When people have meetings or discussions, frequently they use conversational props : physical models, drawings, or other concrete representations of information used to enhance the exchange of information. If the participants are geographically separated, it is difficult to make effective use of props since each physical prop can only exist in one place. Computer applications that allow two or more users to simultaneously view and manipulate the same data can be used to augment human-to-human telecommunication. We have built the Rendezvous system is similar to many UIMSs or user interface toolkits in that it is intended to simplify the construction of graphical direct-manipulation interfaces. It goes beyond these systems by adding functionality to support the construction of multiuser applications. Based on experience with several large applications built with the Rendezvous system, we believe that it is useful for building conversational props and other computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) applications. We present a list of required features of conversational props, some example applications built with the Rendezvous system, and a description of the Rendezvous system.

The Rendezvousml language and architecture are designed to build computer-supported cooperative work applications that support simultaneous work at a distance.The language includes a feature-rich constraint maintenance system.The features in the constraint system were selected based, on feedback from user-interface developers using earlier versions of the Rendezvous language.Three important features in the constraint system are: indirectly referenced source and target variables, tolerance of side-effects, and special handling of uninitialized variables to simplify initialization.Application requirements that motivate these features and implementation techniques are described.The Rendezvous constraint system is faster, on some benchmarks, than other constraint systems currently being used for interface construction.

The goal of the RENDEZVOUS project is to build interactive systems that are used by multiple users from multiple workstations, simultaneously. This goal caused us to choose an architecture that requires a clean run-time separation of user interfaces from applications. Such a separation has long been state goal of UIMS researchers, but it is difficult to achieve. A key technical reason for the difficulty is that modern direct manipulation interfaces require extensive communication between the user interface and the application to provide semantic feedback. We discuss several communications mechanisms that have been used in the past, and present our approach — the Abstraction-Link-View paradigm. Links are objects whose sole responsibility is to facilitate communication between the abstraction objects (application) and the view objects (user interfaces). The Abstraction-Link-View paradigm relies on concurrency and a fast but powerful constraint system.

Rendezvous is an architecture for creating synchronous multi-user applications. It consists of two parts: a run-time architecture for managing the multi-user session and a start-up architecture for managing the network connectivity. The run-time architecture is based on a User Interface Management System called MEL, which is a language extension to Common Lisp providing support for graphics operations, object-oriented programming, and constraints. Constraints are used to manage three dimensions of sharing: sharing of underlying information, sharing of views, and sharing of access. The start-up architecture decouples invoking and joining an application so that not all users need be known when the application is started. At present, the run-time architecture is completed and running test applications. As a first test of the complete Rendezvous architecture, we will implement a multi-user card game by the end of the summer.

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.

Article Free Access Share on UIMSs: threat or menace? Authors: J. Rosenberg Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Hewlett-Packard LaboratoriesView Profile , R. Hill European Computer-Industry Research Center European Computer-Industry Research CenterView Profile , J. Miller Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Microelectronics and Computer Technology CorporationView Profile , A. Schulert Apollo Computer Apollo ComputerView Profile , D. Shewmake Interactive Development Environments Interactive Development EnvironmentsView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '88: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMay 1988 Pages 197–200https://doi.org/10.1145/57167.57200Online:01 May 1988Publication History 13citation212DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations13Total Downloads212Last 12 Months5Last 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Event-Response Systems are a technique for specifying the syntax of multi-threaded dialogues. They are based on the paradigm of specifying system responses to events generated by the user. They can compactly represent the concurrency needed to implement multi-threaded dialogues. This concurrency support also allows interfaces to be structured differently than is possible with existing dialogue specification systems based on state transition specifications or grammars. This flexibility allows many interfaces, especially direct manipulation interfaces, to be specified with a more modular structure than most existing systems allow.

Sassafras is a prototype User Interface Management System (UIMS) specifically designed to support a wide range of user interface styles. In particular, it supports the implementation of user interfaces where the user is free to manipulate multiple input devices and perform several (possibly related) tasks concurrently. These interfaces can be compactly represented and efficiently implemented without violating any of the rules of well-structured programming. Sassafras also supports elaborate run-time communication and synchronization among the modules that make up the user interface. This is needed to implement user interfaces that have context-sensitive defaults, and it simplifies recovery from semantic errors. Sassafras is based on a new language for specifying the syntax of human-computer dialogues known as Event-Response Language (ERL) and a new run-time structure and communication mechanism for UIMSs known as the Local Event Broadcast Method (LEBM). Both ERL and LEBM are described in detail, and implementation techniques are presented. The effectiveness of Sassafras is demonstrated by describing two interfaces that have been implemented with Sassafras.