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Comment by trbleclef | Hacker News Reader

Just the fact that you can use the keyboard is brilliant. I teach high school and most of my computing tasks are in lowest-bidder web GUI messes (lousy UX, no hotkeys) and take so much longer than a keyboard interface would. Even taking roll takes a minute or two longer than it used to.

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I teach at a summer camp once that had custom web app for roll such that it displayed one name at a time to call out and to mark it as present you had to type their given name in a box, otherwise click next with empty input for absent

Somebody needs to be fired for that sort of UI...

I've probably made that sort of UI without realizing it...

False absence, is better than false presence. Especially with kids.

The UX is optimizing for accuracy over ease of use, and in this case is likely intentionally difficult to use.

If I was faced with that, I would switch to paper. Somebody can type it in later.

Also I have no mental imagery of summer camp with networking much less internet. I can't comprehend dropping my kids off at a retail storefront or a church as "summer camp".

Ouch.

I remember my high school went big on Gradebusters software--text entry on the Apple IIe (80 column required!) of course that was all keyboard driven.

Tab tab down space down space down down down space.. that was taking attendance.

One problem with GUI is that pointer-warping is unnerving, we don't have facilities like "I clicked, now warp the pointer to the next target" but that's commonplace with text UI.

There's no TAB button on a mouse.

So much of my work as a software engineer is done in shitty web UIs: trello, github, google gsuite, jira, gmail, calendar.

They are. So. Slow. Each and every one of them. Its awful

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