At 10:04 AM 2/4/2002, you wrote: >Bovine defacation! Doug Gwyn put it best when he said ``GUIs make simple >things simple, and complex things impossible''.
Doug Gwyn was incorrect. Good GUI design makes everything simple. Bad GUI design makes doing anything unbearable. >I'm not saying that GUIs aren't useful for many things, and I certainly >would find life a lot harder without them. On the other hand, there are >many things I can do much more easily and quickly from the command line >than I can poking through endless menus and screens to accomplish the same >thing. It's a lot easier to copy all the text files in a directory to a >floppy by typing ``cp *.txt /auto/floppy'' than it is to select them with a >GUI, right-click copy, go find the floppy in another file manager, then >right-click paste. How many times have you been selecting files from a >dialog box with ctrl-leftclick, only to let up on the ctrl key, and loose >all the ones you had selected? While I've never had to use two file managers to copy files to a floppy I can certainly understand why you selected this task as one complicated by a GUI. Of course, I'm talking about GUI design and not existing GUI technology. One should be able to select a number of files and then "send" them to floppy with a one click affair. A five file transfer should take no more than six clicks, seven tops. I also commiserate with you on the multiple select problem, but consider how much time it would take to copy several files of varying extension types from different directories to a floppy. >Some applications are by nature GUI. GUIs make the infrequently performed >system administration jobs more convenient. GUIs make it extremely >difficult if not impossible to automate jobs. I think you have this backwards. A CLI tool is fine for infrequent management tasks. You can call it easily from a console. You can add it to a script or automate it with cron or what have you. You can concatenate it with other tools. OTOH, a GUI is well suited to frequent tasks for reporting and administration. Being able to glance at an activity monitor or click once to add a user is a time saver. >The best GUI administration tools are basically front ends for command line >programs, and either display or log the commands they execute so that jobs >that are done frequently can be repeated very quickly by putting those >commands in a script. Here, I emphatically agree with you. And its really this that offers the best tool for what the user prefers. Prefer the CLI, use it. Want a GUI, here it is. Same tool, different interface. Then again, there are some tools that are, as you've stated before, decidedly GUI oriented. A paint or illustration tool ala GIMP is a good example. --- Tyler Regas PHM Editor-in-Chief [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.pdahandyman.com _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
