[Gambas-user] Improving the utility of IDE work flow.

[Benoit Minisini]

On mercredi 5 mars 2008, richard terry wrote:
> As part of my on-going experience with using the editor extensively this is
> another observation for a small improvement in usability.
>
> As a prelude I'll make this comment so you know I'm not just talking
> through my hat.
>
> I worked for a number of years (admittedly a number of years ago) writing
> vb medical records projects - eg pathology ordering, prescriptions,
> diabetes stuff, plus a contacts database for our local GP organisation and 
> an entire vb medical record project of my own, and made many observations
> re utility of programs over the years.
>
> I've been paid quite a bit over a number of years to analyse the usability
> of medical records programs, and in the last couple of years was involved
> with a comparison of four major commercial offerings (where I was paid both
> as part of a large group, and separately as an independant consultant , to
> evaluate utility of programs to used in after hours, and aged care
> residential facilities in Newcastle)
>
> As part of my independant review, I ran these 4 programs,  and my own
> (which is optimised for maximal workflow with minimal keypresses)  
> simultaneoulsy side by side in a virtual machine, and kept track of their
> work flow, and just how many mouse events, key presses etc, it took to do a
> similar task in each one.
>
> For prescriptions eg one program (Yes - it was mine) could take as little
> as 2-3 key presses to generate an entire script - consisting of
> drug/generic/quantities/repeats/dosages/indications/instructions, versus
> the usual number of events (up to about 17 or more) generated by the
> commercial programs. Over a day, in my environment, this adds up to many
> many thousands of extra mouse or keyboard events.
>
> So with reference to Gambas IDE, setting it up so as to allow the user
> flexibilty with the minimal number of keypresses and easiest navigation is
> of great interest to me.
>
> Given that when one is programming intensively, and has say finished for
> the moment, or closes gambas to re-open again for some reason, it would be
> nice to have gambas open the project to its last used state, which in my
> hands here, it dosnt seem to do (1138 version)
>
> My project now has around 70 modules and forms, and the data directory has
> some 15 subdirectories.
>
> As once one's gui is fairly stable one dosn't really want to be continually
> re-presented with the gui form at bootup, but with the last code window one
> was working on, I think it would be nice have an option in
> Tools>Preferences>Editor
>
>  like 'Reload last used class' at bootup.

This is a good idea. I note it in the TODO file.

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini