in reply to Decent GUI design

There are, in my mind, two ideals reasons to use a GUI-- you have an application that simply requires a mouse or pointing device to be workable (like a drawing program) or your information is best expressed visually (for instance, an image viewer or graphing program).

In the first case, why would you want to get rid of the mousing? In fact, you'd want to make it even easier to use just the mouse (the GIMP is a good examples of this, with its right-click on the image for a powerful menu feature). In the second case, you may very well want to make it as keyboard-friendly as possible by including a command-line replacement text or entry widget or two (a disturbingly good example of this is the mini-buffer in emacs).

Of course, it's almost never this simple, is it? Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium. One of the things I like about Tk is the way you can use the arrow keys and tab to navigate menus and buttons, that way you're not trying to bind everything in sight, but can still bind some important starting places, like menus but not the menu items themselves.

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Re: (ichimunki) Re: Decent GUI desgin
by gregor42 (Parson) on Apr 16, 2001 at 20:31 UTC
    ... why would you want to get rid of the mousing? In fact, you'd want to make it even easier to use just the mouse (the GIMP is a good examples of this, with its right-click on the image for a powerful menu feature)...

    I never thought of getting rid of the mouse. I'm NOT anti-GUI. The point of the post was that I was making GUI's for everything. I was merely pointing out that hot-keys are usually dealt with as an afterthought when IMHO they should be tied to the widgets more tightly.

    Why do you need to define a sub for the button & another sub for they keystroke. Why not bind the keystroke to the widget...?

    And the answer was given by Masem-sama who pointed out that there might be an Internationalization issue.

    And I grant that yes, Visually Oriented software is GUI driven by nature. However, most of the commercial graphic artists that I know use Photoshop & use the hot keys like mad to make their work go faster. As a programmer I want to accomidate these people. I hate Windoze but I use it at work so I learned all of the hot keys. I have a few Macs at home (amongst other things) & sometimes I get frustrated when I have to use the mouse to do something, when otherwise I'm on a roll.

    I think the point I was making is that as programmers it's our responsibility to provide "More Than One Way To Do It". As in: practicing what we preach in these hallowed halls.



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