Presentation Models by Example

Interface builders and multi-media authoring tools only support the construction of static displays where the components of the display are known at design time (e.g., buttons, menus). High-level UIMSs and automated designers support more sophisticated displays but are not easy to use as they require dealing explicitly with elaborate abstract concepts. This paper describes a GUI development environment, HandsOn, where complex displays of dynamically changing data can be constructed by direct manipulation. HandsOn integrates principles of graphic design, supports constraint-based layout, and has facilities for easily specifying the layout of collections of data. The system incorporates Programming By Example techniques to relieve the designer from having to deal with abstractions, and relies on a model-based language for the representation of the displays being constructed and as a means to provide information for the tool to reason about.