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Abstract: This paper aims at highlighting the importance of Object-Oriented approach taking the user interface as study subject. The paper starts giving the classification of Object Oriented Technologies in their basic forms and defines the Object-Oriented approach. This is followed by the careful study of GUI-its disadvantages. It then provides Object-Oriented User Interface as a solution to the problems in the present user interface giving rise to the future of user interface-the OOUI.
Keywords: Object-Oriented approach, GUI study,
I. Introduction
Object Oriented Technology (OOT):
The Object-Oriented (OO) process is an evolutionary approach to software engineering. It encompasses the entire software life cycle, from operational concept through release. Object oriented technology represents the methodologies which are based on ‘Object’ approach.
Object oriented Technology is seen in three basic forms. They are,
1. Object-Oriented User Interfaces (OOUI)
2. Object-Oriented Programming Systems (OOPS)
3. Object-Oriented Database Management (OODBM)
a. Object-Oriented Programming systems (OOPS):
Object-oriented programming (OOPS) is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction, encapsulation, messaging, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance. Many modern programming languages now support OOP.
b. Object Oriented Database Management (OODBM):
An object-oriented database is a database model in which information is represented in the form of objects as used in object-oriented programming. When database capabilities are combined with object-oriented (OO) programming language capabilities, the result is an object-oriented database management system (OODBMS).
c. Object-Oriented User Interfaces (OOUI):
In computing an object-oriented user interface (OOUI) is a type of user interface based on an object-oriented programming metaphor. In an OOUI, the user interacts explicitly with objects that represent entities in the domain that the application is concerned with. Many vector drawing applications, for example, have an OOUI - the objects being lines, circles and canvases. The user may explicitly select an object, alter its properties (such as size or color), or invoke other actions upon it (such as to move, copy, or re-align it).
II. The Object Approach
1. Object:
An Object is the basis for any OO technology. It is defined as - "An object is anything, real or abstract, about which we store data and those operations that manipulate the data."
The following definition gives the clarification of essential properties of an object:
An object is an abstraction of set of real-world entities or things such that:
• All of the real-world things in the set –the instances – have the same characteristics
• All instances are subject to and conform the same rules
The concepts in Object approach add many advantages to the OO system such as increased productivity, reduced maintenance, standardization in case of Inheritance and improved program reliability, ease of coding, reusability in case of encapsulation and so on the list continues. But the thing to be observed here is that they add value to the system.
Let us now see what a UI is.
2. User Interface (UI):
User interface is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the machine which aids the operator in making operational decisions. In case of computing it comprises of visual and auditory information. GUI (Graphical User Interface) is one such interface.
3. Graphical User Interface (GUI)
In computing a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and office equipment . A GUI represents the information and actions available to a user through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, as opposed to text-based interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation. The actions are usually performed through direct manipulation of the graphical elements. The GUIs familiar to most people today are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and X Window System interfaces.
A GUI uses a combination of technologies and devices to provide a platform the user 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 WIMP ("window, icon, menu, and pointing device") paradigm, especially in personal computers.
The WIMP style of interaction uses a physical input device to control the position of a cursor 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 and graphics hardware, as well as the positioning of the cursor.
4. Flaws with present GUI
GUI has more advantages than other user interfaces like CLI-command line interface. The explanation is too simple- a CLI can be run in GUI as some programmers and advanced users would want it but it’s not possible otherwise. Furthermore, multi-tasking is quite simple with GUI when compared to CLI. In spite of all this there are some limitations or flaws to GUI. Let’s have a look at them.
Consider a normal desktop usage. While browsing the internet for example, I open Google chrome for Facebook, Gmail and I can’t use chrome for any more needs because I follow the links in the mail and fb in the same browser making the number of tabs to 15 to 20. I use my favorite reader to follow the RSS feeds of my favorite sites. Many explorer windows would be kept open where I store my graphics, save webpages, and music. I use a audio player to play songs meanwhile. And this clutter goes out of hand when I am working on a project at the same time.
Though this problem could be minimized by using advanced software’s to group things like Firefox grouped tab browsing remember that more software leads to extra allocation of memory resource, processing power etc. which leads to slowing down the pc.
Besides this, there are other major flaws. Let’s consider the example of a person documenting his work. He inserts graphics in to his word doc for easier representation of data, includes references from the internet in to his doc, screenshots his application output or stats in his app and pastes them for reference and etc... While this seems easier can the opposite work be equally easier??
Consider that I have a document of abstract and I need to prepare a presentation based on it. Can this be equally easier as when you knew all the sources? Will he be able to retrace all them without too much of unnecessary process?? There’s really no good answer
The fundamental problems of modern user interfaces are:
1. They’re application based – Modern UI’s are focused on files and applications. They don’t recognize most projects we work on are multi-application, and so they don’t have a good way of dealing with our need to open and manage multiple apps when we are working on a project.
2. They lock data up in a file format – This isn’t just a matter of interoperability (i.e., opening docx files on Linux and the like.) This is about the fact that the modern UI does not recognize that inside a Word document there might be pictures, and that I might want to extract them for some other purpose.
3. They lack a good way to share and version – Obviously there are exceptions, like with most document processing software. However, the point is that versioning is at an application level, not a OS (this isn’t exactly UI, but I feel like it’s in the same basic realm.)
5. OOUI as the solution
A major part of that rethinking will borrow heavily from the realm of object oriented programming. The OOUI has three parts-Objects, collections, and a canvas. Their relationship can be summed up in the following manner; Collections are a group of objects arranged on a canvas. Those objects can be anything; graphs, images, text files, audio files, web pages, whatever. The canvas can also be very flexible, 2D, 3D, with an image background, with predefined object slots (i.e. days on a calendar). The user interacts by dragging objects round on the canvas in a very natural manner, much like Bump Top. They can open an object and edit it more fully, or change its configuration so that it’s bigger, a different color, transparent, etc. This combination of a very natural user interface, and the ability to save entire collections, helps address the first problem of modern UI’s.
Bump Top (a advanced application that implements collection strategy using the icons of the respective files) offers a good idea of what collections in a OOUI might be like. However an OOUI would go one step further by allowing this type of interaction with more than just icons, but with the actual content (text, images, audio, etc).
The key thing is how the computer manages these objects. Users can save and open collections, so that everything, down even to the layout, is preserved. Furthermore, the OOUI thinks of objects much like objects in object oriented programing. Each object has attributes, it’s content, it’s name, it’s current layout, etc. Each object also has methods that allow the user to manipulate it, such as save, edit, move, group, play, etc.
Here’s where the OOUI begins to solve the second problem. Just like in OOP, objects in the OOUI come in two flavors, primitives and complex objects. The primitives are your basic types of content. Text files, images, sound, video, link, application window, database table are some examples of primitives. Complex objects are then just a collection of primitives, with specially designed methods to bring them together. For example, a programmer could construct a graph object which had one attribute to specify a data source, and then methods to create various kinds of graphs (bar, pie, plot, etc.) Then the user could use this object to create a variety of graphs for their collection. Most importantly, users should be able to easily “explode” these complex objects into their component primitives, letting them say extract all the images from a PowerPoint presentation to use somewhere else.
None of the elements, objects, canvas, or collection, bears a direct resemblance to Microsoft Word, or PowerPoint, or any other of the applications we’re familiar with. So what happens to the application in an OOUI?