From: johnsd2@vccnw04.its.rpi.edu (Daniel Norman Johnson)
Subject: Re: When is a CLI faster than a GUI?
Reply-To: johnsd2@rpi.edu
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 15:36:57 GMT

In article <60#pynm.marquis@netcom.com>, marquis@netcom.com (Roger Marquis) writes:
|> 
|> 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.

You can only move yer pinky a couple of inches if it happens
to be over the right key. And if you only need to push one.
What if you need to push alt-something? More difficult, eh?

Also, I don't have to move my arm 1 foot; my hand moves about 6 inches
actually (but thats being rather picky);

And you aren't factoring in the time needed to figure out
what to do (poor fools like me dont remember all the keyboard
shortcuts for all their programs instantly. I understand
DOS folks do. I'd hate to have to memorize all that. But
I digress); Even if you are using the keyboard operated
pulldowns, you have to find the the appropriate
underlined/(or whatever they do in text mode) letter,
and push alt-that. You haven't factored in that time.

|> 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).

Pardon me? The Finder doesn't (alas) search by content. :(
So you'd need a special program to do it (dont complain,
you needed Desqview to do it); If you had that
you could select it off the apple menu (or something
along those lines) and then use the program. Exactly how
that would go depends on teh program. might be as simple
as typing in what you want to find and pressing return,
if the program only did the one thing. As I dont have,
and have never needed, such a program I cant give
you a concrete example. Hopefully someone will rescue me. :)

|>  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.

[I knew what it meant... honest :)]

What potential time savings? By the traditional
keystroke count, you needed 5  keys to do the find
in Desqview (from any program); For the .bat file you'd
need to switch to dos, type in the filename of hte .bat
file, space, the search-string and pres return. To beat
desqview you must (a) remember the name of the file and
(b) have a file name that is <4 characters (not very
mnemonic)

|> >|> >|> --- 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.

Ahem. We were talking about programming! Somebody or other
asserted that the MacOS made it HARD to program non-GUI
apps. I was saying, no it doesnt! Batch files are beside the
point.

|> >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.

Yeah, altho official its "AppleScript" that will be bundled. That's
a good use, something that Mac ought to be able to do but can't
without extras.

|> >|> 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.

This is irrelevant. The # of apps published for a GUI has no
effect on the quality of the GUI itself; the Windows GUI
has not (itself) changed because lots of apps use it.

|> All of the best selling are either being developed under Windows or
|> ported to Windows (Sound Master/Blaster, Norton Desktop, X Windows,
|> CalLANdar, etc.)

This is understandable, consider size of the market, but its not`
relevant either.

|>  I know there's nothing like Lotus Notes under
|> development on any other platform (though a Mac port is planned).

So there is osmething very much like notes being developed for
the Mac.. notes! :)

|> 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.

Dubious, imho. The GUI age hit when Windows 3.0 gain acceptance
among users. If the developers had such clout, they could have
all switched to OS/2 (or the MacOS! :)

|> 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.

Certainly. I understand there are good macro utilites availiable
for the MacOS (QuickKeys?) but I dont have any of them... anyone
else care to try to impress Roger?

-- 
			- Dan Johnson
And God said "Jeeze, this is dull"... and it *WAS* dull. Genesis 0:0

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