I worked for a short time with SPIFFY and it was pure pain. Once I figured
out how to get rid of it I never looked back.
When I worked for a previous employer, they had Spiffy installed. There were
things about it I didn't like, but overall I found it to be light years
ahead of using regular ISPF. I guess others must have felt the same way,
otherwise my employer wouldn't have paid the $200,000 a year in annual
maintenance!
While that might seem like a lot of money, there were roughly 1,000 people
working on the mainframe. If Spiffy saved each worker an extremely
conservative estimate of at least 1 hour a week (and I would consider the
average to be much higher than that), do the math and you'll see $200,000 a
year was a bargain. Believe me, if it wasn't, my employer wouldn't have paid
it.
BTW: Some people advocate REFLISTS and the ISPF Workplace (etc), which of
course come 'free' with ISPF. Meanwhile, IBM sells Spiffy as an add-on
product to enhance ISPF. If Spiffy didn't do a *much* better job than
REFLISTS and all the other ISPF freebies, how do you think they'd be able to
sell it?
I found Spiffy to be much less intuitive than SimpList, and I was never
comfortable with the fact that Spiffy hijacks a lot of ISPF functions and
replaces them with its own. SimpList doesn't do that. It's there if you
need it, but you can ignore it if you wish; it is just another ISPF
application (although an *excellent* one indeed).
Thank you for that. It's true that some people don't like change, and when
they go to work one day and discover the ISPF interface is suddenly
different (e.g. because Spiffy was installed), they immediately panic and
try to get back to the old interface. It's a shame because if they stuck it
out a little while, they'd soon discover they could be *way* more
productive.
In contrast to Spiffy, SimpList doesn't change the regular ISPF panels. For
example, 3.4 still looks and acts exactly the same as it did before. It's
only if someone selects an option from the ISPF menu and knowingly launches
a SimpList session that things are different. If they don't want to select
the option and they want to continue using 3.4 or REFLISTS or the Workplace
(etc), that's up to them.
I'm a huge fan of ISPF; the editor is awesome and the ISPF services are
absolutely first class. IBM has done a superb job of supplying everything
that's necessary to develop extremely productive tools and utilities. They
also supply a fairly decent mainframe interface that many shops are content
to use (e.g. option 3.4 etc). However, it's not the only interface that's
available and it's far from being the best possible interface. For those who
prefer to drive something other than a black model 'T', there are choices
out there.
Dave Salt
SimpList(tm) - The easiest, most powerful way to surf a mainframe!
http://www.mackinney.com/products/SIM/simplist.htm
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