The GUI Burden ATS 315 Stephenson,

Booting Your PC Starts off with some text with lots of cryptic messages. Next, the ugly windows logo…

Then the Beautiful GUI

Why start off in a text mode? Thousands of possible monitors Thousands of possible video cards = Millions of possible combinations All they have in command is “VGA” mode.

Drivers Translate the computers instructions into instructions for the specific brands of peripherals on your computer. The computer itself cannot care about the brand of hardware attached—it just talks to the drivers and the drivers sort it out.

Where are the drivers? Buried. In binary. You can set some of the features of these drivers in the Display dialog box…

Macintosh Never see text at boot A lovely “welcome screen” Why so different?

Unix At log in, you are on a glass teletype (tty) –Why? –Server knows NOTHING about your computer’s hardware –…or its own hardware!

Starting Xwindows Log in on wx-sun1 itself

XWindows A set of programs that reproduces the graphical metaphors in Unix XWindows itself is extremely ugly…

Window Managers A set of programs and settings that gives XWindows a coherent, modern “look and feel”. In cygwin, we are running XWin, which makes the windows look just like WindowsXP windows. (startxwin.sh)

CDE Common Desktop Environment

GNOME

KDE

Redmond98

Aqua

Transparent

Enlightenment

And Many More!

Developing Programs for a GUI A simple program: grep –grep simply searches files for the requested string. –grep fopen *.c

grep.c Is probably very simple and short: while(!feof(fin)) { –fscanf(fin, “%s”,&string2); –if (!strcmp(string1,string2)) printf (“%s”,string1); }

A grep XWindows Program Would have to open a window:

A grep XWindows Program Would have to prompt the user for the string to search for and the files to search in. Requires loading fonts, choosing colors for the fonts, etc. (i.e., the attributes of the text) What text are you looking for? In which file should I look?

A grep XWindows Program Would have to set up dialog boxes in which the user could enter text. What text are you looking for? In which file should I look?

A grep XWindows Program Would have to know how to work with the mouse, mousebuttons, etc. What text are you looking for? In which file should I look?

A grep XWindows Program Would need buttons for Search and probably for Cancel. What text are you looking for? In which file should I look? Search Cancel

A grep XWindows Program All of this is BEFORE you write the part of the program that actually searches for the text! What text are you looking for? In which file should I look? Search Cancel

A grep XWindows Program This program would be thousands of lines long! Hardly worth the work! What text are you looking for? In which file should I look? Search Cancel

Omnibus Programs Microsoft Office Microsoft Windows Explorer

Microsoft Office File Open Tools Search

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Windows Explorer Press Windows-F

Microsoft Windows Explorer

Microsoft Office Becomes full of “features” –= rand(5,4) dd

Microsoft Windows Explorer Becomes full of “features”

Big Programs have bugs that are hard to find!