If judiciously applied, animation techniques can enhance the look and feel of computer applications that present a graphical human interface. Such techniques can smooth the rough edges and abrupt transitions common in many current graphical interfaces, and strengthen the illusion of direct manipulation that many interfaces strive to present. To date, few applications include such animation techniques. One possible reason is that animated interfaces are difficult to implement: they are difficult to design, place great burdens on programmers, and demand high-performance from underlying graphics systems.This article describes how direct manipulation human computer interfaces can be augmented with techniques borrowed from cartoon animators. In particular, we wish to improve the visual feedback of a direct manipulation interface by smoothing the changes of an interface, giving manipulated objects a feeling of substance and providing cues that anticipate the result of a manipulation. Our approach is to add support for animation techniques such as object distortion and keyframe interpolation, and to provide prepackaged animation effects such as animated widgets for common user interface interactions.To determine if these tools and techniques are practical and effective, we built a prototype direct manipulation drawing editor with an animated interface and used the prototype editor to carry out a set of human factors experiments. The experiments show that the techniques are practical even on standard workstation hardware, and that the effects can indeed enhance direct manipulation interfaces.

Article Free Access Share on Animating direct manipulation interfaces Authors: Bruce H. Thomas Advanced Computing Research Centre, School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia, The Levels, SA, Australia 5095 Advanced Computing Research Centre, School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia, The Levels, SA, Australia 5095View Profile , Paul Calder Department of Computer Science, The Flinders University of South Australia, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, Australia Department of Computer Science, The Flinders University of South Australia, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, AustraliaView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '95: Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technologyDecember 1995 Pages 3–12https://doi.org/10.1145/215585.215628Online:01 December 1995Publication History 21citation729DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations21Total Downloads729Last 12 Months29Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Traditional document editors are large and complex.Using first-class objects to represent individual characters in a document, we have implemented an editor that is much smaller and simpler than editors of comparable power.This editor, named "Dot", uses object sharing to reduce memory usage and an incremental update strategy to minimize screen redraw time.Our measurements show the current Dot implementation uses 10 bytes for each character in a document and 30 bytes for each visible character.On a IO-MIPS workstation, Dot can draw over 10 full pages per second and can keep pace with interactive typing speeds.These measurements and our experience using Dot shows that a fully object-oriented approach to document editing is practical.We used the editor to prepare and publish this paper.

Article Glyphs: flyweight objects for user interfaces Share on Authors: Paul R. Calder Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University, Stanford, California Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University, Stanford, CaliforniaView Profile , Mark A. Linton Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University, Stanford, California Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University, Stanford, CaliforniaView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '90: Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on User interface software and technologyAugust 1990 Pages 92–101https://doi.org/10.1145/97924.97935Published:01 August 1990 42citation1,304DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations42Total Downloads1,304Last 12 Months55Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access