Whereas in indie coffee shops they use a Square tablet and in Apple stores the store people just use iPhones with special cases. Best Buy or Walgreens uses POS tablets with a relatively ugly GUI.
Legacy apps never die. Charles Schwab might use mainframes while Robinhood won't but Schwab won't move off because it's too hard for an established firm. Same with Costco TUIs.
I think it's a mistake to frame this as legacy vs. new. There are real benefits to the approach taken by these TUI applications and it would behoove modern app designers to learn from them.
It's perhaps the case that those coffee shops will someday adopt a TUI once they reach a level of sophistication. As an example: I believe Starbucks uses a TUI for order processing.
I remember around 2010 seeing ads about how KLM/AF did a huge upgrade of their passenger handling system - and how they explicitly went with TN3270 talking to z/TPF application as the new main interface for agents to use.
At least at the time, it sounded like they made a completely new application... and explicitly went with this stack.
Now, before you point to Amadeus still being command oriented just like that, modern Amadeus is accessed over GUI client - even if you're going to use all console commands.
Meanwhile when I had to reschedule a flight due to a volcano exploding and grounding all planes, I got to see what the KLM/AF local agent did. Fullscreen red-on-black TN3270 session. Took only a moment to handle my case and throw in a few extras.
But there are no benefits, you can replicate everything in terms of user interaction identically in a more readable/better looking GUI app, so efficiency is maintained
Sure you can, but it's rare to see a GUI app built keyboard first and specifically optimized for the productivity of power users. The list of apps that do this successfully is a tiny fraction of the total.
- Excel
- 3D modeling tools
- Adobe Creative apps
- Programming IDEs
- ?
Also, if you are focused on that metric: the productivity of the power user, then in many cases adopting a more modern GUI framework will not necessarily make it easier to achieve that goal (and in some cases may make it harder).
TUI apps aren't optimized for the productivity of power users, and by the same token, replacing a GUI app with a legacy TUI framework will not necessarily make it easier while almost definitely will make it harder since some advanced productive UI patterns simply don't get implemented in TUIs - they might not've been invented/known at the time this legacy framework was created
Thus there is no innate framework benefit, only downside, so it doesn't make sense to handicap yourself tying to this legacy
why would a gui app be more readable for reading text?
The only inate difference I can think of is the ability to vary fonts and rendering based on what you are rendering more.
And that can be a nice improvement to e. g show your code at a normal size but pop a tooltip up with smaller text, or have the linter/errors tab be a smaller font.
But that's a difference and not necessarily an improvement, because having a consistent font and fixed width text can make things more predictable and faster to interact with as you don't have to scan around as much.
Someday the COBOL programmers are going to cross the sea to the undying lands and there's going to be a reckoning for companies that have kept legacy apps around this long.
Before Apple switched to the iPhone for their POS system they used iMacs with a very ugly app. I think it was called iPOS. I know as a customer I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I was surprised Apple used something like that, considering Jobs always talking about how even the inside of something that no one ever sees should still be beautiful.
My favourite is how what most people think of "apple store" in Poland the Macs that run sales will actually run windows with BootCamp and run some run of the mill POS/ERP software.
I wonder what they'll do when they will have to switch to ARM-based macs without BootCamp support. Also, do you mean Apple resellers that market themselves as actual Apple Stores? I don't think there is an actual Apple store in Poland yet
Whereas in indie coffee shops they use a Square tablet and in Apple stores the store people just use iPhones with special cases. Best Buy or Walgreens uses POS tablets with a relatively ugly GUI.
Legacy apps never die. Charles Schwab might use mainframes while Robinhood won't but Schwab won't move off because it's too hard for an established firm. Same with Costco TUIs.