GUSIP: Graphical User Interface Genreator for Application Programs

Human computer interaction is in the early stages of development as a science. Although the field contains principles that are sometimes contradictory, a consensus is emerging about the separation of the functionality of a computer system (i.e applications) from the user interface. This separation frees the application programmer from low level details, so as to be able to concentrate on higher application specific aspects of the user interface. GUSIP (Graphical User Interface Generator for Application Programs) is an application support system which deals with the generation of graphical user interfaces .and allows the separation of an application from its graphical user interface. The graphical user interface can thus be designed independently of the main application. GUSIP also facilitates the tailoring of the graphical user interface of any application to its user needs by providing a graphics editor which allows the interface designer to design (draw) the screens using graphical editing facilities (drawing of geometric shapes, free form moving, copying, rotating, deleting, scaling...etc), The drawn graphical user interface is linked to the application by means of a run time module which handles the output of the editor and allows passing graphical data between the application and the display system. The combination of these two modules allows the design of several graphical user interfaces for an application, and the modification of an existing graphical user interface. The significance of GUSIP is that the above operations can be done without involving the application program, and hence the application programmers do not have to deal with tasks that are irrelevant to the functionalities of their application