is to press command while dragging a background window. It stays in its background layer!

Such tiny things are applicable to TUIs also. Instead of having the user to type a file name, give him the opportunity to prompt it with F4, showing a subfile to choose from. This is something very helpful that even IBM did not consequently implement.

:wq! PoC