Re: [Fsfe-uk] An ignorant question?

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 09:01:33PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:
> Agreed.  Many programmers seem to forget that the keyboard exists.
> GTK+ 2.x are vastly better WRT this; I've written GTK+ programs that
> can be used completely from the keyboard--it's not a lot of effort to
> set up the hotkeys, focus movement through dialogues and so on.  If
> you are forced to use the mouse, it's badly designed, IMHO.

Kind of agree, although not 100%. GIMP, for example... I know what you 
mean though ;)

> I don't personally believe in RAD.  Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned,
> but I like to plan what I'm going to write, even going as far as
> speccing each module on paper, from overall design right down to
> function prototypes and specifications.  The result is working,
> documented, long-term maintainable code.  

I've a lot of time for some Delphi programmers - they often have a good
awareness of good code. I'm a fan of design, definitely, but not really
of software architecture - I think you can spend too much time planning,
and often people do. 

> (And this is done in my free
> time, for Free software projects, BTW.  Most free software is not
> hastily slapped together junk.)

My experience also.

> Partly because of this, and what Paul Johnson wrote, as well as
> thoughts I've been having over the last few years, it seems like a
> full accounts package for GNU/Linux would be perhaps /the/ killer
> application for encouraging the adoption of Free software.

Has anyone here played with GNUe? That does a lot of the things people are
talking about here - it has a forms designer that is intended to create
data-aware interactive apps (like Access), it's also designed to be an ERP
suite. I haven't tried it myself properly, but I hear some good things 
about it.

Cheers,

Alex.