INTRODUCTION
A GUI is a user interface that provides graphical two-way communication between the user
and the application. It consists of menus, windows, widgets, input devices (keyboard, mouse -
point-and-click), output devices (audio - the "beeps" and other sounds the computer makes,
video), and in general, all the information channels. The GUI uses these channels to
communicate with the user. It should be noted that the GUI also includes documentation.
GUI Design
Task-Centered Design, also known as User-Centered Design, is a GUI design approach that
focuses on the tasks the users perform in order to accomplish their work. Note that the users
may not be currently performing these tasks using computer software applications (if you
were writing an application to replace an older system).
The graphical user interface is a form of user interface that allows users to interact
with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary
notation, instead of text-based user interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs
were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces
(CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
The actions in a GUI are usually performed through direct manipulation of the graphical
elements. Beyond computers, GUIs are used in many handheld mobile devices such as MP3
players, portable media players, gaming devices, smartphones and smaller household, office
and industrial controls. The term GUI tends not to be applied to other lower-display
resolution types of interfaces, such as video games is preferred, or not including flat screens,
like volumetric displays because the term is restricted to the scope of two-dimensional
display screens able to describe generic information, in the tradition of the computer science
research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
OBJECTIVE
A GUI is a type of computer human interface on a computer. It solves the blank screen
problem that confronted early computer users. These early users sat down in front of a
computer and faced a blank screen, with only a prompt. The computer gave the user no
indication what the user was to do next. GUI are an attempt to solve this blank screen
problem.
At a conceptual level, a computer human interface is a "means by which people and
computers communicate with each other". One can make an analogy between a computer
system's GUI and a car's steering wheel. The wheel directly binds the driver to the operation
and functionality of the vehicle. When driving, a driver should not have to concentrate on the
steering wheel. In the same way, the GUI binds the user of the computer system to the
operation and potential of the computer system. A good GUI design removes the impediment
of communication with the computer system and allows the user to work directly on the
problem at hand.
A GUI may be designed for the requirements of a vertical market as application-specific
graphical user interfaces. Examples include automated teller machines (ATM), point of sale
(POS) touchscreens at restaurants, self-service checkouts used in a retail store, airline self-
ticketing and check-in, information kiosks in a public space, like a train station or a museum,
and monitors or control screens in an embedded industrial application which employ a real-
time operating system (RTOS).
A graphical user interface is a human-computer interface that is graphical (rather than purely
textual) user interface. GUI uses images, window, icons, buttons, menus etc. which can be
manipulated by a mouse. GUI are more user friendly than command line interface (CLI) as
user interacts by using a mouse rather than by having to type in commands. Also users don’t
have to remember lot of commands and thus it becomes easier for the user to learn and use
the system. GUI is often pronounced as “Gooey”. Graphical user interface is a type of user
interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than typing
text commands.
Fig. 1.0
Today’s major operating systems provide a graphical user interface. Although GUI are more
user friendly, they are not as flexible and robust as CLI. For example, multiple CLI
commands can be combined using pipes to perform tasks that would be much more
cumbersome to perform with GUI programs and no GUI tool can replace file attribute-
matching schemes of find command(a UNIX command) to locate files.
OBJECTIVES
A GUI is a Graphical User Interface. Its purpose is to allow the user to interact with your
program. A GUI is not always necessary if you just want your program to be launched and
then forgotten about, but any information your program gives to the user and any control the
user can, well, use are part of the GUI. Those elements can be buttons to launch some
actions, sliders, textboxes for the user to input some information, displaying elements to give
the user some information... The user doesn't need to see everything, but depending on the
program, an experienced user could want to see some things a "newbie" wouldn't understand,
so that's why some GUIs have the possibility to be customized to add some information (for
example torrenting apps showing the ratio, the health of a torrent, the number of connections,
while the basic user only wants to see the name, the size and the state of the download).
METHODOLOGY OF GUI DESIGN
Layers of a GUI based on a windowing system
A GUI uses a combination of technologies and devices to provide a platform that users can
interact with, for the tasks of gathering and producing information.
A series of elements conforming a visual language have evolved to represent information
stored in computers. This makes it easier for people with few computer skills to work with
and use computer software. The most common combination of such elements in GUIs is the
windows, icons, menus, pointer (WIMP) paradigm, especially in personal computers.
The WIMP style of interaction uses a virtual input device to represent the position of a
pointing device, most often a mouse, and presents information organized in windows and
represented with icons. Available commands are compiled together in menus, and actions are
performed making gestures with the pointing device. A window manager facilitates the
interactions between windows, applications, and the windowing system. The windowing
system handles hardware devices such as pointing devices, graphics hardware, and
positioning of the pointer. In personal computers, all these elements are modeled through a
desktop metaphor to produce a simulation called a desktop environment in which the display
represents a desktop, on which documents and folders of documents can be placed. Window
managers and other software combine to simulate the desktop environment with varying
degrees of realism.
POST-WIMP INTERFACE
Smaller mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smartphones typically
use the WIMP elements with different unifying metaphors, due to constraints in space and
available input devices. Applications for which WIMP is not well suited may use newer
interaction techniques, collectively termed post-WIMP user interfaces.
As of 2011, some touchscreen-based operating systems such as Apple's iOS (iPhone) and
Android use the class of GUIs named post-WIMP. These support styles of interaction using
more than one finger in contact with a display, which allows actions such as pinching and
rotating, which are unsupported by one pointer and mouse.
Interaction
Human interface devices, for the efficient interaction with a GUI include a computer
keyboard, especially used together with keyboard shortcuts, pointing devices for the cursor
(or rather pointer) control: mouse, pointing stick, touchpad, trackball, joystick, virtual
keyboards, and head-up displays (translucent information devices at the eye level).
There are also actions performed by programs that affect the GUI. For example, there are
components like inotify or D-Bus to facilitate communication between computer programs.
HISTORY
Early efforts
Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad in 1963, widely held as the first graphical computer-
aided design program. It used a light pen to create and manipulate objects in engineering
drawings in realtime with coordinated graphics. In the late 1960s, researchers at the Stanford
Research Institute, led by Douglas Engelbart, developed the On-Line System (NLS), which
used text-based hyperlinks manipulated with a then new device: the mouse. In the 1970s,
Engelbart's ideas were further refined and extended to graphics by researchers at Xerox
PARC and specifically Alan Kay, who went beyond text-based hyperlinks and used a GUI as
the main interface for the Smalltalk programming language, which ran on the Xerox Alto
computer, released in 1973. Most modern general-purpose GUIs are derived from this
system.
The Xerox PARC user interface consisted of graphical elements such as windows, menus,
radio buttons, and check boxes. The concept of icons was later introduced by David Canfield
Smith, who had written a thesis on the subject under the guidance of Kay. The PARC user
interface employs a pointing device along with a keyboard. These aspects can be emphasized
by using the alternative term and acronym for windows, icons, menus, pointing device
(WIMP). This effort culminated in the 1973 Xerox Alto, the first computer with a GUI,
though the system never reached commercial production.
The first commercially available computer with a GUI was the 1979 PERQ workstation,
manufactured by Three Rivers Computer Corporation. Its design was heavily influenced by
the work at Xerox PARC. In 1981, Xerox eventually commercialized the Alto in the form of
a new and enhanced system – the Xerox 8010 Information System – more commonly known
as the Xerox Star. These early systems spurred many other GUI efforts, including Lisp
machines by Symbolics and other manufacturers, the Apple Lisa (which presented the
concept of menu bar and window controls) in 1983, the Apple Macintosh 128K in 1984, and
the Atari ST with Digital Research's GEM, and Commodore Amiga in 1985. Visi On was
released in 1983 for the IBM PC compatible computers, but was never popular due to its high
hardware demands.[17] Nevertheless, it was a crucial influence on the contemporary
development of Microsoft Windows.
METHOD
Apple, Digital Research, IBM and Microsoft used many of Xerox's ideas to develop products,
and IBM's Common User Access specifications formed the basis of the user interfaces used
in Microsoft Windows, IBM OS/2 Presentation Manager, and the Unix Motif toolkit and
window manager. These ideas evolved to create the interface found in current versions of
Microsoft Windows, and in various desktop environments for Unix-like operating systems,
such as macOS and Linux. Thus most current GUIs have largely common idioms.
POPULARIZATION
GUIs were a hot topic in the early 1980s. The Apple Lisa was released in 1983, and various
windowing systems existed for DOS operating systems (including PC GEM and PC/GEOS).
Individual applications for many platforms presented their own GUI variants. Despite the
GUIs advantages, many reviewers questioned the value of the entire concept, citing hardware
limits, and problems in finding compatible software.
In 1984, Apple released a television commercial which introduced the Apple Macintosh
during the telecast of Super Bowl XVIII by CBS, with allusions to George Orwell's noted
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The goal of the commercial was to make people think about
computers, identifying the user-friendly interface as a personal computer which departed
from prior business-oriented systems, and becoming a signature representation of Apple
products.
Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign, Windows 95 was a major success in the
marketplace at launch and shortly became the most popular desktop operating system.
In 2007, with the iPhone and later in 2010 with the introduction of the iPad, Apple
popularized the post-WIMP style of interaction for multi-touch screens, and those devices
were considered to be milestones in the development of mobile devices.
CONCLUSION
The GUIs familiar to most people as of the mid-late 2010s are Microsoft Windows, macOS,
and the X Window System interfaces for desktop and laptop computers, and Android, Apple's
iOS, Symbian, BlackBerry OS, Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile, Tizen, Palm OS-
WebOS, and Firefox OS for handheld (smartphone) devices.
REFERENCES
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"GUI definition". Linux Information Project. October 1, 2004. Retrieved 12 November 2008.
"VisiCorp Visi On". The Visi On product was apparently not intended for the home user. It
was designed and priced for high end corporate workstations. The hardware it required was
quite a bit for 1983. It required a minimum of 512k of ram and a hard drive (5 megs of
space).
Friedman, Ted (October 1997). "Apple's 1984: The Introduction of the Macintosh in the Cultural
History of Personal Computers". Archived from the original on October 5, 1999.
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Washington Post (August 24, 1995). "With Windows 95's Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype".
Washington Post. Retrieved November 8, 2013.