From: marquis@netcom.com (Roger Marquis)
Subject: Re: When is a CLI faster than a GUI?
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 92 03:39:08 GMT
Organization: Netcom 


In article <hlhzwsn@rpi.edu> johnsd2@rpi.edu writes:
>|> >|> --- MICE VS KEYBOARD
>|> take your hands off the keyboard (the old time-wasting keyboard to
>|> mouse and back shuffle).
>
>Finding the mouse doesn't take long, if you are good at it.
>Its always right where you left it.

It doesn't take long, but relatively, it takes longer to rotate an
entire forearm 1 foot than streching a pinkie down a couple of inches.
Multiply by 100 and you're talking real productivity.

As an example, I can acccess an one of 5 phone books by bringing up
the Desqview menu [Alt], pressing 2 menu keys, [F] for find, any
string I want to search for and [return].  This generally works out to
about 10 keys to find any of a thousand or so names.  To complete an
analogous task in Multifinder it would take a click on the Multifinder
icon, 1, 2 or 3 folders, file, clover-F (or whatever to Find).  This
doesn't count the potentially greater time savings of a batch file 
which could call Norton's TS (text search) to look through phone.* 
for %1. (look through all filenames begining with phone for the
specified string for the DOS illiterate.

>|> >|> --- OPEN VS RESTRICTED SYSTEMS
>
>It is not. The calls make it easier to do things the way apple
>wants them done, but they do NOT make it harder
>to do things "wrong"; You can still write direct to screen
>memory; its easier to use quickdraw but that doesn't make
>it harder to write to the screen directly. (for instance)
>
>If you use Think C anyway, you can make generic command line apps
>wo/ problems; just use standard C calls.

This sounds good.  I haven't seen much of it though.  Think C must be
a bit more complex than DOS batch files.

>However, Id like to know what these batch files of yours do,
>so I can see what it is Im missing, and see if you'd need to do
>it in the Mac.

We'll, I just finsihed a 150 line batch file that collects timesheet
data from 5 remote offices of a large law firm and uploads them to
their HP3000 for processing on a nightly basis.  I would have rather
have used a UNIX shell script to do this but the ability is there in DOS.
I don't see an equivalent ability in the MacOS.  Perhaps when Frontier
is bundeled with the OS ... we'll see.

>|> GUIs _are_ the future!  They are developing quickly and gaining features
>|> at an amazing rate.  Only Apple's GUI is not keeping up with this
>|> explosive growth.
>
>Is it not? Please defend this statement. Tell me what
>sorta great stuff is appearing in other GUIs that Apple is
>missing. Apples UI does change and improve over time, but
>not "explosively", as this would blow away any consistency
>in it.
>
I think the number of new Windows apps over the last couple of years
can be termed explosive.  If not it is clearly an order of magnitude
greater than the number of new apps for Mac, OS/2 and UNIX combined.
All of the best selling are either being developed under Windows or
ported to Windows (Sound Master/Blaster, Norton Desktop, X Windows,
CalLANdar, etc.)  I know there's nothing like Lotus Notes under
development on any other platform (though a Mac port is planned).

The GUI era is upon us if only because developers are longing to get
away from writing to hardware/termcap/Interrupts and anything like a
good (read: standard) API has not been forthcoming on CLI systems.

I'll stick with the Character based Desqview until a decent Windows 
Macro is available and get more done in a day than anyone I know of.

Roger (marquis@netcom.com)