Pierre Wellner

Back to the real world

OMPUTER-AUGMENTED , / ENVIRONMENTS: J We live in a complex world, ftlled with myriad objects, tools, toys, and people. / k Our lives are spent in diverse interaction with this environment. Yet, for the most part, our computing takes place sitting in front of, and staring at, a single glowing screen attached to an array of buttons and a mouse. Our different tasks are assigned to homogeneous overlapping windows. From the isolation of our workstations we try to interact with our surrounding environment, but the two worlds have little in common. How can we escape from the computer screen and bring these two worlds together?

Statemaster: A UIMS based on statecharts for prototyping and target implementation

Most User Interface Management systems are state based and some use state transition diagrams for dialog specification. Although these diagrams have significant advantages, they suffer from drawbacks that make them impractical for the specification of complex user interfaces. Statecharts are a hierarchical extension of state transition diagrams and are well suited for specification of complex user interface dialogs. Statemaster is a UIMS implemented in C + + that uses statecharts for dialog specification. It has been successfully used both for rapid prototyping and target implementation of user interfaces. This paper describes the use of statecharts for dialog specification and the implementation of Statemaster.