RezDez : a graphical tool for designing resources in OSU

RezDez is a Macintosh program for designing Macintosh resources through direct manipulation of graphical objects. Specifically, RezDez allows a designer to construct: Windows : Any of the six standard Macintosb windows with the designer choosing the location, size and title of the window. Menus : With upto twenty menu items per menu. Each menu item may have optional checkmark, keyboard equivalent hilite/unhilite and plain, bold, outline, italic, underline or shadow text features. Dialogs : Either the modal or modeless dialog. The location, size and title of the dialog is determined by the designer. Any number of push buttons, radio buttons, check boxes. edit text boxes, static texts, user items and user icons can be added to the dialog. Alerts : Again, the location and size of the alert are determined by the designer. The following items can be added to the alert - push buttons, static text, user items, user icons and the three system icons, note, stop and caution. Icons : The standard 32X32 bit icons with or without the mask can be designed with a "fat hits" editor incorporating automatic lines, rectangles, circles, ellipses and fills for enclosed regions. Added features are automatic clear of any bitmap, transfer of bitmap between icon and mask and vice versa. complement of the given bitmap, x-or of the icon and mask bitmaps and one-bit-shifts to the top, left, right and bottom of the bitmap. RezDez runs as a stand-alone application and as part of 0. S. U. Both binary and ASCII source versions of the resources are generated. The binary version can be linked with an application and the ASCII source version can be compiled by RMaker. This report gives justification and some design details for RezDez. A short user's manual is given in the forn of a tutorial

Prototypes from standard user interface management systems

Oregon Speedcode Universe (OSU) is a software development system employing on-screen editing of standard graphical user interface objects, prototyping, program generation, and automatic analysis tools which are typically used to accelerate the production of running applications. A programmer uses OSU to design and implement all user interface objects such as menus, windows, dialogs, and icons. These objects are then incorporated into an application-specific sequence which mimics the application during program development, and performs the desired operations of the application during program execution. Experimental results suggest that the techniques employed by OSU can be used to develop 50-90% of an application without explicit programming yielding productivity improvements of 2-10 fold.Keywords: rapid prototyping, program generation, 4GL, software development, user interface management, software tools, programming-in-the-large, object-oriented design, direct manipulation, visual programming