Graphical user interface

Template:Otheruses2 A graphical user interface (or GUI, sometimes pronounced "gooey") is a method of interacting with a computer through a metaphor of direct manipulation of graphical images and widgets in addition to text.

GUIs display visual elements such as icons, windows and other gadgets. The precursor to GUIs was invented by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute (led by Doug Engelbart) with the development and use of text-based hyperlinks manipulated with a mouse for the On-Line System. The concept of hyperlinks was further refined and extended to graphics by researchers at Xerox PARC, who went beyond text-based hyperlinks and used GUIs as the primary interface for the Xerox Alto computer. Most modern general-purpose GUIs are derived from this system. For this reason some people call this class of interface a PARC User Interface (PUI) (note that PUI is also an acronym for perceptual user interface). The PUI consists of graphical widgets (often provided by widget toolkit libraries) such as windows, menus, radio buttons, check boxes and icons, and employs a pointing device (such as a mouse, trackball or touchscreen) in addition to a keyboard. Those aspects of PUIs can be emphasized by using the alternative acronym WIMP, which stands for Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing device.

The GUI familiar to most of us today is either the Mac or the Windows operating systems and their applications originated at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratory in the late 1970s. Apple used it in their first Macintosh computers. Later, Microsoft reused many of Apple's ideas in their first version of the Windows operating system for IBM-compatible PCs.

Examples of systems that support GUIs are Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, NEXTSTEP and the X Window System. The latter is extended with toolkits such as Motif (CDE), Qt (KDE) and GTK+ (GNOME).

An example of KDE, one of the X Window System's many graphical user interfaces available for Unix-like systems

File:Windows XP GUI.JPG

An example of the graphical user interface in Windows XP

File:MacOSX10.4.png

An example of the graphical user interface in Apple's Mac OS X

Types of GUIs

GUIs that are not PUIs are most notably found in computer games, and advanced GUIs based on virtual reality are now frequently found in research. Many research groups in North America and Europe are currently working on the Zooming User Interface, or ZUI, which is a logical advancement on the GUI, blending some 3D movement with 2D or "2½D" vectorial objects.

Some GUIs are designed for the rigorous requirements of vertical markets. These are known as "application specific GUIs." One example of such an application specific GUI is the now familiar touchscreen point of sale software found in restaurants worldwide and being introduced into self-service retail checkouts. First pioneered by Gene Mosher on the Atari ST computer in 1986, the application specific touchscreen GUI has spearheaded a worldwide revolution in the use of computers throughout the food and beverage industry and in general retail.

Other examples of application specific touchscreen GUIs include the most recent automatic teller machines, airline self-ticketing, information kiosks and the monitor/control screens in embedded industrial applications which employ a real time operating system (RTOS). The latest cell phones and handheld game systems also employ application specific touchscreen GUI.

GUI vs. CLI

GUIs were introduced in reaction to the steep learning curve of Command Line Interfaces (CLI), text-based user interfaces requiring commands to be typed on the keyboard. Since the command words in CLIs are usually numerous and composable, very complicated operations can be invoked using a relatively short sequence of words and symbols. This leads to high levels of efficiency once the many commands are learned, but reaching this level can take some time, because the command words are not easily discoverable. WIMPs ("window, icon, menu, pointing device"), on the other hand, present the user with numerous widgets that represent and can trigger some of the system's available commands.

WIMPs extensively use modes as the meaning of all keys and clicks on specific positions on the screen are redefined all the time. CLIs use modes only in the form of a current directory.

Most modern operating systems provide both a GUI and some level of a CLI, although the GUIs usually receive more attention. The GUI is usually WIMP-based, although occasionally other metaphors surface, such as Microsoft Bob, 3dwm or (partially) FSV.

Applications may also provide both interfaces, and when they do the GUI is usually a WIMP wrapper around the CLI version. The latter used to be implemented first because it allowed the developers to focus exclusively on their product's functionality without bothering about interface details such as designing icons and placing buttons. Nowadays, the GUI is no longer an optional part of a successful application, because users have grown accustomed to the ease of use provided by their familiar GUIs.

3D user interfaces

3D GUIs are very common in science fiction literature and movies, such as in Jurassic Park, which features Silicon Graphics' 3D filemanager, "File system navigator" [1], an actual file manager that never got any widespread use, as the user interface of a Unix computer. In science fiction, 3D user interfaces are often immersive environments like William Gibson's cyberspace or Neal Stephenson's metaverse. 3D graphics is currently mostly used in computer games, art and computer aided design. There have been several attempts at making 3D desktop enviroments, like Sun's Project Looking Glass. A 3D computing environment could possibly be used for collaborative work, for example scientists may study 3D models of molecules in a virtual reality environment or engineers may work on assembling a 3D model of an airplane. This is a goal of the Croquet project [2]. 3D is also slowly being introduced in mainstream operating systems like Windows Vista and Mac OS X, for the moment mainly in the form of eye candy, like Apple's Quartz Extreme, which uses OpenGL to do fancy rendering.

Individual Elements of User Interfaces

Eample elements are:

   * About box
   * Dialog box
   * Icon Image
   * Balloon help
   * Breadcrumb (navigation)
   * Button (computing)
   * CandyBar
   * Check box
   * Combo box

To see more:

 Category:Graphical user interface
 Category:User interface

See also

• Fitts' law
• Anti-Mac
• Apple v. Microsoft
• User interface engineering
• Software engineering
• List of software engineering topics
• Human-Machine Interface
• Ergonomics
• GUI Testing
• Inductive reasoning aptitude
• Ajax (programming)
• Rich Internet Applications

External links

• Marcin Wichary's GUIdebook, Graphical User Interface gallery: over 5500 screenshots of UI, application and icon history
• The Real History of the GUI, a very interesting article by Mike Tuck
• A History of the GUI, by Jeremy Reimer of Ars Technica
• Linux is Not Windows points out the important design differences which lead to WIMP and CLI (but lacks impartiality)