rjf@eagle.ukc.ac.uk (Robin Faichney) (03/10/88)
Sorry if this has come up before. Having just come back from an X tutorial by Smokey Wallace, Charles Haynes and Phil Karlton of DEC, I'm fairly fired-up about the toolkit and the possibility of building a UIMS on top of it. It seems a fairly obvious thing to do -- especially since Charles Haynes seemed so keen on the idea ;-) -- (its a tie) so I'm sure someone is already working on it. If you have any such information please mail me and I'll summarise to the net if it seems appropriate. Robin (If the Reply-To doesn't work try ..uunet!mcvax!ukc!rjf)
rjf@eagle.ukc.ac.uk (R.J.Faichney) (03/19/88)
In article <4627@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> rjf@ukc.ac.uk (I) wrote: > >[ asking if anyone was working on UIMS on top of X, and promising to >summarise replies ] There were just a few, so here they are in full: --------- Date: Sun, 13 Mar 88 20:17:03 EST From: Len Bass <ljb@sei.cmu.edu> I know of two UIMSs using X. One is a commercial product: Open Dialogue available from Apollo. I haven't tracked its progress but it was advertised at last year's SIGGRAPH and should be available. The second UIMS is the one we are developing (Serpent). This one will be available for beta testing in Aug of this year. It features a production model, multi-threading and support of user views. Dialogues are specified using a special interactive editor. The interface between the application program and the dialogue manager uses a data base model and should be easily accessible to application programmers (we plan to test this experimentally at some point). We are going to distribute our code freely but Serpent is built on top of OPS83 and so, in order to run Serpent, one must have an OPS83 license. There is a hard copy technical report giving an overview of Serpent available if you are interested and send me a mail address. Len Bass -------- Date: Mon, 14 Mar 88 15:00:18 est From: David Haynes <david@geac.uucp> I assume your UIMS is a User Interface Management System and, as such, I am the project leader of a team working on a UIMS for library applications in X. I have not had any dealings with any of the people mentioned above (although I see Charles and I share last names...) Our major objectives: 1) to divorce the presentational aspects of the system from the procedural aspects 2) to present a consistant user paradym to allow for intuitive extensions to the known system 3) to support language independance at as high a level as is possible 4) to somehow make all this work.... -david- -------- From: xug <@bu-it.bu.edu:xug@ics.uucp> Date: Tue, 15 Mar 88 16:57:19 EST the X users group is also trying to coordinate a UI-editor. if you get any info could you copy it to me and I will do the same thanks -peter winston -------- From: thomas@cme-durer.ARPA (Bruce Thomas) Date: 16 Mar 88 20:03:15 GMT In response to where the UIMS are. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt MD, is developing a UIMS called Transportable Applications Executive (TAE) Plus. TAE Plus is an X-windows based interactive prototyping and implementation environment. TAE supports menus, radio buttons, scrollable text regions, and much more. TAE Plus is in a beta-test stage at the moment. The full system should be out by the beginning of the summer '88. For more information contact the TAE Support Office: Goddard Space Flight Center TAE Support Office Code 521 Attn: Arleen Yeager Greenbelt, MD 20771 (301) 286-6034 -------- Date: Fri, 18 Mar 88 12:07:29 MEZ From: Andreas Heimlich <uwbull!ah@tub.uucp> I just read your "Anyone working on UIMS?" mail in the MIT xpert news. So here is some "overseas" reply: UniWare is a german software firm, located in West Berlin. In the past two years we have been building a UIMS called "UniScreen" which works with ASCII-Terminals. After the X Conference in January we decided to re-design the UniScreen product to support both ASCII and X Environments using the the X toolkit. Work is going on and we are looking forward to have a prototype version end of this year. I'm very interested to hear from anyone working on related stuff in the US. Is there a project at Berkeley in this area? Andreas Heimlich UniWare Computer GmbH Kantstrasse 152 1000 Berlin 12 Alternative e-mail address: ..!unido!tub!uwbln!ah
rtc@masscomp.UUCP (Richard Carling) (04/06/88)
>In article <4627@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> rjf@ukc.ac.uk (I) wrote: > >[ asking if anyone was working on UIMS on top of X, and promising to > summarise replies ] Sorry for the late reply but our news system has been a little flakely for the last few weeks, so I didn't have a chance to reply to the message about UIMS's for the XToolkit. At MASSCOMP I have been working on building some UIMS extensions for the XToolkit and am contributing the initial efforts to the public domain in the hopes that at least some of these techniques will become part of the XToolkit standard, as it evolves. These extensions work directly with the XToolkit and do not require C++, Lisp or extensive amounts of additional code (and memory) to be used. I presented a paper at the X Window Conference at MIT this January on the design for the UIMS layer. The talk was titled "Pickling and Embellishing Widgets". I have placed some widgets which use these techniques (label, command and obedient) and some XToolkit extensions which make this possible on the X11 R2 tape. Since we don't have our tape yet, I don't know the exact directory, I assume in the "contribution" section somewhere. (and there is one small change which must be made to the code, which I will send out once I have the version from the tape). The applications on the tape primarily "demonstrate" our techniques. I had hoped to have a simple WYSIWYG interactive editor finsihed in time for release on the tape, but it is not complete yet (but then I haven't gotten my tape either!). The editor will be made available on one of the MIT machines in April (or early May at the latest). The editor will make the software provided MUCH more useful and provide more of our design strategy for a more complete UIMS system (The editor is almost ready). What it doesn't do: There are other issues like additonal constraint handling between widgets (as an example, arrows between widget boxes on a flow chart, when a widget is moved, the arrows should be smart enough to follow) and high level dialogue management which this level of UIMS and the current XToolkit does not address. Also, at this time we are not planning to provide any new widgets, just modify or rewrite some of those currently available. What it does do: The WYSIWYG editor lets users create the user interface interactively. The user interface is stored as (pickled) data on disk and then loaded by the application at run time (unpickled). The design also allows adding arbitrary graphical detail (embellishments) to the widgets from the widget editor. All of this allows widget developers to concentrate on a set of core or generic widgets which can have arbitrary graphical detail but provide a set of consistant semantics. The graphics of the widgets is not coded directly into the widget (as in the current widgets provided in the XToolkit) but kept as separate data in displaylists. This allows great flexibility in the widgets graphical representation and even allows different widget states to have (greatly) different visual representations, when desired. Since the graphical representation is symbolic, the interactive editor can provide a great deal of control over adding and editing the graphic embellishments. The supporting code to provide these capabilites is relatively small and designed to work directly with the XToolkit, it is not a bulky layer designed to handle everything, and it is very easily extensible. And as part of the XToolkit strategy, this is all designed to be "Policy Free". Applications and specialized widgets should implement policy, NOT the underlying tools (as Smokey Wallace would say). (Also, we don't want to be sued by those friendly folks at Apple) So... I plan to have an interactive widget editor available thru MIT shortly. This will be simple, but usable, and will provide the major missing capability from whats currently been provided by us on the X11 R2 tape. Two simple applications should already be on the X11 R2 tape demonstrating loading of ascii descriptions of the user interface as well as the use of graphical embellishments and how the graphical extension mechanism works. There should be some rough documentation in the directory along with the code. If this style of widget representation and graphical extensibility becomes popular or desired by the X Window Community, then additional support may be provided. A major improvement would be the use of a binary representation on disk for the user interface, so that start up time of the application would be faster (currently we are only supporting the ascii representation, which is of more value without a widget editor available and is easier to understand). Also, output widgets for various types of plotting would be nice, with standardized interfaces for use by applications. But this is crystal ball stuff for now. I hope that in future releases of the XToolkit, integration of the the various XToolkit compatible contributions from the various companies can be made, so that a more robust and complete UIMS layer will be available. Hopefully this will evolve over time and will (perhaps) be a goal of the MIT Consortium. Even without additional support beyond providing a simple widget editor, we believe these techniques greatly enhance the ability to design complex user interfaces with lots of graphical detail using the XToolkit (something not otherwise easily possible without writing a bunch of specialized widgets), and provide companies with an easy way to design their own particular visual style for user interfaces (and this design is more flexible then just using an image for the visual representations). Don't get your hopes too high, the editor won't be a finsihed polished product providing complete control of everything imaginable, but we hope it will provide enough functionality to show the value of using the techniques we are providing (and it is WYSIWYG) And this version will just work with the simple widgets Label, Command and Obedient for now, although adding new widgets should not be a very difficult task. ( I also threw in a document for some modifications to the intrinsics which provide running the toolkit from within an X window, assuming the intrinsics have not changed to greatly from the December level 5 release, and a few other simple but useful changes ). Questions, Interests, etc... Richard Carling ...!decvax!masscomp!rtc MASSCOMP One Technology Way Westford Mass. 01886 617/692-6200 ext. 2302