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Visual Design With Osf Motif (Hewlett-Packard Press Series)
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by Shiz Kobara
Sales Rank: 5002518
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$0.21
At Amazon
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Textbook Binding: 600 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Sd June 1991
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0201563207
ISBN-13: 978-0201563207
Product Dimensions:
9.5 x 7.8 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
From the Inside Flap
This book is for people who want to design more appealing and more useful computer screen interfaces for human operators. It is unique in its approach, insightful for the serious student, while readable and useful for the novice. Shiz Kobara and several colleagues at Hewlett-Packard have strong backgrounds in user interface design experience based on industrial design and human factors. Kobara has captured for the reader much of the lore of these separate disciplines as it applies to the visual design of applications using OSF/Motif. A bit of historical perspective may help to position the need for this book. Our age has been one of mankind adapting to computers. As we entered 1980, there were about a half-million computers in America, which were mostly used in industry. By 1990, there were 50,000,000, of which one half are located in homes. Ninety-five percent of the users of these computers have word processing and spreadsheet software that have better user interfaces than virtually any software available for these tasks ten years ago. Computer scientists, by and large, have been creating and learning new computer interfaces using the mnemonic approach. As a result, users of MS/DOS know that A:\ means "Root Directory, Disk Drive'A'", and UNIX hacker type GREP when they want to "Globally find Regular Expressions and Print." These mnemonics, or abbreviations can be quite efficient when learned. But novice users often have difficulty using mnemonics. Some computing visionaries saw the need for a better computer interface. In the early 1960s, pioneers such as Doug Englebart began research on Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs, in the hope of expanding the usability of computers beyond the limited circle of those people with the time and resources to learn mnemonic interfaces. Silicon Valley was a particularly fertile area for computing interfaces in the early 1980s. Englebart's ideas were greatly expanded at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), by visionaries including Alan Kay. Atari created simple interfaces for children's games that demystified computer power for many people. By 1980, HP Laboratories' collaboration with PARC on experiments with the Smalltalk environment signaled a shift in HP's machine interface efforts to user interface questions. By the latter half of the 80's, HP software engineers began coordinating their efforts with Shiz Kobara and other interface designers to improve the user interface for all HP software products. Shiz's book represents the best effort to date to codify the results of this subtle learning about interface design. We believed we could build upon much of the thinking about computer screen icons and "field" location, and add our own knowledge of application-domain specialties with both visual design and human factors principles to develop a significant improvement in both the appeal and usability of computer interfaces by "lay users." Thus, the true purpose of this book is to help many new screen designers build excellent designs. The consequences will be significant for you as a designer if you learn, study, and use these principles based on the Motif 3D look and feel. OSF selected the Motif 3D appearance and behavior over 42 entries and it was selected by BYTE Magazine as the Software User Interface product of the year in 1990. The message, we believe, is these design rules can give you a head start in designing more effective screens for applications and users in all computing fields. It is an exciting time as well for industrial designers in computing for it signals the acknowledgment of the value of these disciplines. Shiz Kobara has tried to empower you with this book by sharing the lore and secrets of user interface design. Best wishes, then, as you learn the subtle, but vital craft of visual design with OSF/Motif.
Charles H. House, Hewlett-Packard Company Palo Alto, California May 1991
Back Cover Copy
programmers and designers how to visualize and design an OSF/Motif interface. Shiz Kobara is uniquely qualified to write a design guide for Motif and can show you how to take advantage of the three-dimensional features of the interface.
Kobara uses step-by-step tutorials, and more than 200 visually rich illustrations, including color images, to thoroughly describe how you can use each component of the interface. The book goes beyond programming and shows you how to plan and use every aspect of the interface, from scrollbars to the complex window manager, to achieve real three-dimensional effects. This book:
provides practical strategies for taking advantage of OSF/Motif's three-dimensional features, going beyond programming tips. shows step by step how to plan and design and OSF/Motif interface to make your programming more efficient and give your code more visual impact. is the only book that explains the construction of each widget and shows you how to take advantage of their layout characteristics. features in-depth tutorials and reference for each visual component of OSF/Motif, with over 200 illustrations and 24 pages of full color.
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Visual Design With Osf Motif (Hewlett-Packard Press Series)
Available from Amazon
Price: $0.21
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