Re: GUI design

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 03/23/2012 01:20 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 2012/3/23 Daniel J Sebald<address@hidden>:
> > One question is whether people are more productive using a GUI
> > versus a command line and an editor like gvim or whatever.
>
> This is irrelevant.

No it's not.  Being productive is important.


>  They want a GUI. You are not going to convince
> them that they don't want a GUI. The first thing every new user does
> when they install Octave is (1) look for a GUI to install or (2)
> complain that there is no GUI.

Give the people what they want, I suppose.  But honestly, providing a 
service that can process data, analyze data, do numerical integration, 
plot data with all sorts of output formats like EPS, PDF, and LaTeX is 
not enough?  It has to have a GUI before people will accept it?  If 
these people were paying in an acceptable currency, then we can talk.


> > To get my support with a GUI effort, the GUI has to bring some
> > feature to the table above and beyond what the command line can do.
>
> But we don't want your support. Nor mine. The only reason we're making
> a GUI is because everyone but you and me and other people who post on
> this list immediately say the reason Octave sucks is because it has no
> GUI.
>
> > Whether maintainers should be supporting a GUI is another question.
> > It's a lot of work.
>
> Sure, and there also seems to be a lot of people other than you and me
> who are willing to do this work. We should tell those people that what
> everyone seems to like is GUI Octave, and if we are going to convince
> all the people installing GUI Octave that they shouldn't be doing so,
> the easiest way is to make our GUI look exactly the same.

I may be missing some info here.  Is GUI Octave a non open source project?


> > Just use GUI Octave developed as it's own project and contribute to
> > that.
>
> We can't contribute to it. It has no public source code and the author
> doesn't want his artistic integrity tarnished by our patches (really,
> he said to me as much, comparing source code to art).

Oh.  That I didn't know.  If the program writer doesn't want to make it 
open source that is his or her prerogative.  But why use GUI Octave as a 
standard?  Why not just MathWorks' GUI as a standard?  Like I say, the 
GUI has to bring something to the table, which MathWorks does but GUI 
Octave doesn't.  All those masses saying Octave is feckless because it 
doesn't have a GUI will start saying Octave is feckless because it has 
this wimpy plot like GUI Octave that doesn't allow moving objects around 
using a mouse, or doesn't have a method for designing application GUIs.

Also, many companies don't use Octave, not because it doesn't have a 
GUI, but because it is open source and many companies have a policy 
against open source software for its employees because IT departments 
have a difficult time maintaining that.  Whether that is well-founded 
policy I'm not sure, but in some circumstances it is.

Dan