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Yeahs ago I remember when my big bank switched from a TUI front end to a web front end for their front line staff. What originally took a few quick keyboard/ta

Yeahs ago I remember when my big bank switched from a TUI front end to a web front end for their front line staff. What originally took a few quick keyboard/tab combinations that was hard wired into employee muscle memory immediately took 2-3 times longer. Fortunately, the need to go into a physical bank doesn’t matter as much, but it’s still a regression…

chiph 25d ago
I saw the same thing at Best Buy. They switched from a traditional cash register to a web application on a PC. And all the clerks carefully (and slowly) navigated their mice to click on everything. What was worse was their mouse platform wasn't level. So every time they let go, it would drift downwards and they'd have to go through the "where's my mouse pointer" wiggle again.
api 25d ago
The truth is that the web is a shit GUI framework. It's slow, clunky, incredibly resource intensive, hard to make uniform, verbose to code. It's terrible. The way the whole industry adopted it is understandable given the install base, but it's also probably a trillion dollar tax. I'd hate to see how much additional energy is used by billions of end-user devices running a rendering layer that is 100X heavier and more CPU intensive than anything native or TUI.
- em3rgent0rdr 25d ago
  Not if you just stick to the basic built-in 30-year-old HTML GUI elements (<button>, <select>, <legend>, <form>, <input>, <table> for layout, etc., maybe also some modern standards like flexboxes) which are very fast, lightweight, east to code, and uniform. The problem to me is every website tries to do some custom javascript monstrosity with their own graphics to keep up with the latest fad. When just sticking to the basics, I find the web is a great cross-platform GUI framework.
  - ezekiel68 25d ago
    Sure. Except that nobody ever does just stick to those elements.
    - shoopadoop 25d ago
      You can make a crummy TUI like you can make a crummy GUI...
- shimman 25d ago
  eh, I don't agree with this. More like American corporations have degraded the free web to a point where nothing hasn't really improved for the last two decades. There should be public browsers and public search engines. The private incentives are too much and software built for public needs can be extremely cheaper than their private counterparts once you remove the need to support advertising services.
shoopadoop 25d ago
Modern TUIs aren't like the form-based TUIs of yesteryear, though! They're wannabe window managers.
yencabulator 24d ago
You can make a bad UI with any of TUI, GUI or WebUI. There's no real reason a GUI app couldn't take the exact same keyboard input as a TUI app did. Consider this: Grocery store cashier interfaces are graphical these days, yet they're still optimized for fast input.

chiph 25d ago

I saw the same thing at Best Buy. They switched from a traditional cash register to a web application on a PC. And all the clerks carefully (and slowly) navigated their mice to click on everything. What was worse was their mouse platform wasn't level. So every time they let go, it would drift downwards and they'd have to go through the "where's my mouse pointer" wiggle again.

api 25d ago

The truth is that the web is a shit GUI framework. It's slow, clunky, incredibly resource intensive, hard to make uniform, verbose to code. It's terrible. The way the whole industry adopted it is understandable given the install base, but it's also probably a trillion dollar tax. I'd hate to see how much additional energy is used by billions of end-user devices running a rendering layer that is 100X heavier and more CPU intensive than anything native or TUI.

em3rgent0rdr 25d ago
Not if you just stick to the basic built-in 30-year-old HTML GUI elements (<button>, <select>, <legend>, <form>, <input>, <table> for layout, etc., maybe also some modern standards like flexboxes) which are very fast, lightweight, east to code, and uniform. The problem to me is every website tries to do some custom javascript monstrosity with their own graphics to keep up with the latest fad. When just sticking to the basics, I find the web is a great cross-platform GUI framework.
- ezekiel68 25d ago
  Sure. Except that nobody ever does just stick to those elements.
  - shoopadoop 25d ago
    You can make a crummy TUI like you can make a crummy GUI...
shimman 25d ago
eh, I don't agree with this. More like American corporations have degraded the free web to a point where nothing hasn't really improved for the last two decades. There should be public browsers and public search engines. The private incentives are too much and software built for public needs can be extremely cheaper than their private counterparts once you remove the need to support advertising services.

shoopadoop 25d ago

Modern TUIs aren't like the form-based TUIs of yesteryear, though! They're wannabe window managers.

yencabulator 24d ago

You can make a bad UI with any of TUI, GUI or WebUI. There's no real reason a GUI app couldn't take the exact same keyboard input as a TUI app did. Consider this: Grocery store cashier interfaces are graphical these days, yet they're still optimized for fast input.