Trends and Evolution of Window Interfaces A Discussion on Interfaces and Interaction Techniques for Window Management

The Xerox Star, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, was developed about twenty-five years ago. Seminal work on graphical interfaces even dates back to the 1960s. However, current techniques used for window management are merely variations of methods designed in the 1980s with very little improvements. Users are more and more confronted to the fact that the direct manipulation paradigm and the desktop metaphor do not scale well to the increased number of windows, palettes and icons that we need to manage today. This document starts with a retrospective on graphical user interfaces and the concept of window manager. It then describes state-of-the-art window interfaces as well as innovative techniques that have been recently proposed by the research community. Finally, it ends with some suggestions for new research directions on window management.