The Tunes User Interface Subproject
(Last modified Saturday, February 18th, 1995 @ 4:00PM PST)
NOTICE
If you are accessing this page from the chharris/ui.html link, beware:
this
link will be removed in a few weeks! Please instead use
http://weber.u.washington.edu/chharris/ui/
If that warning won't convince you, I just noticed that some of the links
depend on using the "good" address, so it might be worth your while
after all....
This page is a mess
This page is a real mess at the moment, due to my current juggling of how
to organize things. If you have any suggestions, plesae let me know!
Project scope
The UI project is devoted towards changing the way individuals
interact with their computers, so that it becomes a more productive
and enjoyable experience. The scope of this project, then, is very
broad. It includes such "traditional" UI topics as developing
interfaces and abstractions to existing paradaigms, but also finding
two paradiagms that are more user-friendly. Basically, this project
is dedicated towards giving Tunes users the absolute best using
experience possible with their availible hardware. (Every occurance
here of user also applies to developer--we find no difference between
the two.)
Project Members
Project coordinatior:
Chris
Members:
Mailing List Archive
We now have a mailing list archive set up! To access it, click
here.
Internal UI Developments
Have a very rough draft UI paper availible
here.
External UI Devopments
Jecel (jecel@lsi.usp.br) has been working on an interesting interface for
his Merlin project. For more information, click here.
Anyone know of any other links? I'm sure there's more out there, and
this looks quite bare.
Items within these horizontal lines are in complete disarray; don't rely on
them to save your life.
And the purpose is...
Welcome to the wonderful world of the TUNES UI subproject! Our purpose here
is to create a (set of) intelligent user interface(s) that is (are) easy and
powerful for the user, while at the same time reduce the amount of work
required to develop application programs.
The way things are looking now, this is will be done through a clever
seperation of mechanism and policy. Rather than having the application
programmers specify the exact pixels at which the buttons in a dialog box
should be displayed, for example, the programmer might ask the UI(s) to display
the user with a set of options, and return one. Aside from being less work
to program (making things easier to debug and faster to make), this also
provides the user with a more coherant UI no matter what way they are
accessing the system, be it textual, a 2d windowing system, a 3d world, or
whatever.
These ideas were inspired by Fare. To see his original thoughts on the subject, click here.
Some of the goals include:
- Easy/fun to use
- Easy to learn
- Minimal abstraction (If the OS is designed well from the start, we won't have to hide the OS behind a bunch of strange UI concepts. Some UI ideas may need to bypass this....)
- Support for many seperate UIs at once - One program might be running in the 3d worlds interface while another is using voice commands.
If you have any additions/subtractions/multipications/divisions, please let Chris know.
UI Current Events
We're still getting organized around here, so we don't have a formal agenda
yet. Probably the most helpful thing at the moment is the begin considering
the various input and output devices we may want to one day support, and what
features they do or do not have in common. At the same time, we should be
figuring what particular class of apps, if any, we are catering to, and what
features these programs most commonly need. To see a very basic document
about this (I'm sure its related somehow), click
here.
Click here to return to the Tunes home page.
Page maintainer:
Chris
-- chharris@u.washington.edu