My comparison between GNUcash and Skrooge (if anyone is interested)

[David Goodenough]

On Thursday 27 Sep 2012, Michael Leone wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> > Define "standard" here.  Gnome-Terminal uses Shift-Control-Q to close a
> > window.  Firefox uses Control-W.  Evolution uses Control-W.  I don't
> > know anything that uses Control-F4 on Linux.
> 
> GnuCash is not a "Linux" program (in the sense that Linux is the only
> platform it runs on). It is multi-platform. On a Windows platform, at
> least, Control-F4 or Control-W is the "standard" UI command to close a
> window, but may not be the same on all the other platforms that
> GnuCash runs on (Linux, Mac, etc)..
Control-F4 goes back to one of the most important things that IBM ever
did - CUA or Common User Access which was a component of SAA or Systems
Application Architecture.  SAA was really the first time that APIs and
libraries became standardised, before that a Fortran or C library on
one platform did not necessarily provide the same functions with the
same semantics and arguments as that on another platform.  IBM had 
this problem with the multiple platforms it produced (at least 5 major
ones at the time).

CUA was a standard which said what program "Windows" (not Windows the
the system, but applications with UIs) looked like, what the standard
controls on the window looked like and did, and things like where menus
where to be found.  It was adopted as the style guide for Windows, and
a lot of the thinking behind it came from concepts first proposed by
Xerox Park.  It was also the guide for OS/2 and is the basis for both
GNOME and KDE.  Almost everything now breaks the old rules at least in
part because there are now things what we want to do that the designers
never thought about - but CUA is where it all started.

I have a copy of the original version of the CUA Advanced Interface
Design Reference, SC34-4290-00, dated October 1991.

David
> 
> Ideally, if possible, a multi-platform program should have a
> consistent UI. The problem is that (generically speaking)  a UI is not
> the same on all platforms. And hence, some keyboard shortcuts (such as
> the Control-F4 mentioned) are not going to give the same result on all
> platforms. But as long as the menus are the same on all platforms,
> that's more important (for consistency). IMO.