A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers---virtually all applications today were built using some form of user interface tool. In this paper, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work. Using these themes, past tools can be characterized by what aspects of the user interface they addressed, their threshold and ceiling, what path of least resistance they offer, how predictable they are to use, and whether they addressed a target that became irrelevant. We believe the lessons of these past themes are particularly important now, because increasingly rapid technological changes are likely to significantly change user interfaces. We are at the dawn of an era where user interfaces are about to break out of the "desktop" box where they have been stuck for the ...

The X Window System -- has become widely accepted by many manufacturers. X provides network transparent access to display servers, allowing local and remote client programs to access a user's display. X is used on high performance workstation displays as well as terminals, and client programs run on everything from micro to super computers. This paper describes the tradeoffs and basic design decisions made during the design of X Version 11. We presume familiarity with the paper describing X Version 10. Keywords: X Window System, interactive human-computer interface system, distributed systems. c flDigital Equipment Corporation and Silicon Graphics Computer Systems 1990. All rights reserved. -- The X Window System is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology trademark. This paper will appear in a special issue of Software Practice and Experience. y Digital Equipment Corporation, Cambridge Research Lab, One Kendall Square, Bldg. 700, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. jg@crl.dec.com z ...

Peter Sawyer B.Sc. A User Interface Framework for Object-Oriented Database Systems Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. March 1990 Object-oriented database systems (OODBs) provide support for applications which manipulate semantically rich entities of varying granularity. Many existing commercial database systems provide direct manipulation tools which permit users to access database entities and generate applications. Users of OODBs also require sophisticated tools, but the database entities manipulated are of less uniform structure and semantics. The work reported in this thesis has developed a model of a user interface framework for OODBs. The model exploits objects' encapsulation of data (attributes) and operations (methods). It is based on an abstraction from objects to dynamic forms; attributes are represented as fields and methods are represented as graphical buttons. Forms are dynamic because they reflect the functional properties of their underlying objects. A prototype sy...