Scor­pio News

almost as hard and time consuming to write as the ‘over the top, all bells and whistles’ kind.

The aim with Imaging Systems is two-fold, to enter data as painlessly as possible, and once entered, to extract it with the minimum of fuss. All the software I’ve seen achieves these aims, it’s the amount of bother attached to the tasks which annoys me, and it’s not the actual data entry and extraction which is usually at fault. It’s the way in which these are approached. There is a great tendency these days to go on first impressions. Perhaps, the tendency has always been there, it could be as I get older, I see it for what it is.

My point is that it’s not first impressions which should count. But salesmen only have a short time to impress the customer, so any impression made has to count. Take, for instance the use of ‘pull-down’ or ‘pop-up’ menus in software, where a little window appears on the screen containing commands or instructions. Fine – nice idea. These are a salesman’s dream, they look neat and tidy, very clear (if properly laid out) to the prospective buyer and so make the salesman’s job easier. Pop-up and pull-down menus are, more often than not, coupled with the use of a mouse, claimed as a great ergonomic tool by Xerox, who first researched the idea. The problem with the combination is that if the job in hand is essentially a keyboard entry job, it means moving one hand away from the keyboard, usually the right hand, to reach the mouse to point to the menu required. This leaves the left hand for typing. Now I’m a reasonably proficient typist, not a normal feature amongst those who design and write software, or for that matter those who buy (as opposed to use) software. Now I can’t type left handed – I need both hands ! To me, and to many others who can type, and many others who use computers seriously, the mouse is an absolute pain. It slows things up. Sometimes, only too rarely, the mouse commands are supplemented by a set of keyboard commands, so the hands don’t leave the keyboard. But then, if keyboard commands are provided as well, why bother with the mouse in the first place ?

Don’t get me wrong, Xerox weren’t wrong in their research, the mouse is an invaluable tool – when used with graphics and combinations of text and graphics. It’s simply that the mice have been breeding and have now spread to areas where they shouldn’t have.

Pop-up and pull-down menus have their bad points (they must have some advantages when used with keyboard entry, but for the life of me, I can’t think of any). Because they ‘pop-up’ and are supposed to appear (but never do) in an unused area of the screen, they are invariably quite small. This means they usually contain only half the set of commands required and so require another menu for the rest, or if they contain instructions, they go on endlessly. The guy who designs them tends to ensure they overlay each other, always slightly to the right and down from the previous one. This is supposed to represent a pile of pages on a desk. So you can