>Jay,
>
>Re: I'd be interested (as well as others, I'm sure) in hearing what you come up with to resolve your various design constraints.
>
>See Cetin's reply to my post which includes full Win API declarations and everything. I just tried it and it works great. This capability opens up a lot of options for creating 'rich interactive surfaces' for input including Intellisense and SmartTag capabilities!
>
>Re: The interactivity of HTML pages is seductive, isn't it? <g>
>
>Strongly agree! I find that more and more of my customers are 'demanding' features that I would classify as 'eye candy'. While the logical and pragmatic side of me wants to explain that a form is a form is a form - the salesman side of me want to shout that a car is not a car is not a car when you consider the difference in price between a basic car and a sexy import/sports car. Sure both types of cars provide basic transportation (and in fact the basic car may do an even better job on the transportation part), but the sexier car is what people are willing to pay premium money for! :)

I kind of agree with you here. At the same time, I want to point out what I consider "tunnel vision" in a lot of database applications, including my own. I grew up learning that db applications involved 2 operations data entry and reporting. That comes from the kinds of interfaces typical of mainframe and UNIX green screen apps.

But, in situations where I've worked on a day-to-day basis with end users, it became clear that they had processes to complete. The closer my app modelled their process, the more they liked using the system.

Interfaces such as drill downs, executive information systems, interfaces which allow for "management by exception" are higher level interfaces which combine input (user selection of criteria) as well as reporting (the resulting queries displayed).

So, I think there are some real usability benefits that we can incorporate by developing interfaces, such as you are, which integrate more deeply into the daily work done by users.

Enjoy!

Jay

>
>Thanks again for your feedback on this thread!
>
>Regards,
>Malcolm