Progress
Portability Guide


Identifying Competing Goals

Once you define the design goals for your application, you can then determine the goals that are competing.

As an example of competing design goals, Table 3–1 lists common user-interface features and how different interfaces support them.

Table 3–1: User-interface Features
Feature
Character
Windows
Application interface
A single screen with multiple frames.
Multiple windows and dialog boxes.
Multiple windows
Only one pseudo-window.
Multiple windows are useful and desirable.
Buttons
Clumsy without equivalent keystroke.
Useful and desirable.
Images
Not available.
Desirable (.BMP, .ICO).
Color
Not always available; colors that are desirable on one terminal often are not on another.
All colors might not be available on all machines, and the same RGB numeric color might appear differently on different terminals.
Multiple fonts
Not available.
Achievable, but desired fonts might not exist on all machines.
Widget sizes
Inner and outer sizes are the same.
Inner and outer sizes are different; borders vary.
Inner size
(Format Characters) (Font)
One-to-one with format.
Varies when you use a proportional font.
Outer size
(Decoration)
No decoration.
Platform dependent.
Default keys
GO = F1
ENDKEY
= F4
GO = F2
ENDKEY
= ESC
Default buttons
One character high; horizontal layout.
Approximately 1.2 character units high; small extra margin.
Standard dialog boxes
GET-FILE dialog available in adecomm.
Open, Save As, Color, Font, Print.
Field-level mnemonics
Not available.
Uses “&” syntax to denote ALT key combination.


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