[AstroPy] AstroPy Digest, Vol 817676788676, Issue 1263429639647

[Perry Greenfield]

On Jun 20, 2013, at 4:02 PM, Aldcroft, Thomas wrote:

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> On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Adrian Price-Whelan <adrianmpw at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm totally lost on what thread I'm responding to, but +100 to what
> Perry said about GUIs! IMHO there is plenty to keep us busy working on
> the modeling and backend, and we should focus our efforts on making
> that code super slick and useable *first*, then worry about a GUI
> (which, also IMO, are overrated! why do you want to click on your
> absorption lines anyways??).
> 
> I understand you are being a bit sarcastic, but I did half my thesis on QSO absorption lines and I'll tell you that being able to click on those lines was a lifesaver.  I wrote a Fortran / PGPLOT-driven GUI tool for analyzing absorption lines which people were still using 10 years later.  Suffice to say that GUI's are useful, but I fully agree with comments regarding the separation of computation from interface.

Don't get me wrong, interaction is very important for many tasks, but initially sometimes a simpler tool can get most of the important interaction done before investing in a big integrated functionality GUI (and perhaps a few different simple GUI tools would be better than one trying to do it all, at least to start).

Doing the interactions in the browser may be closer than we realize also.

Perry