GUI

[Andy Waddington on Survey stuff]

> I always enter the data in Excel first ...

Hmmm, I guess if you find Excel easier to use than a text editor ... I've
never yet found a use for a spreadsheet - they are just one huge blind spot
for me - seem to just be a way of making things a lot harder. My wife does
our weekly menus and jobs lists in Excel 'cos they print out nicely, but I
have to say that I find it an absolute bloody pain - a typical Windows
product where the GUI seems mainly to get in the way of doing anything
productive. But, as you say, Survex is sufficiently simple and flexible that
if that is your preferred way of data entry, then it works fine !

The nice thing about Survex is surely that you don't need to learn any extra
tools or complex GUIs - a text editor is something that everyone needs to
know how to use - you need it for everything (such as email :) and you can
use a text file on any platform (except when MS systems can't hack text
without the extra <cr>s in, but then that again is MS trying to make life
as hard as possible for everyone else and is not *that* hard to workaround).

Once you have your data, the only GUI you need is an icon to drag your
survex file to or a file association so it gets processed on a double click.
Similarly for viewing your .3d file - although it would be nice if CaveRot
ran inside a window on RISC OS :-) Processing a survey is inherently a
batch job (like running a compiler) - you give it the instructions and
then go away and let it get on with the job (although with modern computers
that "go away" step is getting shorter and shorter - can we have a campaign
to make Survex a bit slower ? I don't get enough coffee breaks any more )-:

Lets face it, you are going to actually draw the survey on paper, and almost
certainly paper that's bigger than your printer will handle ... unless you
have a nice big drum/flatbed plotter. A nice GUI is not going to help here
either.

Maybe if the problem is the number of command line switches that you are
trying to remember, then something like the FrontEnd module on Acorn
platforms would do the job ? This would provide a bit more flexibility than
the current IconCLI, although I find that I never need to change these
switches from the default, so once IconCLI is set up, it is quite enough.
There must be something similar to this (where you tick boxes or radio
buttons in a simple GUI, which then sets up command line switches when you
press "OK") perhaps in Tcl/Tk ? It's such a generic problem that it seems
unlikely you'd need to write anything apart from a description of the icons
you want and the switches they control.

Personally, I find the existing interfaces sufficiently nice that I use
Survex for a lot more than just cave surveys. Kayak design, for example :-)

Andy