A New Layout Method for Graphical User Interfaces Inproceedings

Abstract:

The layout mechanisms for many GUI toolkits are hard to understand, the associated tools and API's often difficult to use. This work investigates new, easy-to-understand layout mechanisms and evaluates its implementation. We will analyze the requirements for the definition of layouts of a graphical user interface. Part of the issue is that several aspects need to be considered simultaneously while laying-out a component: the alignment with other components as well as its own behaviour while resizing its container. Moreover, the used tools should isolate the designer/drawer from the implementation details of the framework. We present the details of our new GUI layout system, discuss the choices we made for our new layout algorithm and detail implementation issues. Moreover, we present also the user interface for our new GUI builder system that contains several innovations, such as a preview window to show the effects of layout configuration choices in real-time. We present an evaluation of our new system by attacking the complex GUI layout problem mentioned above.