Sunday, January 15, 2006

Interfacing

Bear with me this is a complex one....

I have been thinking about how to make computers do things alot. In particular I was thinking about whether you could call your own phone, have your computer take the call and then bark commands to your computer over the phone. Well I dont know if it would work but if it did, you would have to somehow control the computer without seeing the screen.

Then I thought about how my friend Ashley is HUGE on using the keyboard for everything, any program he finds without keyboard shortcuts he refuses to use. There often arent shortcuts for everything the program can do...

I myself find it hard to remember more than a few without spending loads of time working on it.

And then theres the CLI (command line interface) crowd. They build software that works solidly (thankfully) if you can string the commands together in the right sequence (doh!).

What if, a program had a single key, Alt, or Ctrl shortcut for EVERY function! And was built where these could be used in the command line. Then in order to give the program a GUI you would just have to map all your buttons to feed the program each key. (which is essntially what the linux guys do except the commands are more grammatic)

Then you could possibly get the phone call control working, the computer would have to work out the focus (for example when a dialog pops up), but you would be that much closer. Scripting would become that much easier as well.

You gotta remember that this is coming from a guy that doesnt really script or program that much.

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