easydoes it.(Industry Trend or Event)

Ease of use simplifies difficult designs

Ease of use is a very subjective thing," declares Eric Starkloff, a marketing manager at National Instruments (www.ni.com). "Most of the people using our products are not software engineers; they are domain experts in some particular application. Software for them is a necessity, but it's not something they want to spend all day coding." His company's solution is to provide start-up kits offering pre-designed, graphical applications that developers can examine and reconfigure to suit other engineering situations.

Of course, point-and-click has to be tempered with insight into the functions underlying the objects. For example, Algor (www.algor.com) offers right-click assessable object parameters in its 3D software packages to help developers quickly determine the functionality behind each graphical element. Similarly, Capital Equipment (www.cec488.com) graced its object-oriented TestPoint development software with the added benefit of self-documentation.

Bendrix Bailey, chairman of ComputerBoards (www.computerboards.com), contends, "Graphical programming has its place with beginners and its place in automating functions that don't stress speed. But, graphical programming will never replace syntactical programming." He stresses that the key is to leverage the strengths of both methodologies, instead of confining the developer to a closed set of pre-coded objects.

Keep it simple ...

Ease-of-use might also mean embracing a simpler platform. A spreadsheet, like Microsoft's Excel, may offer a faster and easier solution.

DADiSP from DSP Development (www.dadisp.com) builds upon the spreadsheet concept by adding an interpreted analysis language. Overcoming the restrictive data size and lack of engineering analysis routines that characterize ordinary spreadsheets. When the data in one analysis window changes, all the dependent windows automatically update their displays. A C-based Series Processing Language is ...