Product Description

In the early days of computing, technicians in white coats controlled refrigerator-sized computers housed in sealed rooms, far from ordinary users. Today, computers are inexpensive commodities, like television sets,
and ordinary people control and interact with them. This new paradigm has led to a burgeoning demand for graphics-intensive and highly interactive interfaces.

Developing User Interfaces is targeted at the programmer who will actually implement, rather than design, the user interface. Most user interface books focus on psychology and usability, not programming techniques. This book recognizes the need for programmers to collaborate with usability experts and psychologists, so topics such as the principles of visualization, human perception, and usability evaluation are touched upon. Yet the primary focus remains on those tools and techniques required for programming the complex user interface.

* Focuses on advanced programming topics

* event handling
* interaction with geometric objects
* widget tool kits
* input syntax

* Useful to programmers using any language-no particular windowing system or tool kit is presumed, examples are drawn from a variety of commercial systems, and code examples are presented in pseudo code

* The basic concepts of traditional computer graphics such as drawing and three-dimensional modeling are covered for readers without a computer graphics background.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1370678 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 414 pages

About the Author
Dan R. Olsen, Jr. is the director of the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a professor of computer science at Brigham Young University. Dr. Olsen earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in computer and information science at the University Pennsylvania in 1981. He is also the author of User Interface Management Systems. Dr. Olsen has considerable expertise in user interface mangement systems (UIMS), computer graphics, and the construction of compiled and interpreted languages

Customer Reviews

A useful text for computer scientists
Most existing UI/HCI books ignore the details on how to implement user interfaces and are thus inappropriate for courses in many computer science departments. Olsen's book steps into this vacuum and provides a text that covers how to go about determining the tasks an interface should support as well as how to implement the resulting design. The bulk of the book is on the implementation side and thus students will also come to understand how toolkits, which practitioners generally use, work internally.

This text can be used in a quarter long course on UI development or in a more comprehensive semester long HCI course when supplemented with additional material on human abilities, design, and evaluation. We have found this book quite valuable in three offerings of our course on UI Design, Prototyping, and Evaluation here in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley.