The quality of the user interface often determines whether user enjoy or despire
a system, whether a system succeeds or fails in the market.
The three chapters 8,9 and 10 of the "Computer Graphics: principle and
practice" (second edition) book by Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes, deal with this
topic exaustively.
During the designing of the xcmodel system we needed a Graphics User Interface
suitable for a modeling system and so we decide do design the xtools
library.
xtools is a library made for Unix and Xwindow environments. It is
designed to produce graphic interfaces in the simplest and easiest way,
instead of using the more complex and larger Xwindow tools as X Toolkit.
xtools is designed for a limited number of objects and
the use of three classes of functions: create, execute and able/unable.
Creation defines the name and shape of the object, execute creates the
event-object-function association in order to execute a function when
an event occurs on an object. Able/unable allows the object to be
active or not. For these reasons, xtools is very fast and uses
little memory, while still being efficient and effective.
xtools is recommended also for little applications.
File Request Object of xtools