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The development of software for reconfigurable sensor-based realtime systems is a complicated and tedious process, requiring highly specialized skills in real-time systems programming. The total development time can be reduced by automatically integrating reusable software modules to create applications. The integration of these modules can be further simplified by the use of a high-level programming interface. We have developed Onika, an iconically programmed human-machine interface, to interact with a reconfigurable software framework to create reusable code. Onika presents appropriate work environments for both application engineers and end-users. For engineers, icons representing real-time software modules can be combined to form real-time jobs. For the end-user, icons representing these jobs are assembled by the user into applications. Onika verifies that all jobs and applications are syntactically correct, non-ambiguous, and complete. They can then be executed from within Onika, or can be saved as a stand-alone program which can be executed independently on the underlying realtime operating system. Onika has been fully integrated with the Chimera real-time operating system in order to control several different

End-user development has enormous potential to make computers more useful in a large variety of contexts by providing people without any formal programming training increased control over information processing tasks. This variety of contexts poses a challenge to end-user development system designers. No individual system can hope to address all of these challenges. The field of enduser development is likely to produce a plethora of systems fitting specific needs of computer end-users. The goal of this chapter is not to advocate a kind of universal end-user development system, but to cut across a variety of application domains based on our experience with the AgentSheets end-user simulation-authoring tool. We have pioneered a number of programming paradigms, experienced a slew of challenges originating in different user communities, and evolved end-user development mechanisms over several years. In this chapter we present design guidelines that cut across this vast design space by conceptualizing the process of end-user development as a learning experience. Fundamentally, we claim that every end-user development system should attempt to keep the learning challenges in proportion to the skills end-users have. By adopting this perspective, end-user development can actively scaffold a process during which end-users pick up new end-user development tools and gradually learn about new functionality. We structure these design guidelines in accordance to their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic nature of support offered to end-users.

Visual languages are more complex than we would like. We introduce a small but powerful visual vocabulary for a visual programming environment that is simple, yet expressive enough to represent the structure of programs and program executions. This vocabulary is not based on any existing textual language. It was designed for the purpose of visually representing and understanding programs and their executions. I. Introduction V ISUAL languages are designed to make programming simpler by representing programming concepts visually. However, many researchers in the field concede that visual languages are still more complex than we would like. When the large collection of constructs that we use in textual programming is translated to a large collection of visual constructs for a visual language, textual complexity is merely replaced with visual complexity. Additional complexity arises when there is no clear relationship between visual symbols and the concepts they represent. Many visual...

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Construction of immersive virtual environments usually takes place outside the virtual environment in configuration files or application code. The system presented in this paper allows interaction with and behaviours of objects to be defined whilst immersed within the system by manipulating a dataflow representation of the dialogue occuring between the input devices and virtual objects. A concrete example is presented that illustrates the flexibility and customization opportunities that this approach provides.

The construction of large-scale programs is supported by tools an engineer may use to graphically design the structure of a software under development. Diagrams, such as UML class diagrams, are then automatically translated into code-frames. Functionality is implemented in a textual manner.

Abstract—Visual languages are beneficial particularly for domain-specific applications, since they support graphical metaphors of the domain. The development of graphical editors for such languages can be simplified by using generator frameworks. Up to now the majority of visual languages are two-dimensional, but there are domains which are much better described by three-dimensional language constructs. The use of three-dimensional representations is well known in the area of (scientific) visualizations, games, or movies. Our approach is to use 3D graphics for visual languages that make use of 3D relationships, and to develop a generator framework to simplify the implementation of 3D languages. Our system DEViL3D accomplishes this task and encapsulates special knowledge necessary to implement 3D editors for such languages. The language designer does not need to know about implementation of 3D graphics and interaction with them, because our framework supports this for each language implementation automatically. This paper introduces previous approaches in the area of 3D languages, describes the specification process to get a 3D language implementation using our generator framework, and especially illustrates the 3D specific features of these implementations automatically derived without further effort. Index Terms—automated generation, visual languages, visual programming, three-dimensional representations. interconnected planar diagrams. Glinert shows how 2.5D representations can be extended to 3D and proposes projects in the area of visual languages that use the third dimension and therefore differ from classical visual language approaches. A good example for a three-dimensional visual language is the description of molecular models. These models consist of atoms that are visualized as balls, and bonds between them that are represented by sticks. The arrangement of the atoms in the 3D space is the result of the electron cloud repulsion. Hence, the molecular language can be regarded as a representative of the class of application-specific languages that describe inherent three-dimensional graphical models. I.