Absolute Positioning

Archive for 'A voyage of discovery' Category

A voyage of discovery

Designers want a website to enable interaction with the end user. Interaction styles refer to all the different ways in which technology enables the user to communicate with the system. Historically, it all began with the text terminal. Users entered commands as lines of text, and the output was a text. With increasing use of [...]

Command-line interfaces

A command-line interface (CLI) is a text tool used to command the computer to perform some operations and provide the end user with desired outputs. The output obtained is also text. The concept of CLI originated from the teletype machine and represented an advance from the punch-card system. Even today, some users prefer CLIs, which [...]

CLI versus GUI

Die-hard graphical user interface fans would probably point out that the CLI is not relevant anymore. However, they forget that graphics and command lines are orthogonal. Text user interfaces and graphic applications like CAD still use the CLI. It is true that GUI interfaces are visual and simple to learn, but CLI is a powerful [...]

The graphical user interface

Most users are top-level users. They want to give high-level commands to the computer and wait for it to process the command at the backend without bothering their heads about how the command gets executed in the guts of the machine. GUI, despite its several drawbacks, is easier to learn and simpler to understand. The [...]

Graphical user interface—FrontPage and Dreamweaver

FrontPage and Dreamweaver are GUI applications offered to web designers who want to drag and drop controls on their web pages and get the HTML code generated automatically at the backend. Rapid application development and web design became a possibility in the process.

Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop

The Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop is the official Macintosh development environment from Apple Computer, Inc. The MPW shell has a multiwindowing text editor, a command processor, a linker, make facility, resource compiler, resource decompiler, source-code management system, and an optional graphical user interface with almost all commands wrapped into graphical elements. The MPW uses an open [...]

Object-oriented interfaces

Object-oriented interfaces use objects as tangible and conceptual things that have definite attributes and expose specific methods. The purpose is to break down the interface into modular, reusable chunks called classes. The classes then act as blue prints for creating instances of the objects and implementing methods encapsulated in these objects. This results in robust, [...]