Complex GUI Architecture Discussion?

XNuke asks: "I have been searching for intelligent discussion (on dead trees or otherwise) of the issues involved in designing very complex GUIs. Things on the level of TecPlot, AutoCad, 3DS, etc, where there may be very many different views of the same data and there are many degrees of freedom for the user. I am not interested in 'where to put the buttons', but rather the nuts and bolts of making the 'Well Designed UI' work. I guess I am looking for a sort of 'Design Patterns applied to a big deskptop application' sort of discussion. It is no problem to find discussions of Model-View-Controller concepts at the component level, but at the application level there seems to be nothing. Too often the architectural level discussions encompass non-interactive, server side design issues and not the extremely chaotic problems a client side application with many degrees of freedom has. Short of wading through megabytes of source code for KWord et. al., does anyone know of any digested information? There is obviously no 'One Solution' to this, but there must be something out there."

Comments

Re:My Favorite GUI

[Zeebs]

Application Error W98SETUP.exe has caused a Gerneal Protection Fault in module KRNL386.EXE at 0D02:20FF Close

Re:Mac gets it right.

[IamTheRealMike]

Actually MacOS itself gets it wrong in quite a few places, for instance the muscle memory destroying zoomable Dock and the visually noisey stripes everywhere. They also vary the theme between aqua and brushed metal seemingly at random in their apps collection. This goes flat against their own HIG.

Also, iirc Interface Builder is based on absolute positioning mostly, with guidelines to let you line things up. The technique used by Glade/GTK/XUL, box packing, has several advantages like being able to scale the GUI up to any size you like (good for resolution independance) in any aspect ratio and still have it look right.

Anyway, I digress. I don't think this guy is talking about desktop design. He's talking about fantastically complex pieces of software, probably specialist stuff.

I'd suggest he exames emacs and vi. Given that they have practically no GUI elements, they nonetheless expose a lot of functionality via the keyboard (and mouse too). It may be worth considering having a "lite" graphical UI and a heavy duty keyboard based UI for this question.

KISS & MISS

[elrick_the_brave]

Keep It Simple Stupid & Make It Simple Stupid.. key words to head when trying to make your mark in this computer world. Frankly.. having been in it for over 10 years now.. I want something that will listen to me and work with gestures... I'd wear a glove.. get rid of the keyboard and mouse.