Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons -- MIDRANGE-L

Booth,

Maybe some of us are having trouble getting too excited because a few clunky radio buttons on a 80 or 132 column screen does not a GUI make. I'd be hard pressed to believe that (as currently implemented) they make an application any easier to use, and they certainly don't give a tired old terminal a sexy new look. These things are an answer to a problem that doesn't exist. My users aren't asking for radio buttons and menu bars on a terminal screen. What are they asking for?

They are asking for a GUI - a complete GUI. One that provides the following features:

1) Colour - Lots of it, used intelligently to draw attention to different information.

2) More data for each screen. Eighty columns doesn't cut it. And just try to effectively use 132 columns displays in a CA/400 emulation session - it looks horrible.

3) Rich text fields that allow them to emphasize their text.

And on, and on, and on.... limited time prevents me from continuing. But these few examples should serve to illustrate some of the elements of a GUI that actually help the user in any significant way. Radio boxes, menu bars etc., are nice touches, but they don't allow you to really do anything that you can't already accomplish using existing techniques.

Solving any of these problems would require significant resources, and I don't think that I would like to see IBM wasting any more time on it. I think that they should continue to focus on the more modern tools instead.

Regards,

John Taylor

----- Original Message -----

From: boothm@earth.goddard.edu

To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com

Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 1999 12:26

Subject: Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons

Pat,

I'm not convinced it makes much difference though. I did the application and David posted it ( http://www.midrange.com/booth ). There's been interest, but only a dozen or so as near as I can tell. A couple of people that I've showed it to just sort of shrugged; it was a real ho-hum for them. I'm not sure what that means but I'm thinking that there's not much interest in new features in plain old RPG, RPGIV, and DDS. Or it might mean that RPG people don't really know what radio buttons are? who knows...

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Subject: Re: ok, I made a green screen with radio buttons

boothm@earth.goddard.edu wrote:
>
> I just made a simple little application. Here's the salient features:

My faith is renewed in this group... In the original ranting and raving
I did, my complaint was that programmers were unable or unwilling to try
the features and functions that we all have had for a number of years.

It would appear that a simple conversation has at least made a
difference in the way a few folks felt. If we ALL were more willing to try these
functions, a lot of our older applications would sure look a lot
better to the users... This little discussion has apparently had some
real benefits.. I applaud everybody who tries !!!!!!