"Mike Raiford" <"m[raiford]!at"@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:49e49115$1@news.povray.org...

> > Such interfaces are certainly much less work on the programmer (even
though

> That's debatable. Writing a single dialog with all options on the
> screen, even under tabs is trivial compared to writing a wizard to guide
> the user.

With trivial GUIs, I agree. But it often requires much more thought and
coding to handle everything the user can do on a more powerful interface.
What if the user selects multiple accounts and wishes to change their
properties which may not have the same value? What if the user changes the
number of rows in a matrix while the cells are already partially filled? You
don't have to deal with such things with a sequential/modal interface.
Creating window layouts is a cakewalk compared to dealing with out-of-order
changes, handling multiple item changes, potential conflicts, realtime
updates, validation and correction of co-dependent inputs (*)... etc.

(*) If you ask the user the year first, month next, it's trivial to validate
the day. But if all three are modifiable at the same time, but on different
inputs, you have a lot more UI logic to code. Not that you should code a
date control from scratch, and like this, but it gives an idea of
difficulties in more realistic cases.

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