Re: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Trevor,

For sure, if you are still performing green screen data entry and wish to
> remain in the last century, then you should use a keyboard.


I'm all for automation too, and have completely eliminated "data entry"
departments at clients by use of scanners in a warehouse, Omega remittance
processing systems in A/R, scanner based sales automation systems which
ultimately feed directly into the iSeries, etc.  But even after you do that,
you'll still find there are tasks for which the keyboard is appropriate.

For that matter, when your hands are already on the keyboard even things
like switching tasks in Windows is much faster with Alt+Tab then using the
mouse.  Ditto for lots of other Windows standard keyboard shortcuts.  OTOH,
if you're already using the mouse, then you typically should use the mouse
method instead.  It is switching between them which should be minimized.

Most people seem woefully unaware of how much you can (and should <g>) do
using keyboard shortcuts, IMHO.

Hahaha. This is really ironic, too. The QWERTY keyboard is designed to slow
> you down. DVORAK was an attempt at speeding it back up again.


Correct, QWERTY was an attempt to both slow down typing by forcing extra
finger movement and an attempt to maximize the distance between where strike
hammers originated so it would reduce the frequency of the hammers (and thus
the keys) from getting "stuck" near the ribbon.  Along with just nonsensical
quirks like wanting to have the entire word TYPEWRITER on a single row of
the keyboard.  But I was specically referring to the DVORAK layouts
optimized for one-handed amputees (both left and right handed version
exist).  The traditional DVORAK layout is still optimized for two handed
typing.

Regardless of that, I find that most users use the mouse incorrectly


Not to mention the keyboard, too.  :)

The user is going to use the interface that is the easiest to use...
> regardless of the time wasted.


And that is a good thing?

"Easiest" here comes down to a lack of training, like your example of moving
your hands from the keyboard to click an OK button.  Is that really
"easier"?

Doug