I Hate Solomon IV

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: I Hate Solomon IV
Date: 02:33 on 03 Sep 2003
We have this timecard system we use based on some kind of business
process package called Solomon IV.

I have never seen a program that did as bad a job of following the
Windows GUI guidelines (which are, at least in principle, pretty
good) as this one.

Lotus Notes is better.

It looks like they started by screen-scraping a 3270 program and
assigned random Windows operations to virtual 3270 buttons, and
never bothered changing anything once it was more or less working.

First, the program is in two separate windows, One of these windows
is nothing but a launcher for the other components, but all the
menus are in this window. The other window has no menu, no toolbar,
and if you close the first window it generally crashes.

Then, none of the entry controls are standard. The first one you
come across is the one for the date. It looks at first like a normal
text entry. Oh no, that would be too easy. It's got the whole date
hilighted in yellow, and if you enter anything in the wrong place
it collapses the date to "//" and expects you to enter it again.
I haven't quite figured out the rules by which it decides to advance
to the next field, so I end up having to reenter the date fairly
frequently.

If you enter fields in the wrong order you can't go back and correct
them, they get locked. You *have* to enter your employee ID (why?
It knows who you are, you already logged on!) and then the date
and so on. If you need to go back you have to quit and start over.

The main entry area is is a fairly conventional looking grid. When
you want to enter a job or department number, you don't right-click
or double-click, you hit F3. If you double-click it brings up a
more detailed view of the current line of the grid, and the only
way to make THAT go away to edit another line is to double-click
again. Sometimes. It seems there's right and wrong places to
doubleclick. There's no indication of this, by the way... aborting
is so normal I just aborted it until I happened to doubleclick
right and had an epiphany.

F3 brings up a new window, containing another grid. For some reason,
this grid has scrollbars but you can't use most of the normal
scrollbar operations on them: the thumb is a fixed minimum size
and locked in the middle. You click above or below them, the grid
scrolls, the thumb stays exactly where it is until you get to the
top or bottom, when it suddenly jumps to the end.

There's a normal pulldown box that shows the status of the card
(in progress or complete).  As soon as you select "complete" all
the fields lock up, the only thing you can do is "save" or close
the program and start over, losing all your changes.

If you close the window it closes it. No warning. Throws away all
your changes.

I guess people got tired of having to say OK because aborting the
session was such a normal thing to do.

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