“Towards a comprehensive user interface management system” by Buxton, Lamb, Sherman and Smith

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.

1. Buxton, W., Fogels, A., Fedorkow, G., Sasaki, L. & Smith, K. C. (1978). An introduction to the SSSP Digital Synthesizer. Computer Music Journal2(4), 28-38.
2. Buxton, W., Patel, S., Reeves, W. & Baecker, R. (1982). Objed and the Design of Timbral Resources. Computer Music Journal6(2), 32-44.
3. Buxton, W., Sniderman, R., Reeves, W., Patel, S. & Baecker, R. (1978). The Evolution of the SSSP Score Editing Tools. Computer Music Journal3(4), 14-25.
4. Buxton, W. & Sniderman, R. (1980). Iteration and the Design of the Human-Computer Interface. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Association of Canada, pp 72-81.
5. Deutsh, L & Taft, E. A. (1980). Requirements for an Experimental Programming Environment. Technical Report CSL-80-10, XEROX PARC.
6. Kasik, D. (1982). A User Interface Management System. Computer Graphics,16(3), 90-106.
7. Kuzmich, N. (in preparation). Melody Manipulations. Music Dept., Faculty of Education, University of Toronto.
8. Olson, D. (1983). Automatic Generation of Interactive Systems, Computer Graphics17(1), 53-57.
9. Reeves, W. (1975). A Device-Independent Interactive Graphics Package M.Sc. Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto.
10. Swartout, W & Balzer, R. (1982). An Inevitable Intertwining of Specification and Implementation. Communications of the ACM25(7), 438-440.
11. Wong, Peter C.S., and Eric R. Reid (1982). FLAIR – User Interface Dialog Design Tool, Computer Graphics,16(3), 87-98.