Towards a comprehensive user interface management system

Abstract

A UIMS developed at the University of Toronto is presented. The system has two main components. The first is a set of tools to support the design and implementation of interactive graphics programs. The second is a run-time support package which handles interactions between the system and the user (things such as hit detection, event detection, screen updates, and procedure invocation), and provides facilities for logging user interactions for later protocol analysis. The design/implementation tool is a preprocessor, called MENULAY, which permits the applications programmer to use interactive graphics techniques to design graphics menus and their functionality. The output of this preprocessor is high-level code which can be compiled with application-specific routines. User interactions with the resulting executable module are then handled by the run-time support package. The presentation works through an example from design to execution in a step-by-step manner.