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Vision & Architecture

  An application GUI involves different knowledge domains [New00], from usability to hypermedia analysis, including graphic design, information architecture and use case modeling.

At the same time, base technologies are more powerful every year, adding new requirements to the interface. How many improvements have you seen in GUIs in the last year? Do you think the same happens with databases? Think that Microsoft has dedicated years "just" to remake the Office GUI.



New elements become commodities every day and should be considered in a new interface development. Undo/Redo, Back/Forward, Annotations, Zoom, Tagging, are only a few of these functionalities.

Are you ready to program them? Can you? Should you? How much time will it take you? Could you simply forget about these functionalities? It would be great to get all these but nothing of the implementation problems. Don't you think?

Product farm
In order to make this easier, we need a user interface language like Himalia.

Himalia Guilder allows the developer to make just-add-water[Sch99] GUIs, and focus on the navigation/use case model for the specific domain that is being represented, with a flexibility never seen before. Himalia Guilder for Visual Studio 2005 is the first Himalia designer, enabling the guilding process in your natural environment.



Himalia Runtime allows the user to play the Himalia user interface definition (xml file with .hui extension) in a specific platform. Currently we have only one runtime available, for Windows Presentation Foundation.


Academic references

[Sch99] Daniel Schwabe; “Just add Water” Applications: Hypermedia Application Frameworks, 1999
Hypertext’99 Workshop on “Hypermedia Development: Design Patterns in Hypermedia"

[New00] Mark W. Newman, James A. Landay; Sitemaps, Storyboards, and Specifications: A Sketch of Web Site Design Practice, 2000.
Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, Techniques.
New York: ACM Press, pp. 263-274.
 
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