Graphical styles for building interfaces by demonstration

• Authors: Osamu Hashimoto;Brad A. Myers
• Venue: UIST '92 Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
• Year: 1992

Conventional interface builders allow the user interface designer to select widgets such as menus, buttons and scroll bars, and lay them out using a mouse. Although these are conceptually simple to use, in practice there are a number of problems. First, a typical widget will have dozens of properties which the designer might change. Insuring that these properties are consistent across multiple widgets in a dialog box and multiple dialog boxes in an application can be very difficult. Second, if the designer wants to change the properties, each widget must be edited individually. Third, getting the widgets laid out appropriately in a dialog box can be tedious. Grids and alignment commands are not sufficient. This paper describes Graphical Tabs and Graphical Styles in the Gild interface builder which solve all of these problems. A “graphical tab” is an absolute position in a window. A “graphical style” incorporates both property and layout information, and can be defined by example, named, applied to other widgets, edited, saved to a file, and read from a file. If a graphical style is edited, then all widgets defined using that style are modified. In addition, because appropriate styles are inferred, they do not have to be explicitly applied.