HyperNeWS: an interactive interface design tool

HyperNeWS is a powerful tool for designing user interfaces, developed at the Turing Institute. It runs on Sun3 and Sun4 workstations, using either the X11/NeWS server, or NeWS server. It is somewhat like the Macintosh HyperCard system in its screen organisation, with windows (or stacks) composed of backgrounds and cards. Each background/card/stack can contain a variety of objects, such as buttons, sliders, dials etc. The implementation language is Postscript. Objects scripts are written directly in Postscript, and HyperNeWS can be used for interesting applications without involving anything but the server. All communication is message-based, where using an object oriented design, if an object cannot handle a given message, it is passed to its parent. HyperNeWs can communicate with external clients. This interface has been developed in C, is type-secure and allows each stack to communicate with a separate client. Interfaces to other languages, such as Prolog and Lisp, are built on top of the C interface. Some of the features that HyperNeWS provides are: simple to use, reusable and good error handling