Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!SEAS.UCLA.EDU!bilbo.gregh From: bilbo.gregh@SEAS.UCLA.EDU (Gregory Holmberg) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Summary of AT&T Open Look Product Overview Message-ID: <8805100028.AA15653@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> Date: 10 May 88 00:20:19 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 112 A Summary of "OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface: A Product OverView" from AT&T AT&T says it is commited to open standards and consistency and that OPEN LOOK and its merging of SVR3 and BSD into SVR4 are proof. The OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface is an X Window System "toolkit" and development environment. This high-level toolset and user interface standard will provide increased application programmer productivity. The OPEN LOOK standard will be found initially in two Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), one from Sun Microsystems and one from AT&T. The OPEN LOOK standard will be licensed to other vendors also. OPEN LOOK combines the best of existing graphical user interfaces and improves upon them. The design goals were: Simplicity - easy to learn and master Consistency between applications Efficiency of use for the user The design principles were: Balance of design goals Similarity with existing graphical user interfaces Fewer concepts to remember across applications: Object-verb model - select object(s) then select action Objects have properties that can be examined and modified Context sensitive help Cut, copy and paste Visible control panels Windows can be over-lapped or tiled. Focus can be bound to a window by clicking on it. All windows have these basic parts: Title bar - identifies the window Used to pick up and move the window Contains an iconize button Contains a standard menu (also available in icon mode): (de)iconize Set properties - edit the windows properties Scale - scale the window and its contents up or down! Note that this is not the same as resizing. Refresh Quit Resize gadget in lower right corner like the Mac Proportional horizontal and vertical scroll bars "Control panel" under the title bar Like the window's individual menu bar except with buttons. Makes multi-tasking easier than a single screen menu bar. Permanent message area at bottom For running multiple applications simultaneously Commands selected from menus or buttons are completed if necessary with "command boxes," similar to MS Windows "dialog boxes." Command boxes automatically grab the focus. Command boxes may contain any of the standard controls: Buttons - cause immediate effects Buttons stacks - popup like menus Choices - mutually exclusive choices similar to MS Windows radio buttons Toggles - non-mutually exclusive choices similar to MS Windows check boxes Sliders - an analog control Lists - menus too long to display all at once. Uses a vertical scroll bar. Dials - an analog control All objects have "properties." An object's properties vary depending on its type. Any object's properties can be viewed and modified with a "property box." "Push pins" are used to make any kind of popup remain resident for easier repeated use. Popups include menus, palettes, property boxes and command boxes. An application's main menus popup wherever the cursor is. The user is not required to move the cursor up to a menubar. The popup menus are context sensitive, in that the menu received depends on what object the cursor was on at the time. Menus can also be hierarchical, that is they may have sub-menus. A one, two or three button mouse may be used. On a three button mouse, the first buttons is the select button (to select a menu item, text or an object), the second is the extend button (extends a selection) and the third it the menu button. On a one or two button mouse keyboard modifier keys must be used. Function keys are supported and may have on-screen labels. Initially there will be two implementations, called Application Programmer Interfaces, of this user interface: the NeWS Development Environment (NDE) from Sun Microsystems and an X Toolkit based version from AT&T. The NeWS Development Environment is inspired by the Andrew X toolkit from Carnegie-Mellon and IBM. It is object-oriented, using encapsulation and code sharing through inheritance. Postscript is used to communicate between the NDE toolkit and the server. The server manages all the menus, scroll bars, frames and text editing locally, making the user interface more responsive and reducing network traffic. NDE uses a data-object-plus-view-objects model. The programmer declares one data object and one or more view objects for that data object. The data object must be able to modify, save and load itself. The view objects provide graphical views of the data object on the screen and let the user view and manipulate the data object. NDE will coexist with X clients and X toolkits. NDE will allow the user to cut and paste to non-NDE applications. The AT&T version will be built on the X Toolkit intrinsics and the resource manager from MIT. There will be widgets for the various type of controls and widgets classes will be able to inherit from other widgets classes. Event handling will be greatly simplified. Access to the base X library will be available. For more information on the X Toolkit, see "X Toolkit Intrinsics" from MIT.