Construction of an object-oriented user interface

Describes the development of a graphical user interface for the ELLA hardware design system. The interface, called ELLAVIEW, was constructed using object-oriented design methods, Objective-C and the ICpak201 graphics toolkit. ELLAVIEW was developed by Praxis to add a more up-to-date user interface to ELLA. Direct manipulation techniques, menus, and graphical feedback are used to provide a more productive environment for hardware designers. The interface is object-oriented. The user points at objects on the screen and then selects an operation to perform. The desk top metaphor to enable the hardware designer to get full information about the database contents. The paper describes the results of the development work and draws conclusion on the use of object-oriented techniques for design and implementation