A molecular architecture for creating advanced GUIs

This paper presents a new GUI architecture for creating advanced interfaces. This model is based on a limited set of general principles that improve flexibility and provide capabilities for implementing information visualization techniques such as magic lenses, transparent tools or semantic zooming. This architecture also makes it possible to create multiple views and application-sharing systems (by sharing views on multiple computer screens) in a simple and uniform way and to handle bi-manual interaction and multiple pointers. An experimental toolkit called Ubit was implemented to test the feasibility of this approach. It is based on a pseudo-declarative C++ API that tries to simplify GUI programming by providing a higher level of abstraction.