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