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Graphical User Interface (GUI) design and standards
Rather than looking at enforceable standards, the Foundry
is working towards a "best ideas" approach to GUI design. As the Foundry
community discovers these ideas, they are brought into a "pattern language" for
application GUI development.
[Foundry picture source: Library of Congress]
K-12 Teachers
The next generation of data tools is being built today in the NSDL. These tools will bring live data access and simple data viewers that can help your students achieve new levels of data literacy. Learn how you can get involved!
[picture source: Library of Congress]
College and University Teachers
The NSDL is working to bring research-level data tools to your classroom or lab. Your students can experiment with real data observations or run models without needing to know complicated software. Learn how you can get involved!
[picture source: Library of Congress]
Museum Director or Media Staff
Building interactive data-rich kiosks and give-away software for your museum has never been simpler. With the DDTF technology and your own Macromedia Director® applications. Or you can come to the foundry to find others to help.
[picture source: Library of Congress]
NSDL or ESIP Data Collection Project
Your collection of data resources holds a wealth of educational information. The DDTF is building the user tools that can tap your resources for classroom and other use. Come and see how the foundry can add value to your collection.
[picture source: unknown]
Campus Media and Curricular Development
If you are developing resources for teachers to use to
bring data into their classroom, here you can explore how the DDTF can help
you to add real and real time data to your current Director®/Flash® development
efforts.
[picture source: Library of Congress]
| Attention to GUI design and technology takes the curve out of learning | ||||
Other Information
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| Creating a GUI pattern language for data discovery applications
Creating a GUI "pattern language" is a project where the Foundry also needs to learn from efforts at GUI design from many sources. Two of the links (above: Ask Tog.com and Useit.com) are examples of long-time (more than 5 years) GUI design expertise. Within the GUI section of the Foundry Foundry members will be linking to a wide range of GUI web sites. The notion of a "pattern language" comes from the work of Christopher Alexander (et al). In this work the authors turn to 2 millennia of building history to find patterns for designs that have proven to work. In the same way, we will be looking at the recent history of internet and application design to find patterns for GUI objects that work. The above GUI, created at Planet Earth Science, Inc. uses GUI objects that the Foundry will be providing to the NSDL community. The sliders, window features (scrolling, etc.) and window tabs are all implemented in the Foundry code resource. GUI objects: modular and reusable
On the right is one of the current GUI objects: the slider object, seen in its Director development environment. Any Macromedia Director user/author in the Foundry can download the code for this object and use it to easily create any number of sliders that allow end users to select from a range of values, or to scroll a graphic animation, or to animate a data display. As with all the Foundry GUI objects, this one fills a pattern. Here the pattern is simply: all sliders work in the infinity between Zero and One. By simply translating any range to a range between Zero and One, this slider can be used over and over again. BELOW is a shot of the slider code in the Foundry. NOTE: you need to have a workspace membership to view and download the code.
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Graphical User Interfaces
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Starting
with the idea that the best GUI is one that is invisible, intuitive,
and elegant, the Foundry works to assemble code and GUI objects (behaviors
and graphics) that can be used by all Foundry developers to create new
applications. The idea is that the overlap between the GUIs of any two
applications will be great enough (and the acceptance of common GUI guidelines
broad enough) so that any user that has experienced one Foundry application
can pick up another and use it without any additional interface learning
curve. 
GUI objects are the building-blocks for GUI design. GUI objects combine code objects with GUI elements (graphics) to create the repreogrammable user interfaces that all the Foundry products can share. CUrrently, the GUI objects are created using Director's programming language, Lingo. These are true code objects, created through OO programming, and easily tested and refactored. 
