Current interactive user interface construction tools are often more of a hindrance than a benefit during the early stages of user interface design. These tools take too much time to use and force designers to specify more of the design details than they wish at this early stage. Most interface designers, especially those who have a background in graphic design, prefer to sketch early interface ideas on paper or on a whiteboard. We are developing an interactive tool called SILK that allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced very quickly and the medium is very flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be modified. In addition, our system allows designers to examine, annotate, and edit a complete history of the design. When the designer is satisfied with this early prototype, SILK can transform the sket...

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The Amulet user interface development environment makes it easier for programmers to create highly-interactive, graphical user interface software for Unix, Windows or Macintosh. Amulet uses new models for objects, constraints, animation, input, output, commands, and undo. The object system is a prototype-instance model in which there is no distinction between classes and instances or between methods and data. The constraint system allows any value of any object to be computed by arbitrary code and supports multiple constraint solvers. Animations can be attached to existing objects with a single line of code. Input from the user is handled by "Interactor" objects which support reuse of behavior objects. The output model provides a declarative definition of the graphics, and supports automatic refresh. Command objects encapsulate all of the information needed about operations, including support for various ways to undo them. An key feature of the Amulet design is that all graphical objec...

ions Implementation-level: pages, links, presentation styles Reuse Plug-in components; Reusable presentation styles Architecture Two-tiers, based on file system Static binding of content to pages Usability High graphical control through manual authoring High coherence through use of presentation styles Low customization, no adaptivity, no proactivity 236 . P. Fraternali ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 31, No. 3, September 1999 metaphor (e.g., in Director, objects' synchronization is defined by editing the score for the cast members of a stage; see Figure 6). ---The type of database connectivity, which may range from support of an internal database, of an external database via gateway software (typically ODBC or JDBC), or of an external database through DBMS API. ---The type of Web connectivity, which may be achieved by means of a plug-in application extending a Web browser, or by exporting the hypermedia application into a network language. Web connectivity may affect database c...

Research on model-based user interface development tools is about 10 years old. Many approaches and prototype systems have been investigated in universities and research laboratories around the world. This paper proposes a generic architecture for these tools, reviews the different approaches in light of this architecture, and discusses their progress towards the goals of increasing the quality and reducing the cost of developing interfaces. The paper closes with a discussion of challenges for future model-based development tools. Keywords Model-based interface development, automatic user interface generation, user interface design.

This article proposes and tests a two-component model for describing and programming the finegrained aspects of non-WIMP interaction. The model combines a data-flow or constraint-like component for the continuous relationships with an event-based component for discrete interactions, which can enable or disable individual continuous relationships. Its key ingredients are the separation of non-WIMP interaction into two components and the framework it provides for communication between the two

This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in humancomputer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field.

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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 ...

presentation model APM Provides a conceptual description of the structure and behaviour of the visual parts of the user interface. There the UI is described in terms abstract objects.