What, I'm afraid, people rarely realise these days, is that their desktops are, essentially, GUIs to various OS features, so they obviously use GUI more frequently than they think :) After all, this is all matter of habits and training, and the reality is that people get more and more GUI-oriented these days, like it or not. Whether to fight the reality or try to use it for benefit is, certainly, every developer's own choice. I still remember payroll officers saying that hand calculators (and even their predecessors) were much more convenient and robust than modern software, but do not hear this for some 15 years already ...
Eugene On 12 Apr 2013, at 19:09, James Holton wrote: I agree with Nat. There are good GUIs and bad GUIs, just like there are good command-line programs and bad command-line programs. Bad programs are easy to write and good ones are hard. Conservation of "work" I think. -James Holton MAD Scientist On 4/12/2013 10:38 AM, Nat Echols wrote: On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 10:27 AM, James Holton <jmhol...@lbl.gov<mailto:jmhol...@lbl.gov>> wrote: But, when it comes to GUIs, I have always found them counterproductive. In my humble opinion, the purpose of computers and other machines is to DO work for me, not create work for me, and I already have enough buttons to push each day. This is a very defensible position with regards to your normal workflow (or mine) - but beamline scientists (or software developers) are not very representative of crystallographers as a group. I've seen a lot of reflexive anti-GUI mentality from users who don't fall into either category, presumably because a senior postdoc or PI told them "real crystallographers use the command line", when in reality they'd be better served by figuring out on their own what workflow is most efficient for them. -Nat -- Scanned by iCritical.
