Why?

After all, one can "easily" click one's way to any dialog box, as in this real-life example. Ready? Start clicking: Start, Settings, Control Panel, Display, Settings tab, Advanced, Monitor tab, Properties, Driver tab, Update Driver (brings up the Wizard -- what took him so long?), Next, Next, OK, OK, all the way back... the usual GUI experience, cherished and perpetuated by 95% of all users today (based on observation in hi-tech environments). It's probably above 99% elsewhere, among non-professionals.

The above sequence, which is not infrequent, is accepted as normal, user-friendly, computer-man interaction. But it should be triggering an alarm in a healthy, self-respecting personality...

This is part of the often-quoted "just a mouse click away" propaganda, but, rest assured, it is not reserved to any specific GUI environment. Mac, Windows, Motif and CDE (both part of the X Window System), Gnome, KDE, GeoShell -- all essentially share the same "vision": mouse, icons, scroll-bars, no automation whatsoever. They are visually pleasing, easy to start using, but lead to almost irreversible "addiction", humiliation and slavery.

The GUI seems to paralyze and "dumb-down" the brain, as the user does not seek to find new ways for getting the work done faster and more reliably. "Beaten men follow beaten paths", somebody said. The above and similar long-winded paths are being taken millions times every day.

To be fair, for the majority of daily tasks, the buttons are somewhat more accessible -- somewhere on the visible screen, in fixed or floating toolbars, behind pull-down and pop-up menus, but most users ignore obvious ways of speeding up their work.

In a login dialog, for example, it appears that a large majority of users tend to type in their name, reach for the mouse to click on the password entry field, type it in, then reach for the mouse in order to click the OK button. Very few use the TAB and Enter keys that completely eliminate taking the hands off the keyboard.

What's the problem?

It may not be immediately obvious, but the "use the mouse whenever you can and the keyboard only when you must" mindset is a high price to pay in the long run.

Disclaimer

If the tone is sometimes harsh, patronizing, or arrogant, it is because I believe that how an overwhelming majority of people interact with computers is very sad and wasteful.

This is not a scientific report, although some of the absurd behavioural patterns are obvious and measurable.

This is not about saving a few seconds here and there (although billions of planetary clicks per day do add up). It is the repetitious, insulting routine, that takes out all the fun and challenge to learn and grow that I find saddening.

A system requiring so much repetition from a human being is not user-friendly. It's irrelevant that some people are extremely fast and precise with the mouse; it's the number of quantifiable steps needed to take that is objectionable.

A Prophecy

Chaplin saw the inhumanity in the debilitating, repetitive man-machine interaction almost seventy years ago. When it comes to desktop devices currently in use, we have not evolved a bit. The tools have changed, but the machine is still fully in charge. Today, we are sitting, not standing in front of the assembly line conveyor belt, and we are clicking and typing, not tightening bolts. From some future point in time, both epochs would appear equally shocking and inhumane.

Ironically, the original IBM PC ad from the 1980's uses Chaplin's Tramp character as the mascot. The prophet is now back with the "GUI times"!

Servers and Clients

The servers are designed and programmed to run unassisted "eternally", that is, until a severe power cut, a major disaster, and so on. Typically, the human side of this environment starts batch processes and services and the machine does the work: financial transactions, similations, real-time process control, web serving, image rendering, and so on.

On a desktop machine, the roles are completely reversed, when it comes to who does the real "work". This is by design, and we are not doing anything about it...

Consider this simplistic, non-scientific observation: ??? all year round ...

Slaves and Masters

The Power Users Defintion

The Keyboard and the Mouse

Let's hope that Windows will continue to support the keyboard as before, although many applications do so miserably by violating well-know style guides in this domain.

The above brilliantly executed dozen operation (a dozen or so steps) by a typical mouse-only user appears somewhat extreme, but is it? Really, is there a quicker way to do the above? Couldn't the user tell Windows to remember his clicks and choices, so that they could later be replayed, or bound to a single shortcut? It appears not.

In the days of Windows 3.x, there existed a utility called Macro Recorder. In those days, even basic users still used the command line, wrote and understood simple batch scripts, were used to command line history. I don't know how popular the Macro Recorder was, but the fact that it disappeared from the product is telling.

Obviously, it attracted no attention. The GUI seduced the user by its external beauty and ease of getting started with computers by looking at colorful pictures and clicking with the mouse. Most users seem to have remained in that infantile state.

Both the keyboard and the mouse may have serious health side-effects, but I personally find the mouse more destructive to my shoulder, arm hand and fingers. Unlike the keyboard, where one can easily type without looking at the tool itself, the mouse absolutely requires looking at it's "nose" -- the pointer on the screen. It may sound like a detail, but it is not. Instead of concetrating on text or other areas of interest, we must, from time to time, search for the pointer and manipulate it. Our eyes often have to zoom-in at the pixel level to perform an action. Errors are frequent and not always immediately obvious.

The Keyboard and the Mouse

With the keyboad scrolling using the paging and arrow keys, no such problems exist -- you never look at the tool and you can scroll in small increments and big leaps with great precision.

The scroll bar sports another gadget, a slider whose size reflects the relative portion of the file you are viewing. This is very useful, and I often glance at it as I hit PageDown or PageUp. The problem with using the slider is its practical uselessness: when it is large, say one third of the screen height, it's obvious that you can view the file with one or two, at most, paging keys. As the file gets bigger, auto-repeating paging keys make scrolling easy as well, and the speed is always the same.

When dragging the slider with the mouse, interesting things happen -- the scrolling speed increases, making it humanly almost impossible to control it. I have recently spent some time with a person using this approach exclusively. Unfortunately, the log file we were looking at was so huge that the slider went down to several pixels high (an obvious programming oversight to stop shrinking it after a certain absurdly small size, but that's not the point). The speed at which the text was flashing before our eyes and the difficulty of locating information were incredible. Still, no keyboard keys were used, rather, huge doses of clicks on the tiny scroll bar arrows were used to bring the information into view. This went on, and is going on at this very moment millions of times...

"Thou Shalt not automate thy work"

To "fix" that, we have the extravaganza of numerous, confusing, and overlapping ways of doing the very same thing from the Start menu, Explorer, Desktop, user-defined keyboard shortcuts, System Tray, Quick Launch, built-in WinKey shortcuts, Task Bar, application menus and customizable (floating) toolbars...

Who would want a car with several steering wheels, accelerator pedals and breaks? Less is definitely safer and more productive in all man-machine interaction.

Yes, there is still the command prompt, but for how long? I seem to remember reading something about this being completely removed in future Windows versions!

Granted, with very long paths and file names, and the mysteries of the Registry, there is little one can or dare do from the command line interactively.

But batch facilities and and command line tools must never go away, even on machines destined for 100% MS Office, mouse-only users. In GUI-only hell, an advanced user has nothing better than litter the Desktop with dozens of shortcuts as the only way of somewhat automating and speeding up the work.

As the above example shows, there is no such thing as an easy click: what you must go through is a lot of navigation, where you must understand and remember all the steps -- how would you otherwise decide which button to click? There are no easy ways to create "black boxes" and abstractions, so you are forced to see and perform a lot of unnecessary, uninteresting chores repeatedly.

Full concentration is required all the time as you are making decisions which of the many crossroads to take. Most users progress and navigate step by step -- of course, it is not impossible to skip a step (a dialog box level) with the mouse! As in life, shorcuts exist in the GUI, so some users (finally) decide to try them out and never regret. Unlike the mouse, keyboard shortcuts allow skipping steps: hit Win+E and you have Explorer in front of you. Hit Win+R and enter \\server\docs\may to reach some far away folder. But how many users do this, even after being reminded repeatedly?

If we don't perform an action often, we tend to forget where exactly to start the clicking process, and later, which path to take when faced with so many choices.

Is it in one of the current application's buttons with names like Settings, Options, Properties, Configure, Tools, Customize, Advanced -- or maybe via Control Panel's Modems, Dial-up Connections (Network Connections, Internet Options, Mail Options, or whatever other names that change or get added with every new version) applets; or is it Start, Programs, Administrative Tools? Or maybe go directly to the Registry and modify a key (there are thousands)? Or use the TweakUI type of tools?

Yes, there are too many choices and ways of doing things and it is easy to mix things up. No doubt, the environment is very complex, and the Control Panel, for example, is layed out very logically, but the complexity now seems to be totally exposed, not hidden from the user. No doubt, the original goal was to make the interface simple and easy to learn and use, but somehow, it no longer is.

"Use Personalized Menus"

This seems to be proof that the number of options that are constantly creeping in is out of control, and that by hiding some of them the interface would still look manageable. I personally like seeing all available options in a drop-down menu and now need to adjust this on every PC I use.

Some users may want to enable this, but is should not be imposed as the default! It takes time to figure out what the wording "Personalized Menus" really mean, then to try to figure out where to modify it.

Underlined shortcut characters

Unfortunately, again, to make the GUI in recent Windows look cleaner, this was quietly disabled by default. The characters become visible only after pressing the Alt key. I find this an impossible way to function, so I always toggle this option to suit me. But the real issue is that users who are not aware of keyboard advantages will never discover that they even exist. An underlined character offers some hope...

This is one of the first things I customize. One would expect to find the relevant checkbox somewhere down the Start, Settings, Taskbar & Start Menu path, but it's not there. The path is: Start, Settings, Control Panel, Display, Effects tab. If you don't do this very often, you'll probably search for it under the Settings tab or the Appearence tab, because these terms are easily mixed up.

Internet Explorer, which has almost become the OS in itself, has many visual aspects, which are handled inside this application, and not, as we are used to, in the Control Panel Display applet. In this application, the path to follow is: Tools, Internet Options, Advanced. There we will find "Enable Personalized Favorites Menu". It is not related to the global "Use Personalized Menus" option described earlier.

The good news is that this gives us per-application flexibility, but what if all other applications allowed that? Many do, and we end up with an ever-growing number of control panels to understand and navigate. Hardly a well-designed, user-friendly, environment

??? The above "offenders" show the flaws of over-design and feature-creep

Where do I click?

You miss one pixel, and your hard work disappears.

Also, it's not unusual for an expert user trying to control an aspect of the GUI to run in circles for a few minutes until the correct path is found. For exmaple, one may start with IE's View, Toolbars, Customize..., only to find that it's not there and try Internet Options, Advanced, then abandon and go into the Control Panel. Still no luck; let's try Explorer and its View, Customize This Folder... option; no, it's Tools, Folder Options, General tab, followed by View tab.

All this to reach that last, magic click that is supposed to give this user interface its glamour! The road to that, in reality, "far, far, far, away mouse click" it often uncertain, slippery and risky...

Scripting

Note that all the executables launched from F9 will still run in their familiar GUI clothes, exactly as if launched with the .LNK files; what differs is the total control and flexibilty as to how they are organized and how fast you can reach and launch them!

You control the names, categories, sequences of execution, and so on. You do so in pure, no-nonsense text mode, with its unparalleled speed, efficiency, portability. You avoid the GUI noise and bloat and the imminent, destabilizing changes in the next Windows GUI incarnation.

The above risky, boring, humiliating, clicking adventure (12 levels deep!) to reach a dialog box becomes a single item in the ZTree Application Menu. (Of course, you must do some work in advance and find the command line equivalent for the action we want to execute, but it is usually there, either in Windows itself or using a freeware utility.)

You decide to place the action script on a prominent level in the menu hierarchy, not suffer through the hard-coded layout imposed by the platform (it cannot possibly fit everybody's needs). Your action may start at a prominent top level, or whatever suits you at the moment. Later, it can be moved and grouped under one or several catogies or tasks.

In addition, you can bind one or more Application Menu scripts to a single keyboard macro, for instant execution of a complex, frequent, task. You can reclaim your rigth to automate the way you work. The more programming you succeed building into your desktop, the closer you are to switching the roles of the Master and the Slave.

Some obvious benefits for power users

The following are some obvious and not so obvious benefits:

• Immediate access to the last action executed, thanks to ZTree's sophisticated history features. Of course, there is no such thing in the GUI. You will best understand this if you perform the example of changing some parameters in the Display applet and then close Control Panel. If you need to fix something 10 minutes later, there you go again clicking 12 levels deep. Every time, and on every PC you need to apply the change on.
• An F9 menu item is infinitely easier to navigate to because you decide where in the hierarchy of actions to place it. If it's too deep and you need to use it often, just promote it to a higher level.
• You can rename the action to whatever you like, in whatever language you like.
• You can add comments, tips, online help, and warnings to actions. After all, this is classic batch file programming, but done from a powerful, integrated, visual interface, not in a plethora of tiny disk files.
• An action's script can be cloned in order to modify it slightly, for example, leaving the original script intact. With files, we tend to either work with the original file (risky), or create file variants (with tags like NEW, OLD, SAVE, _nnnn, BAK, and so on). There is no concept of file cloning without renaming on the Windows file system (but it exists on others). Scripts creation does not mean file creation.
• Since we are dealing with classic batch programming, the scripts can be very elaborate and powerful. Compare this to single-line simplistic .LNK files in the Programs hierarchy that are pre-programmed for you. Of course, they are still available for use, but now you have a way of enhancing them in a variety of ways.
• You can finally add freeware tools to a logical place, the emulated Control Panel, for example: UI tweaks can be added under the standard Display applet. Tools for testing monitors can finally be kept next to the Monitor tab, for example. You can easily create a new category in your version of the Control Panel, "USB flash drives", for example, for all the utilities and hacks you have gathered in this area. Thus, your emulated Control Panel becomes a super-set of the standard one.
• The logic of super-setting can be extended to the Send To menu, Favorites, Desktop, Start button, and so on. The emulated GUI never becomes obsolete, it just grows and integrates new features as they become available. Features, yes, but it does *NOT* need to accept the latest UI re-organizations, the new icons (such as the horrible, liquid ones in Windows XP), or suffer from the fact that rarely-used options are hidden from the user by default.
• By understanding command line options to RunDLL32, Regedit, and other system tools, you can control the environment, do tests, and undo the changes in an organized way. For example, you may want to make sure that for each Registry tweak you place an "untweak" script right next to it. This is much safer and easier than using the GUI or Regedit.
• It's unlikely that any of the key system .DLLs and .EXEs will change the actual file names from version to version, whereas the GUI is almost guaranteed to do so, primarily for marketing reasons. (The other reasons are fixing oversights in the intial design.) Still, this is enough to disrupt serious work, and it often does when dialog boxes are moved around, renamed, redesigned.
• Your entire toolbox (one or more .ZDB files!) survives crashes, reboots, re-installs and even major OS changes. Your work procedures become fully resilient to the latest GUI redesign, new icons, new desktop metaphors, the latest trends in color schemes and skins.
• The marketing hype, fads, gadgets, and similar destabilizing, work-unfriendly, "imperatives" that drive the GUI sugar-coating industry can be completely neutralized.
• A ZTree's Application Menu database can store hundreds of "shortcuts" and batch scripts in a single file, as opposed to hundreds of .LNK files and batch files on a file system (whose future is never certain). In addition, .LNK files are not portable by design -- they contain hard-coded user and computer names, so it seems wiser to re-create them every time, on every PC one uses. Just copying them over may be risky.
• The automatically-generated .LNK files are quite limited in what they offer you: a single command line and a working directory. You can do that easily with a script, but also much more. My CD-burning software has this "C:\Apps\Nero\nero.exe" target in the .LNK file, so I can put exactly that line in a script, but I can also add many lines before and after the invokation line. For example, I can perform a quick visit to the publishers web site to check for updates, check disk space, check for presence of media in the drive and inform the user, do a virus scan of the staging area -- all this before even launching the application.
• You may come across PCs where access to certain controls has been hidden or disabled. However, sysadmins never actually remove the .CPL, .DLL, .EXE and other OS files, because they need to be there for the privileged users. Your F9 items will still find them, although they don't exist in the GUI of the restricted user. (Of course, your privileges must allow access to these files.)
• Broken Desktops (installations where users delete or move around GUI elements) are no longer a problem, as long as command line executables are still present. They could be on the user's disk, but you will certainly make sure that they also exist in your toolbox on a floppy, CD, or USB drive. No more panic searches and downloads.
• To avoid all surprises, you may even build a toolbox with (read-only, virus-checked!) versions of the executables you intend to use, for each of the Windows variants. This requires time and effort, but pays abundantly in the long run. This effort could easily be shared and spread across a community. Community efforts are simply not possible in the closed, strictly private GUI setups! The best one can do is share "cool tips" (which almost always amount to "discovering" [documented] Registry keys and capturing screens to explain how to go about tweaking them). This can be seen on hundreds of such sites on the web.
• Using the %OS% environment variable, all scripts can be conditioned for specific Windows versions. You write and debug them once and they run on all platforms you bring ZTree to. As new platforms or variants appear, you just touch a few lines in your scripts.
• A basic toolbox built around the ZTree environment should easily fit on a floppy disk. A full-blown version may require a USB flash drive, or a CD-ROM and can grow and evolve indefinitely.
• The ultimate troubleshooter's toolbox becomes a reality: a bootable, PE Builder-based, live CD-ROM that starts up with the ZTree "desktop"! It has all you need: powerful file management to reach and fix any files on the disk, and a well-tested, evolving, Application Menu-based toolbox.
• You are getting closes to the GUI-free, Registry-free, OS-free nirvana :-)
• In the future, there may be a ZTree for Linux, or some other platform du jour. Your toolbox will certainly require a lot of work internaly (migrating scripts to other language(s) and hunting down freeware utilities), but externally, it will still reflect the way you think and work. You, the master.

Warning: Use with moderation. You will miss dearly the Application Menu on platforms where it does not exist.

---

ZTreeMenu             2004-03-16 23:25:39

(This is just a skeleton of one of the many possible ways of organizing the emulated Windows Desktop/Explorer GUI. The example focuses on the US Windows 2000 and XP, and not all branches are shown -- the area is too vast to be covered here. This could best be handled as a set of community projects, to avoid work duplication. Each branch or specific domain could be a separate mini-project owned by a single person and the changes later merged into the master .ZDB file.) +--Windows 95/98/ME +--Windows 2003 +--Windows 2000 and XP | +--Control Panel (French) | +--Control Panel (German) | |--Control Panel (US) | | +--Accessibility (Win+U) | Keyboard | Sound | Display | Mouse | General | | | +--Add/Remove Hardware: WIZARD | | +--Add/Remove Programs: | | +--Administrative Tools: | | | +--Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+ESC) | | | +--Component Services | | | +--Computer Management | | | +--Data Sources (ODBC) | | | +--Event Viewer | | | +--Local Security Policy | | | +--Performance -- Displays graphs of system performance and configures data logs and alerts | | | +--Services -- Starts and stop services | | | +--Telnet Server Administration -- View and modify telnet server settings and connections | | +--Automatic Updates | | +--Date/Time | Date&Time | Time Zone | | | +--Display | Background | Screen Saver | Appearance | Web | Effects | Settings | | | +--Fax | | +--Folder Options | General | View | File Types | Offline Files | | | +--Fonts | File | View | | | +--Game Controllers | | +--Internet Options | Genereal | Security | Privacy | Content | Connections | Programs | Advanced | | | +--Keyboard | Speed | Input Locales | Hardware | | | +--Java Plug-in | Basic | Advanced | Browser | Proxies | Cache | Certificates | Update | About | | | +--Mail | E-mail Accounts | Data Files | Show Profiles | | | | +--Exchange server: XXXXXXX Username: Vujnovic, Slobodan Personal Folders: YYYYYYY | | +--Mouse | Buttons | Pointers | Motion | Hardware | | | +--Network and Dial-up Connections | File | View | Advanced | | | +--Phone and Modem Options | | +--Power Options | Power Schemes | Advanced | Hibernate | UPS | | | +--Printers | File | View | | | +--Regional Options | General | Numbers | Currency | Time | Date | Input Locales | | | +--Scanners and Cameras: | | +--Scheduled Tasks | File | View | Advanced | | | +--Sounds and Multimedia | Sounds | Audio | Hardware | | | +--Speech | Speech Recognition | Text To Speech | About | | | +--System properties (Win+Break) | General | Network Identification | Hardware | User Profiles | Advanced | | | +--Text Services | Settings | | | +--Users and Passwords | Users | Advanced | | | | +--Contractors (Outlook DL exported to text) | | | +--List ALL users in %USERDOMAIN% to #ZTtemp\%USERDOMAIN%\%USERDOMAIN%_users.TXT | | | +--View ANY user in %USERDOMAIN% | | | +--View %USERNAME% in %USERDOMAIN% | | | +--Send quick messages to users (NET SEND) | | | +--Managers' mobile phone numbers | | +--Protocols | +--Favorites | +--Programs | +--Send To popup | | +--3½ Floppy (A) | | +--3½ Floppy (A) -- FAST and DIRTY | | +--COPY | | +--XCOPY | | +--XXCOPY | | | +--Check for updates www.xxcopy.com | | | +--Cloning -- non-SOURCE files are DELETED on DESTINATION! | | +--Robocopy | +--Start Menu | | +--Programs | | +--Accessories | | +--Admin | | +--Diagnostics | | +--Backup | +--Task bar System Tray area | | +--TClockEx V1.4.2 (Taskbar Clock Enhancement) -- RUN this to install on this PC | | +--Go to website: Dale Nurden http://users.iafrica.com/d/da/dalen/tclockex.htm | | +--TCset (controls TClockEx display) examples | +--My Windows shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+x) | +--My IE shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+number) | | +--Ctrl+Alt+2 ZTreeWin Forum | | +--Ctrl+Alt+9 vujnovic.free.fr/ztw