A Second Generation User Interface Design Environment: The Model and The Runtime Architecture

Several obstacles exist in the user interface design process which distract a developer from designing a good user interface. One of the problems is the lack of an application model to keep the designer in perspective with the application. The other problem is having to deal with massive user interface programming to achieve a desired interface and to provide users with correct help information on the interface. In this paper, we discuss an application model which captures information about an application at a high level, and maintains mappings from the application to specifications of a desired interface. The application model is then used to control the dialogues at rtmtime and can be used by a help component to automatically generate animated and textual help. Specification changes in the application model will automatically result in behavioral changes in the interface