3.1 Working Within Existing Interface Frameworks

The first borrowing you should do is to work within one of the existing user interface frameworks, such as Macintosh, Motif or Windows. The choice may have already been made for you: in in-house development your users may have PCs and already be using Windows, or in commercial development it may be obvious that the market you are trying to reach (you've already found out a lot about who's in the market, if you're following our advice) is UNIX-based. If you want to address several platforms and environments you should adopt a framework like XVT that has multi-environment support.

The advantages of working in an existing framework are overwhelming, and you should think more than twice about participating in a project where you won't be using one. It's obvious that if users are already familiar with Windows there will be big gains for them if you go along. But there are also big advantages to you, as mentioned earlier.

You'll get a STYLE GUIDE that describes the various interface features of the framework, such as menus, buttons, standard editable fields and the like. The style guide will also provide at least a little advice on how to map the interface requirements of your application onto these features, though the guides aren't an adequate source on this. This information saves you a tremendous amount of work: you can, and people in the old days often did, waste huge amounts of time designing scroll bars or ways to nest menus. Nowadays these things have been done for you, and better than you could do them yourself.

You also get SOFTWARE TOOLS for implementing your design. Not only does the framework have an agreed design for menus and buttons, but it also will have code that implements these things for you. We'll discuss these implementation aids in a later chapter.

"We can't use any of the existing frameworks because of our special hardware, which we have to use because of military specs/the customer's hardware base/ the new psychotelekinetic interaction device we're supporting."