Editable graphical histories

Abstract

Graphical interfaces typically provide their users with little idea of a session's history, except insofar as it is reflected in the current state of the system. If undo and redo commands are provided, they are often the only way to review the actions performed, cycling through them in sequence. We introduce the notion of an editable graphical history that can allow the user to review and modify the actions performed with a graphical interface. We have designed a testbed system that creates a series of automatically-generated panels that depict in chronological order the important events in the history of a user's session with Chimera, a graphical editor. Our system uses heuristics to determine the contents of each panel and the actions that it illustrates. The user may scroll through the sequence of panels, reviewing actions at different levels of detail, and selectively undoing, modifying, and redoing previous actions.

Visual Programming in a Visual Shell—A Unified Approach

“…The Pursuit visual language employs a comic strip metaphor [13] for operations and graphical representations for control structure. Data objects, such as files and folders, are explicitly represented with familiar icons.…”

“…Chimera [13] is a graphical editor that creates an editable, graphical history of user actions. As the user edits a picture, Chimera produces a series of panels, similar to a comic strip, in a separate window.…”

“…Pursuit is the first system to define this automatically from the specification. In previous systems like Chimera [13], the programmer had to determine how to display and combine panels.…”

Extending programming by demonstration with hierarchical event histories

“…research systems like Eager [3] can already do this. Other systems have applied PBD to such domains as widget creation [18], graphical editing [15], and general-purpose programming [16].…”

Visual Programming in a Visual Domain: A Case Study of Cognitive Dimensions

“…By allowing programs to be speci ed by demonstration and by representing programs in a visual programming language that re ects the desktop, users can apply knowledge of the interface and its objects to the visual language and its objects when constructing, viewing and editing a program. The Pursuit visual language 2 combines elements of the comic strip metaphor (Kurlander and Feiner, 1988) and the visual production system (Furnas, 1991). Familiar icons are used to represent data objects, such as les and folders.…”