ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Teddy: a sketching interface for 3D freeform design
Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
AutoHAN: An Architecture for Programming the Home
HCC '01 Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'01)
SIGGRAPH '84 Proceedings of the 11th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Metacognitive Theories of Visual Programming: What do we think we are doing?
VL '96 Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages
Twelve years of diagrams research
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
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Most software applications present information to the user in a WYSIWYG form, where the main representation on the screen is made as close as possible to a visual facsimile of the final work product. Wherever possible, users specify required transformations of the product by directly selecting and manipulating areas of this visual facsimile. This brings great usability advantages, but is not adequate for the specification of abstract operations such as generalization and inference commands, which are usually represented linguistically in menus and dialogues. We report a series of experimental implementations exploring alternatives to menus and dialogues. In these six systems, abstract functionality is integrated into the work context through two techniques: diagrammatic interpretation of user's actions (gestures) and diagrammatic overlays superimposed as semi-transparent layers over the visual presentation of the work product. We discuss the diagrammatic justifications and consequences of these alternatives, and present results of preliminary user studies suggesting that both forms of interaction may in future be valuable techniques for exploiting diagrammatic formalisms in software interaction.