Linked by Richard Wareham on Mon 8th Mar 2004 20:49 UTC
This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them.
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The 'renaming 2000 frames' comment earlier in the discussion made me think - what if big programs like Word or Photoshop could present a set of it's features to the shell, as though they were commands? So, imagine being able to call commands like
wd.auth "doc1.doc" "Steve"
to set the author of a word document, or
ps.scale 400 300 source.gif out.gif
to rescale a photo in photoshop.
It'd be far more useful to far more people than an API or javascript object model. You could write decent scripts quickly to use normally gui-driven apps as batch processors. Really useful.