Yes, it was a really good article.

He was giving examples of doing database searches based on locality, prefilling listboxes etc., with choices that seemed appropriate depending on what the user had done previously.

He also gave a photoshop example of filters where instead of filling a dialog with previews of how the filter with varied options will look to just go ahead and perform the various filter operations on the full image instead - if the user chooses one of the presets, the work is done already, if not, toss it, rinse and repeat...

It was a lightbulb moment for me reading it cause I'm an old school programmer starting out with 8080s, 6809's 6811's, etc., every cycle was like gold - those old habits die hard!

This concept of throw away processing was enlightening.


I had the performance dialog open one evening and I was watching MOI crunch though a fillet (which I gave up on cause it took too long) - I saw that it wasn't CPU intensive at all so I can appreciate that your actual processing may not improve all that much using a technique like this - the GUI maybe, but that would be (if ever) after MOI has advanced to supporting way more functionality than it does now (perhaps parts libraries, large lists of things etc.)

-Will