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Issue 1.4

COLUMN

Integumentary Customization, Part I

Using "Skins" in REALbasic Applications

Issue: 1.4 (February/March 2003)
Author: Toby Rush
Author Bio: Toby Rush is a music instructor, consultant, freelance programmer, web designer, husband and dad in Greeley, Colorado.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 10,737
Starting Page Number: 44
Article Number: 1424
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Since software programming began, the primary goal of interface design has always been to make software easy to use. When programmers put effort into the nuances of their application's interface, it's not because they're obsessive perfectionists (though many of them are); they do so because it helps the user use the program more efficiently, thus improving the user's satisfaction with the program.

The creation of the Mac OS in the early eighties was an important event in interface design because it provided programmers with the capability, through the Macintosh Toolbox, to create easy-to-use interfaces. In fact, it was easier to use the predefined, familiar, and well-designed interface elements than it was to create one's own.

As an example of this, consider what it would have been like to write a program on a Commodore 64 with a graphic user interface like the Mac's. If you wanted to create a button, you would have had to design it from the ground up, pixel by pixel. Figuring out when the button was clicked would have also been quite an ordeal; the data provided by the mouse would have had to be continually monitored and tracked, and a determination would need to be made on whether the mouse was within the bounds of the button when it was clicked. Of course, this doesn't even come close to the subtleties of button-clicking: highlighting, determining what happens when the user clicks the button but moves off the button before letting up on the mouse button, handling keyboard shortcuts, and so on.

The Macintosh toolbox solved this quite nicely; when a Mac developer needed a button, all he had to do was specify where the button needed to go, what size it was, and what its caption was. Since all the interface details were taken care of automatically, he could concentrate on what the button did instead of how it looked.

A fortunate and intentional side-effect of this scheme was to enforce consistency across all applications; a button in one program looked and behaved like a button in any other. This allowed the user to learn new applications more quickly.

In the past few years, processor speed has been rapidly increasing and interface designers have had the computing power to pursue a secondary goal: flexibility. The perfect interface should be able to adapt to the needs and tastes of the individual user, and many of the recent advances in interface design have been efforts to allow more user customization of the interface. Interestingly, this movement toward more flexible interfaces on the Mac has been halted somewhat by the introduction of Mac OS X; as developers become more and more comfortable with the newly redesigned interface, perhaps this advancement will pick up again.

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