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Environment for rapidly creating interactive design tools

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Abstract

The Garnet toolkit was specifically designed to make highly interactive graphical programs easier to design and implement. Visual, interactive, user-interface design tools clearly fall into this category. At this point, we have used the Garnet toolkit to create three different interactive design tools: Gilt, a simple interface builder for laying out widgets; Lapidary, a sophisticated design tool for constructing application-specific graphics and custom widgets; and C32, a spreadsheet interface to constraints. The features of the Garnet toolkit that made these easier to create include use of a prototype-instance object system instead of the usual class-instance model, integration of constraints with the object system, graphics model that supports automatic graphical update and saving to disk of on-screen objects, separation of specifying the graphics of objects from their behavior, automatic layout of graphical objects in a variety of styles, and a widget set that supports such commonly used operations as selection, moving and growing objects, and displaying and setting their properties.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, 15213, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Brad A. Myers

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Tennesse, 107 Ayres Hall, 37996-1301, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Brad Vander Zanden

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  1. Brad A. Myers
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  2. Brad Vander Zanden
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Myers, B.A., Vander Zanden, B. Environment for rapidly creating interactive design tools. The Visual Computer 8, 94–116 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01900551

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