December 1991 - USER INTERFACES


FEATURES

THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF PIE MENUS by Don Hopkins

Circular pie menus are easier to use and faster to manipulate than conventional linear menus. Don discusses their pluses and minuses, and shows you how to design and implement them.

ENHANCING THE X-WINDOW SYSTEM by Jim Rhyne, Doris Chow, and Michael Sacks

Our authors describe how they extended the X-Window system by adding a paperlike interface and handwriting recognition capabilities.

LINKING USER INTERFACE AND DATABASE OBJECTS by Eng-Kee Kwang and Christopher Rosebrugh

In the first installment of this two-part article, Eng-Kee and Chris discuss the object-oriented UI and database architecture of the notebook UI they implemented for a pen-based computer.

FS: A FILE STATUS UTILITY FOR UNIX by Jeff Reagen

The file status utility presented here lets you examine the current status of the UNIX file table in much the same way ps allows you to look at the list of active processes.

A SIMPLE HANDLE-BASED MEMORY MANAGER by David Betz

This handle-based memory manager may solve you memory fragmentation problems.

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

STATISTICAL PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS by Fred Motteler

Understanding statistical performance analysis helps you improve time-critical application execution and avoid potential problems.

EXAMINING ROOM

VISIBLE RESULTS WITH VISUAL BASIC by Al Stevens

Al built this Windows 3 network e-mail system with just 640 lines of code in only four days using Microsoft's Visual Basic.

PROGRAMMER'S WORKBENCH

GRAPHICAL DATA VISUALIZATION by Marian G. Williams and Peter D. Varhol

The object-oriented nature of VZ Programmer makes it easy to build an interactive GUI for exploratory data analysis under Windows 3 or Presentation Manager.

COLUMNS

PROGRAMMING PARADIGMS by Michael Swaine

Michael continues his conversation with Robert Carr, this month discussing the PenPoint UI and imaging model; Roland Alden and Tony Hoeber add details about the NUI.

C PROGRAMMING by Al Stevens

The D-Flat TEXTBOX class Al discusses this month displays, scrolls, and pages through the text in textbox windows.

STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING by Jeff Duntemann

The tragedy of any Black Box, whether it be an IC or Turbo Vision, is that what goes on inside is magic--even when you know what goes in and what comes out.

GRAPHICS PROGRAMMING by Michael Abrash

In addition to catching up on his correspondence, Michael discusses graphics debugging and hi-res VGA page flipping.

PROGRAMMER'S BOOKSHELF by Andrew Schulman

C and C++ are this month's focus as Andrew examines Plauger's The Standard C Library and the second edition of Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language.

DEPARTMENTS

EDITORIAL by Jonathan Erickson

LETTERS by you

SWAINE'S FLAMES by Michael Swaine

PROGRAMMER'S SERVICES

OF INTEREST by Tami Zemel


Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal