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by oblak
1757 days ago
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I was so impressed the first time I saw a relative use their government mandated accounting software for DOS. That woman was going through forms faster than me doing mortal kombat 3 combos. Not sure that would be possible these days with remote databases and such. |
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In windows (or more generally GUI) you usually need to constantly move your hands from keyboard to mouse (to click a button and "go ahead") and then back to keyboard to type soimething, then mouse again, etc.
I believe this is only due because of the choices of the programmers that used some "default" modes.
To give you an example the good ol'Dos program I was talking about used Enter to confirm data typed in a field AND move to next field, to go back to a previous field it was Ctrl+Enter, then you had to press F8 to confirm the whole form and exit to the main menu or F10 to confirm the whole form AND go to the next form of the same type.
When you got to a field like "state" or "country", that need to match an existing database, windows programs mostly have a drop down list (and you need the mouse to open the drop down list and scroll down until you find the one you want), the old program allowed to either enter the two-three letter country id (like IT for Italy, DE for Deutschland, etc.) OR to type the first few letters and then autocomplete with - if I recall correctly - F4.
Dates could be typed without separators, i.e. 22082021 and when you pressed enter the field would be automagically formatted to 22/08/2021, currently in lots of programs (or web sites) you have to click and then a calendar pops up, and you have to click three times for day/month/year, some "smarter" ones have a button for "today" but that, for a field like "date of birth" makes no sense whatever.
This latter is a pet-peeve of mine but 3/4 to 7/8 of all web shops, including those that are clearly national only have a drop down list for countries that invariably starts from Afghanistan, which possibly represents 0,0000000001 % of the orders.
Then you have "tabs", on a huge screen 1024*768 or higher resolution the actual form is a tiny window, and you input name/surname/birthday/address, etc. on it, then you have to switch (why?) to another tab to enter (say) fiscal data and to yet another one to add notes.
Of course there are also better UI's, but the large majority is as I described above.