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insightful post on gui design, and why it can be faster than the command line

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JavaJones:
40hz, the SUPER example is a great one because it - and even more so Media Coder - are great displays of what happens when you try to encapsulate significant amounts of CLI functionality in a GUI. In that case they're encapsulating *multiple* CLI programs so the problem is even worse. SUPER simplifies things considerably, removing many of the more flexible options in the interest of simplicity and is, in my opinion, the better for it for most users, i.e. they disallow putting certain kinds of content into certain kinds of media containers because most players won't play them once output. With the CLI apps themselves you could of course do almost any kind of container and codec combination you wanted. Media Coder does a bit less to reduce complexity and the interface is quite cluttered as a result. And still, even in MC's case, you don't have a comprehensive view of all options. So it just illustrates the flexibility of GUI vs. CLI, at least in certain tasks. That being said for the occasional video or audio transcoding I do, SUPER and MC are by far my preference. ;)

I am quite curious to see how much could be done to better integrate scripting with GUIs. There are in fact GUIs specifically designed to *create* scrips, and those are quite an interesting cross-over in the considerations of this thread. Being able to expose your app's underlying functions with through scripting, even if a CLI is not available, is a very good thing IMO. I wish more apps did this. We'll be adding scripting functionality to Terragen at some point, so that should give me an interesting inside look as it is mostly a GUI-driven app (though many people would call the GUI more akin to a CLI in power, flexibility, and complexity/difficulty).

- Oshyan

rjbull:
I am quite curious to see how much could be done to better integrate scripting with GUIs. There are in fact GUIs specifically designed to *create* scrips-JavaJones (September 08, 2011, 01:29 PM)
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mouser's Drag and Drop Shell Robot is sort-of related.  I felt that the real work lay in figuring out the command lines of the programs, and I'd then have put everything in a batch file, so the idea of using drag + drop to feed in files didn't quite gel.

40hz:
It's a totally different story in the server room. But everybody knows BOFHs like me and JJ are evil six-fingered mutants. So they don't allow us to have our own GUIs. For obvious reasons. (see above)-40hz (September 08, 2011, 09:30 AM)
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Forget somebody?

-Stoic Joker (September 08, 2011, 11:33 AM)
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@Stoic - Ah indeed! I am truly remiss in not including you with the BOFHs
mentioned earlier.

I will edit my original post to correct this inexcusable oversight.  8)

Stoic Joker:
Thank you. :)

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