Developing User Interfaces

In the early days of computing, technicians in white coats controlled refrigerator-sized computers housed in sealed rooms, far from ordinary users. Today, computers are inexpensive commodities, like television sets,and ordinary people control and interact with them. This new paradigm has led to a burgeoning demand for graphics-intensive and highly interactive interfaces. Developing User Interfaces is targeted at the programmer who will actually implement, rather than design, the user interface. Most user interface books focus on psychology and usability, not programming techniques. This book recognizes the need for programmers to collaborate with usability experts and psychologists, so topics such as the principles of visualization, human perception, and usability evaluation are touched upon. Yet the primary focus remains on those tools and techniques required for programming the complex user interface. * Focuses on advanced programming topics* event handling* interaction with geometric objects* widget tool kits* input syntax* Useful to programmers using any language—no particular windowing system or tool kit is presumed, examples are drawn from a variety of commercial systems, and code examples are presented in pseudo code* The basic concepts of traditional computer graphics such as drawing and three-dimensional modeling are covered for readers without a computer graphics background.