Towards an Object-Oriented Interaction Model for Graphics User Interfaces

Abstract

The increasing importance of the User Interface Management System THESEUS stimulated the development of a formalized graphics input model that is based on the THESEUS input concepts. This paper presents cooperative work by the Zentrum fur Gra-phische Datenverarbeitung (ZGDV), West Germany and IST/INESC, Portugal which aims to formalize, generalize and enhance the THESEUS input model and transfer it to a clean object-oriented approach. The main goal was to establish concepts for specifying and managing user interfaces tailored to the requirements of graphics dialogues- among these concepts are the diversity of input devices, many different kinds of interaction techniques, higher complexity in dialogue structures, dynamic control over dialogue specification, a strong coupling of input and output instead of ping-pong sequencing, powerful output capabilities, support of continuous input operations and a close interlocking between user interface component and application.