The Structure of Tube - A Tool for Implementing Advanced User Interfaces

Abstract

Good user interfaces are very costly to implement and maintain. As user interfaces become more advanced, moving to various forms of direct manipulation, they become even more expensive and difficult to implement. In the recent past, many user interface management systems and related tools for the rapid development of user interfaces have been developed. Some have been successful at reducing interface development costs for some styles of interface, but none fully address the requirements of advanced direct manipulation interfaces. We claim this is because they are founded on basic models and components that work only for simpler interaction styles. We present Tube, a tool for the rapid development of advanced direct manipulation user interfaces, describe its structure, and show how it differs from, and is better than, traditional structures.