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User interface having movable sheet with click

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1. filed concurrently herewith Xerox Docket No D 92494Q3 In brief the system described in the referenced applica tion provides the user with visual filters Each filter is a screen region called a viewing region together with an operator such as operations that magnify render in a wire frame style or reveal the hidden equation in a spreadsheet cell performed on shapes viewed in that region These filters generalize to many representations other than pixels and to many operations other than magnification To produce their visible output these filters may make use of the original application data structures from which the current visual representation is produced Thus these filters can portray the application data structures in a substantially different format highlighting information that was previously more difficult to see suppressing information that is not currently relevant or even revealing information about parts of the data struc tures that were not previously displayed Such visual filters work in concert with overlay tools particularly tools that perform operations relevant to the parts of the data structures that are revealed or highlighted by the visual filters Visual filters may produce not only modified views of application data structures but also temporary overlay tools positioned relative to particular application shapes The user may use these temporary tools in the same way as other tools on the overlay
2. 91 Computer Graphics Vol 25 No 4 July 1991 pages 329 337 Swinehart86 Daniel C Swinehart Polle T Zellweger Richard J Beach Robert B Hagmann A Structural View of the Cedar Programming Environment ACM Transac tions on Programming Languages and Systems Vol 8 No 4 1986 pages 419 490 Also available as Xerox PARC Technical Report CSL 86 1 What is claimed is 1 A method of operating a computer system where a program displays data and a user interacts with the data through the use of a displayed cursor the method comprising the steps of displaying a visual depiction of an overlay having a plurality of delineated regions each specifying an operation and referred to as a click through tool positioning the overlay relative to the displayed data so that a given click though tool overlaps a desired par ticular portion of the displayed data generating a particular event with the cursor positioned within the given click through tool and at a location 5 581 670 41 relative to the displayed data which location specifies the desired particular portion of the displayed data and in response to the particular event performing the opera tion specified by the given click through tool on the desired particular portion of the displayed data 2 A method of operating a processor based machine the machine including a user input facility a display device a processor coupled to the user input facility and the
3. References to a specific type of program or editor are not intended to imply stand alone application programs In fact many so called drawing programs have very sophisticated text handling capabilities and many so called word proces sors have powerful drawing modules The demarcation is further blurred by integrated program packages so called works programs that provide the functionality of many types of program in a single program Accordingly refer ence to a given type of program should be taken as a reference to a program having the stated functionality whether marketed as a drawing program a word processor a database program or a spreadsheet A number of the tools are described in conjunction with a graphical editor that supports a feature referred to as snap dragging This refers to a gravity technique described in the Bier and Stone paper on snap dragging Bier86 In connection with this technique a special point referred to as the caret snaps to gravity active locations such as object corners and other objects as they are drawn may snap to the caret l The terms button menu and palette are used in connection with a number of the tools to be described below The terms are used in general accordance with their known meaning but some departure is sometimes necessary in view of the fact that the overlay of the present invention imbues these otherwise familiar devices with new proper
4. Regardless of the type of application the user manipu lates input devices with reference to the screen image in order to effect desired changes This is typically done by placing a cursor at a particular position on the screen that corresponds to the displayed location of an object to be modified and executing one or more user events such as keystrokes or mouse actions Mouse actions include button depression button release mouse movement clicks and drags A mouse click refers to the user depressing and releasing one of the buttons without moving the mouse but the term is also used to refer to the act of depressing one of the buttons A drag or sometimes click and drag refers to the user positioning the cursor with the mouse depressing one of the buttons moving the mouse to a new position with the button still down and releasing the button at the new location The effect of mouse button depressions mouse button releases clicks and drags may be modified by holding down a keyboard key or a different mouse button if present For example placing a cursor at a particular location in a word processor image may operate to insert typed text at that location Dragging the cursor over a portion of the displayed text may select the text shown on the screen as highlighted so that the user can apply an operation such as deleting moving or changing the font to the selected text by some other mechanism Depending on the application and t
5. lt T Perform any final user feedback Recursively call the Event to Overlay Routine entering at circle A This routine may retum data e g if T is a clipboard Use this data and perform any parts of action A that T can perform FIG 37 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 16 of 16 5 581 670 fillinValue Command GetSelected value ready condVar List of programs waiting for this value FIG 38A filllnValue value ready condVar FIG 38B The actual shape APP 3B APP 3A FIG 40 5 581 670 1 USER INTERFACE HAVING MOVABLE SHEET WITH CLICK THROUGH TOOLS CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS The following three commonly owned copending appli cations including this one are being filed concurrently and the other two are incorporated by reference into this one Eric A Bier and William A S Buxton entitled USER INTERFACE HAVING MOVABLE SHEET WITH CLICK THROUGH TOOLS Attorney Docket 13188 68 Xerox Docket D 92492 William A S Buxton and Eric A Bier entitled USER INTERFACE HAVING SIMULTANEOUSLY MOVABLE TOOLS AND CURSOR Ser No 08 398 420 filed 2 27 95 which is an FWC of Ser No 08 95 591 filed 7 21 93 now abandoned Attomey Docket 13188 69 Xerox Docket D 92492Q and Eric A Bier William A S Buxton and Maureen C Stone entitled USER INTERFACE HAVING CLICK THROUGH TOOLS THAT CAN BE COMPOSED WITH OTHER TOOL
6. when the event occurs within the click through tool at a given location relative to the click through tool the result of an operation on the data depends under at least some circumstances on the location of the event relative to the displayed data positioning the click through tool so as to at least partially overlap a particular object generating a particular event within the click through tool and in response to the particular event performing the click through tool s specified operation on the particular object if but only if the particular event is at a location that specifies the particular object 31 The method of claim 30 wherein said positioning step causes the click through tool to overlap an additional object in addition to the particular object the particular event is at a location that does not specify the particular object but does specify the additional object whereupon said conditional performing step is not performed and the method further includes performing the click through tool s specified operation on the additional object 32 The method of claim 30 wherein the computer system includes a pointing device and displays a cursor at a position specified by the pointing device the pointing device having a button the user designates a desired position by manipulating the pointing device to cause the cursor to be displayed at the desired position and the user initiates an event by depress
7. Computer Science Division Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sci ence University of California Berkeley Calif 94720 Also available as Xerox PARC technical report EDL 89 2 Bier90 Eric A Bier and Aaron Goodisman Documents as user interfaces In R Furuta ed EP90 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing Document Manipulation and Typography Cambridge University Press 1990 pages 249 262 The earliest paper on EmbeddedButtons 15 20 25 30 35 45 50 55 60 65 40 Bier9la Eric A Bier EmbeddedButtons documents as user interfaces In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology South Carolina November ACM 1991 pages 45 53 Bier91b Eric A Bier and Steve Freeman MMM a user interface architecture for shared editors on a single screen In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Hilton Head S C November 11 13 ACM 1991 pages 79 86 Bier92 Eric A Bier EmbeddedButtons Supporting But tons in Documents ACM Transactions on Information Systems Vol 10 No 4 October 1992 pages 381 407 English90 Paul M English Ethan S Jacobson Robert A Morris Kimbo B Mundy Stephen D Pelletier Thomas A Polucci and H David Scarbro An extensible object oriented system for active documents In R Furuta ed EP90 Proceedings of the International Conference
8. a design like that in FIG 7 could also be used The user positions the cursor at a desired position in the drawing and moves the button having the desired color under the cursor By begin ning a stroke on a particular color button the user tells the system to create an object of that color The direction of the stroke determines the shape that will be created the length of the stroke the size Once the stroke is started the overlay disappears and a pie menu of shapes appears reminding the user which directions correspond to which shapes Once the stroke is completed a new shape is added to the scene As Kurtenbach and Buxton describe there are many ways to speed up this interaction further For example if the user makes the stroke quickly the pie menu need not appear Notice that this tool allows a user to specify the position color size and shape of a new object in a single short two handed gesture In a conventional drawing program the user would first move the cursor to the tool palette to select the rectangle tool move the cursor back to the desired starting position draw the rectangle at the desired location and size and move the cursor to a color palette or menu to select the desired color The conventional color palette might look like the array of click through buttons in FIG 7 or FIG nr 10 15 20 25 30 35 45 50 55 65 18 14 although the conventional palette would not normally be trans
9. dela Torre Re 32 632 3 1988 Atkinson nnen 340 709 Attorney Agent or Firm Townsend and Townsend and 4 555 775 11 1985 Pike u n 364 900 Crew 4 622 545 11 1986 Atkinson we 340 747 4 686 522 8 1987 Hemandez et al 345 146 X 4 748 441 5 1988 Brzezinski 97 ABSIRACI 4 788 538 11 1988 Klein et al eeeeeeeceers 340 747 A user interface technique operates in the environment of a 4 827 253 5 1989 Maltz processor controlled machine for executing a program that done ieee e annie ener operates on a set of underlying data and displays a visible 4917516 4 1990 REE my 400 489 representation thereof The system generates a visual depic 4 931 783 6 1990 Atkinson 345 146 X tion of a movable sheet having a number of delineated 4 982343 1 1991 Hourvitz et al 345 113 Tegions active areas responds to a first set of signals for 5 157 384 10 1992 Greanias et al 340 706 positioning the sheet relative to the visible representation 5 204 947 4 1993 Bernstein et al responds to a second set of signals characterized by position 5 250 929 10 1993 Hoffman et al nn 345 146 information typically cursor position relative to the sheet 5 276 797 1 1994 Bateman et al and the visible representation and generates a third set of 5 283 560 2 1994 Bartlett nennen 345 113 signals to the program The third set of signals depends on ee aad sae styattatiestndesteeeesettness Tepa the
10. visible representation in response to a first set of signals from the user input facility positioning the click through tool s tool defin ing region so as to overlap a desired location in the visible representation in response to a second set of signals from the user input facility generating a particular event within the click through tool s tool defining region the particular event being at the desired location in the visible representa tion and in response to the particular event performing the click through tool s specified operation on a portion of the data that corresponds to the desired location of the visible representation 35 The method of claim 34 wherein the visible representation includes objects the click through tool specifies the creation of a particular type of object and said step of performing the click through tool s specified operation includes creating an object of the particular type at the desired location 36 The method of claim 34 wherein the visible representation includes an object at the desired location the click through tool specifies an object property and said step of performing the click through tool s specified operation includes applying to the object the property specified by the click through tool 37 The method of claim 34 wherein the user input facility includes an indirect pointing device and further comprising the step of displaying a cursor on the display
11. 581 670 39 water pipes n an architectural model The user is able to view and edit this hidden state in a way that takes up no permanent screen space and requires no memorization of commands Additionally the see through interface provides a new paradigm to support open software architecture Because the overlay tools can be moved from one application to another rather than being tied to a single application window they provide an interface to the common functionality of several applications and may encourage more applications to pro vide common functionality Moreover because overlay sheets can contain an unlim ited number of tools they provide a valuable new substrate on which users can create their own customized tools and tool sets In effect the sheets can provide a user interface editor allowing users to move and copy existing tools compose macros by overlapping tools and snap tools together in new configurations Indeed one overlay sheet can even be used to edit another While the above is a complete description of specific embodiments of the invention various modifications alter native constructions and equivalents may be used For example while the above description of overlay tools Stresses applications in graphical editing many of the described tools can potentially be used in any screen based application including spreadsheets text editors multi me dia editors paint programs solid modelers circuit edi
12. A to be interpreted suc cessfully a particular program P must provide bindings values for all of the variables used in A The following examples illustrate the current implementation s particular use of this technique as it applies to the use of application independent tools 4 05 Actions Using a General Program For example an action A whose intent is to scale up any rectangle that is behind the mouse cursor by a factor of 2 might contain code like this pseudo code FOREACHSHAPE s in PICTURE do if ISRECTANGLE s and INCLUDES s cursorPoint then SCALE s 2 0 endloop In order to interpret this action P must provide its own definitions for each of the words shown in upper case It must provide its own procedure FOREACHSHAPE that iterates through the shapes in its picture its own value for the variable PICTURE its own routine ISRECTANGLE that tests if a shape is a rectangle its own procedure INCLUDES that checks if a shape contains a point and its own procedure SCALE that resizes shapes In addition it must make sure that the variable cursorPoint contains 10 15 20 30 35 45 50 55 65 the current cursor position as passed to it by the overlay _ routines described above 32 In order to simplify the interpretation of overlay actions the current implementation of overlays in Cedar does not support general programs like the one shown in the above example which includes iteration cond
13. Multi Editor MMM framework Bier91b in the Cedar programming language and envi ronment Swinehart86 running on the SunOS UNIX TM compatible operating system on Sun Microsystems SPARC stations and other computers The Gargoyle graphics editor Pier88 as integrated into MMM serves as a complex application for testing the interface User input devices include a standard mouse for the dominant hand and a MicroSpeed FastTRAP TM trackball for the non dominant hand The trackball includes three buttons and a thumb wheel which can be used to supply additional parameters to the interface This section describes three overlay subsystems one that handles simultaneous input from two pointing devices and updates the screen after multiple simultaneous changes one that modifies pointing events as they pass through tools and visual filters and one that modifies graphical output as it passes up through each tool or visual filter 4 01 Multi Device Input The see through interface relies on the following features of MMM MMM takes events from multiple input devices such as the mouse and trackball keeps track of which device produced which event and places all events on a single queue It dequeues each event in order and determines to which application that event should be delivered MMM applications are arranged in a hierarchy that indicates how they are nested on the screen Each event is passed to the root application which may pass the
14. a gesture interpreting tool If X means delete to this tool the object underneath the X would be deleted Such a gesture interpreter could be used in a variety of applications For instance it provides a way to layer a gesture interface on top of a mouse based word processor In a paint program mouse or pen motions could lay down paint 5 581 670 21 when the gesture interpreting tool is absent but perform editing commands when it is present Furthermore the interface provided by a gesture interpreting tool could be common among applications For instance if the overlay is provided by the window system the same gesture interpreter could be moved from a drawing program to a word proces sor allowing the user to use a given gest re in multiple contexts For instance the X of FIG 24 could be used to delete shapes in a drawing program paragraphs in a word processor or a region in a paint program 2 12 Combining Local Command Interpreters and Visual filters The idea of having a local command interpreter can be combined with visual filters For example many drawing programs display small user interface objects called handles on top of scene objects By pointing at these handles with the cursor and depressing the mouse button users can perform translation scaling and stretching opera tions on objects This idea can be combined with the overlay to provide a variety of different kinds of handles For example
15. a keyboard key could be used as a reverse clutch that allows the overlay to be easily coupled and de coupled from the motion of the mouse When this key is held down the overlay moves with the mouse cursor When it is released the overlay stays where it has been placed and the mouse cursor moves independently The use of the keyboard in connection with scrolling the overlay has the advantage of providing relatively easy use of the overlay for those users whose computers are not con figured with a trackball and a mouse 3 09 Modal Tools While two handed users can repeatedly perform an opera tion on a variety of objects by moving both the mouse cursor and the tool around on the screen this requires a lot of coordination and is likely to be inconvenient for one handed users who must sequentially reposition the overlay and then the mouse cursor It is possible to overcome this problem by allowing a smooth transition between the overlay metaphor and more traditional moded interfaces For example the tool handles described in section 3 01 could include a button for placing the cursor in a tool mode corresponding to that tool While in this mode users can repeatedly perform operations 5 581 670 27 as though they were clicking through that tool The cursor could take a shape similar to that of the tool as a reminder of the persistence of the mode This is somewhat akin to a user selecting a conventional modal tool Allowing a c
16. area and clicks or drags with the cursor to form the shape Such a combination would allow the user to select the color and shape in one step by superimposing the click through button for the desired color over the desired con ventional shape tool The user would still have to move the cursor and form the shape in the conventional way While 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 35 65 28 this doesn t provide the total economy of motions that characterize the tool shown in FIG 14 the user still benefits by being able to select color and shape with a single click The modal tool could also be used with click through buttons that specify other object properties such as line weight dash style and the like and with compositions of click through buttons for specifying more than one object property Another example of such composition is where the user first clicks on the conventional shape tool and then proceeds to draw shapes through one or more click through buttons for the desired set of properties In this way the user is able to select the properties and position of the object to be drawn in one step having pre selected the shape of the object by clicking on the conventional shape tool 4 0 Specific Implementation This section describes a current implementation of the see through interface that includes the overlay tools and visual filters The software is currently implemented in the Multi Device Multi User
17. bar above the drawing area To change tools the user moves the cursor to the palette clicks on the icon for the desired tool and moves the cursor back to the appropriate location in the drawing area To effect a desired operation on a desired object the user moves the cursor to the object clicks the object to select the object moves the cursor to the menu bar depresses the mouse button to pull down the menu drags to the desired menu item and releases the mouse button The user then moves the cursor to the drawing area to another item in the menu bar or to the tool palette This is a lot of mouse movement for even the simplest actions Tear off menus and movable tool palettes allow the user to position what amount to permanently open menus and the tool palette near the area where drawing is actively occur ring and thereby reduce the length of mouse travel Tear off menus and movable palettes have made drawing more efficient in the sense of reducing the distances the user has to move the cursor but have made it less efficient in another They tend to take up a lot of the drawing area especially near where the user is drawing This can result in the user s constantly having to interrupt the drawing tasks to move the menus and palettes out of the way This difficulty is com pounded by the fact that as programs have gotten more powerful greater functionality the menus have grown longer and take up even more area Unfortunately this
18. calls FIG 3 shows how input signals to the overlay are converted to procedure calls FIGS 4 32 are single views or sequences of views showing the operation of a number of tools including click through tools FIG 4 shows a shape creation tool FIG 5 shows a particular use of a shape creation tool FIG 6 shows a delete move and copy tool FIG 7 shows a color palette tool FIG 8 shows a type style palette tool FIG 9 shows a symmetry clipboard tool FIG 10 shows a tool for transferring object attributes FIG 11 shows a tool for transferring graphical shapes FIG 12 shows a vertex selection tool FIG 13 shows an attribute gesture tool FIG 14 shows a color and shape creation gesture tool FIG 15 shows an alignment line tool FIG 16 shows a shape placement tool that snaps to objects FIG FIG FIG FIG FIG FIG 17 shows a rotation tool 18 shows a rotation scaling and skewing tool 19 shows a tool for activating alignment objects 20 shows a grid tool 21 shows a custom grid tool 22 shows a geometric measurement tool FIG 23 shows a text format revealing tool FIG 24 shows a gesture interpreting tool FIG 25 shows a control handle tool 5 581 670 7 FIG 26 shows a debugging tool FIG 27 shows a numeric keypad tool FIG 28 shows a text creation and text rotation tool FIG 29 shows a figure labelling tool FIG 30 shows a tool for loading documents into win dows FIG 3
19. device so as to provide the user with a visual indication of positions speci fied by the pointing device 38 The method of claim 34 wherein the click through tool s tool defining region is displayed as a transparent region 39 In an interactive computing environment including a processor coupled to a display screen and to an input facility suitable for positioning an object with respect to 5 581 670 47 the display screen and further suitable for generating a signal specifying an event at a given position and user interface software that the processor executes that controls at least a portion of the display screen and that is responsive to the input device a method of operating the processor to execute the user interface software the method comprising the steps of displaying a window whose contents include a workpiece displaying a transparent object that represents a tool having an object altering property positioning the tool over the workpiece and altering the workpiece in response to a signal from the input facility specifying an event at a position that specifies the workpiece and that is within the tool the nature of the alteration being determined at least in part by the object altering property of the tool 40 A method of operating a processor based machine the machine including a user input facility including a device having a button that is subject to being clicked by the user a display device
20. display device and a storage system for storing information including instruc tions defining at least one program to be executed by the processor and a set of associated data the method comprising operating the processor based machine to perform the steps of executing the program so as to operate on the data and to display a visible representation thereof on the display device generating a visual depiction of a transparent overlay having a number of delineated operation specifying regions thereon responding to a first set of signals by positioning the overlay relative to the visible representation responding to a second set of signals characterized by position information relative to the visible representa tion and generating a third set of signals the third set of signals depending on the relative position of the overlay and the visible representation and on the position informa tion that characterizes the second set of signals the third set of signals specifying a particular operation when the position information that characterizes the second set of signals is in a predetermined relationship with the delineated region of the overlay that specifies that particular operation the third set of signals further specifying that for at least one type of particular operation the particular opera tion be carried out in a manner that depends on the position information that characterizes the second set of signals 3 The
21. event on to one of its child applications which may in turn pass the event on down the tree Mouse events are generally delivered to the most deeply nested application whose screen region contains the mouse coordinates However when the user is dragging or resizing an object in a particular application all mouse coordinates go to that application until the dragging or resizing is completed Keyboard events go to the currently selected application To support the overlay MMM s rules for handling trackball input were modified When the over lay is movable trackball and thumbwheel events go to the top level application which interprets them as commands to move or resize the sheet respectively When the sheet is not movable the trackball and thumbwheel events are delivered to the selected application which interprets them as com mands to scroll or zoom that application 5 581 670 29 FIG 33 is a flowchart of the User Input Routine which determines the appropriate action to take in response to an input event When a system that contains an overlay receives input it must determine whether the event is intended to move the overlay move the cursor trigger the overlay or to be delivered to a traditional application in the usual way and then it must act on this determination The routine first tests whether the input is from an overlay moving device and if it is moves the overlay as a function of the device move ment If not it t
22. example of the trade offs encountered in trying to meet the above goals is far from rare SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention provides a user interface technique that allows a user to perform many common tasks with fewer actions thereby significantly enhancing productivity The technique makes use of actions with which the user tends to be familiar and therefore may be learned rather quickly The invention may be implemented in the context of a single program or may be incorporated into the operating system so as to be available across different programs including the operating system The invention operates in the environment of a processor controlled machine for executing a program that operates on a set of underlying data and displays a visible representation thereof The invention is characterized by generating a visual depiction of a movable sheet having a number of delineated regions active areas responding to a first set of signals for positioning the sheet relative to the visible representation responding to a second set of signals char acterized by position information typically cursor position relative to the sheet and the visible representation and generating a third set of signals to the program where the third set of signals depends on the relative position of the sheet and the visible representation and on the position information that characterizes the second set of input sig nals As used herein the te
23. frontmost child C of A that is behind belowChild A and contains coordinates lt x y gt if any such C exists IsC an overlay Perform the Event to Overlay Routine Does such a child C exist belowChild A lt C FIG 35 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 14 of 16 5 581 670 Event to Overlay Routine Overlay O receives point ing event E at lt x y gt Is O in gesture mode Determine the frontmost tool T of O that is behind belowTool O and contains coordinates lt x y gt if any such T exists Pass event to the tool T that is the current gesture handling tool T looks up E in its event table to determine the action A to perform Let P be the parent program of O Translate lt x y gt of E and any coordinates lt x y gt in E s command list L that are marked for translation into the coordinate system of P Pass event E to P Perform the Event to Application Routine Does such tool T exist Is A the end of a gesture Pass E to T for processing T looks up E in its event table to determine the action A to perform Tum off gesture mode for O Tum on gesture mode for O making T be the current gesture handling tool Let the list of gesture data points be empty Is A the beginning of a gesture Process the event by performng the Ev
24. in FIG 25 the user has selected two objects of three in a picture the selected objects are highlighted with small black squares By positioning a transformation handles tool the user can see and point at any of a set of control handles small white squares Clicking and drag ging on the central handle will translate the selected objects Clicking and dragging any of the other handles will stretch the selected objects The utility of visual filters that add temporary tools positioned relative to application objects is particularly apparent when several such filters are available on a single overlay sheet In this case the user can alternately make use of one set of temporary tools and then another For example one set of tools might provide editing handles that allow translation and stretching as described above Another set might provide rotation about the center of a shape or any of its corners If all of these tools were provided at once the temporary tools would result in unacceptable clutter Pre sented alternately however they make it possible for the user to take advantage of a large variety of tools whose attributes including position type and number depend on the attributes including position type and number of application objects and hence are particularly tuned to effectively operate on them 2 13 Logging and Debugging Tools Tools can be used not only for the normal operation of an application but also to allow a
25. input facility a display device a processor coupled to the user input facility and the display device and a storage system for storing information including instruc tions defining at least one application program to be executed by the processor and at least one application data structure including a number of application data items the method comprising operating the processor based machine to perform the steps of executing the application program so as to manipulate the application data structure and display a representation thereof referred to as the visible representation on the display device generating a visual depiction of a transparent overlay having a number of delineated operation specifying regions thereon responding to a first set of signals for positioning the overlay relative to the visible representation responding to a second set of signals characterized by position information relative to the visible representa tion and generating a third set of signals and communicating the third set of signal to the application program the third set of signals depending on the relative position of the overlay and the visible representation and on the posi tion information that characterizes the second set of signals the third set of signals specifying a particular operation when the position information is in a predetermined relationship with the delineated region of the overlay that specifies that particular opera
26. make extremely effective use of the non dominant hand e g a right handed user s left hand Except during typing user interfaces based on mouse and keyboard make poor use of a user s non dominant hand The dominant hand participates actively in tasks while the non dominant hand is relegated to occasion ally holding down modifier keys The present invention allows the non dominant hand to participate more equally in the interaction by providing a positioning device such as a trackball to position the overlay and having the user operate the positioning device with the non dominant hand As mentioned above the overlay does not have to be positioned precisely By superimposing tools over displayed objects the non dominant hand can simultaneously select both a command and potential operands The dominant hand applies the command by making a detailed operand selec tion e g by clicking or dragging on an object through the tool The resulting two handed interactions typically reduce the steps needed to perform editing tasks A further understanding of the nature and advantages of the present invention may be realized by reference to the remaining portions of the specification and the drawings BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS FIG 1 is a block diagram of a computer system embody ing the present invention FIG 2 shows how the underlying data for the program and for the overlay are converted to a visible representation procedure
27. method comprising operating the processor to perform the steps of 5 581 670 45 executing an application program so as to manipulate an associated application data structure and display a representation thereof referred to as the visible repre sentation on the display device generating a visual depiction of a transparent overlay having a number of delineated operation specifying regions thereon positioning the overlay relative to the visible representa tion positioning the cursor within a particular delineated region and at a position that is in a predetermined relationship to a particular object in the visible repre sentation the predetermined relationship with the par ticular object being a relationship that selects the par ticular object generating a cursor event with the cursor so positioned and performing the operation specified by the particular delin eated region on the particular object in response to the cursor event 30 A method of operating a computer system where a program displays objects and a user interacts with the objects through the use of displayed tools each tool having an associated tool defining region and a specified operation the user activating a particular tool by designating a position within the particular tool s tool defining region and initiat ing an event at the designated position the method com prising the steps of displaying a click through tool having the property that
28. method of claim 2 wherein the program is a window system that manages a plurality of applications such that the visual representation represents a partitioning of the screen into regions representing each application determined by relative position of the second set of signals to the application screen regions 4 The method of claim 2 wherein the delineated regions specify different particular opera tions to be performed on the data and at least one particular operation augments the data 5 The method of claim 2 wherein the delineated regions specify different particular opera tions to be performed on the data and at least one particular operation removes a portion of the data 6 The method of claim 2 wherein the delineated regions specify different particular opera tions to be performed on the data and at least one particular operation extracts a portion of the data 7 The method of claim 2 wherein the delineated regions specify different particular opera tions to be performed on the data and 15 20 25 30 35 45 50 55 42 at least one particular operation modifies a portion of the data 8 The method of claim 2 wherein the user input facility includes a user actuated device and at least one of the first set of signals results from a user s actions with the user actuated device 9 The method of claim 2 wherein the user facility includes a user actuated device and at least
29. of microprocessors while OS 2 and Windows have only been available on so called IBM compatible PCs based on the Intel 80x86 family of microprocessors This trend is in the process of changing with Microsoft s Windows NT having versions capable of running on more than one type of microprocessor One relevant aspect of a GUI is that an open file for a given application is typically given a window which is a movable and resizable region on the screen The OS can have its own windows showing directory structures with files and applications possibly being represented by icons small graphical objects representing actions or items There may be other windows that do not correspond to open files An advantage of a GUI is that it provides a rather consistent user environment across applications Some GUIs allow multiple applications to be open at the same time Regardless of the type of OS the application program with varying amounts of help from the OS typically pro vides the user with a visible representation sometimes referred to as the screen image or the display image of the underlying data The user acts on the visible represen tation and the program translates these actions to operations on the underlying data As used herein the term visible representation will refer to the visual representation of the underlying data not only for application programs but for all kinds of programs including the OS and various typ
30. overlay sheet so that they move together as a unit This is convenient when the combination is likely to be used frequently It is also possible to compose tools that are on separate overlay sheets so that they can be moved indepen dently and brought together on the few occasions where the particular combination is needed When a stack of overlapped tools or filters receives input e g a mouse click the input event is passed top to bottom through the tools Each tool in turn modifies the command string that has been assembled so far For example a tool might concatenate an additional command onto the current command string Consider the example discussed above from the user s point of view of the tool that changes fill colors to red being composed with the tool that changes line colors to blue to form a tool that changes both fill and line colors If the line color tool is on top then the command string would be SetLineColor blue after passing through this tool and SetLineColor blue SetFill Color red after both tools 3 04 More Complicated Macros The composition of tools described above is a powerful technique for implementing macros However if the user wishes to compose more than a few tools there is a risk that the intuitive visual advantage will be lost in a clutter of tools In view of this possibility the overlay provides an alterna tive technique for creating composite tools The technique is similar to
31. reaction to event E would be to generate the action SelectShape lt x y gt SetLineColor blue Say however that E has already passed through a tool that has specified an action to set a fill color to red SelectShape lt x y gt SetFillColor red If T is an appending tool it will append its command list to the existing command list to form the longer action SelectShape lt x y gt SetFillColor red SelectShape lt x y gt SetLineColor blue 4 09 02 Prepending Prepending is like appending except that the new com mand list is added to the beginning of the existing list If ordering of commands matters prepending may produce a different result than appending For example if event E arrives with an existing command RotateShape 45 that rotates a shape by 45 degrees and if tool T would ordinarily generate the command ScaleShape 2 1 which scales a shape by 2 in the x direction and 1 in the y direction then the final command would be ScaleShape 2 1 RotateShape 45 which has a different effect than RotateShape 45 Scale Shape 2 1 4 09 03 Deletion The tool T could remove one or more commands from the event For example T could protect the picture underneath it from being edited by deleting any commands that could edit that scene If T received the event SelectShape lt x y gt SetLineColor blue it might remove the SetLineColor blue command which would have modified the unde
32. scene application Clicking the right button causes the trackball and thumbwheel to scroll and zoom respectively the over lay Clicking the middie button allows the scene and the overlay to be scrolled and zoomed as a unit The user could be given the opportunity to customize this mapping For example a user who wishes to be able to easily make the overlay disappear when it is not needed and reappear when it is may prefer to have one of the trackball buttons toggle overlay visibility on and off Furthermore for embodiments 15 20 30 35 45 50 55 65 26 where there are multiple overlay sheets it may be desirable to provide additional mappings to allow the sheets to be scrolled and zoomed independently This could be done by having the user click different combinations of trackball buttons for the different sheets With these moving and sizing controls the user can center a tool on any application object and size the tool to cover any screen region Large tools can be used to minimize sheet motion when applying a tool to several objects A tool that has been stretched to cover the entire work area effectively creates a command mode over the entire application For several of the tools above it is necessary to be able to freeze the overlay in some sense For instance the snap ping tools of section 2 06 require that alignment lines stay frozen once placed so that scene objects can subsequently be snapped
33. snapping technique can be used for other alignment objects beside lines FIG 16 shows a palette of alignment circles positioned over an illustration in which the caret has been placed at the lower left comer of a rectangle When the center of one of these circles e g the small circle within the large circle on the right passes near the caret the circle highlights by changing to a different color and the center of the circle snaps precisely to the tip of the caret In this example the entire palette snaps but it is also possible to have only the single circle move temporarily away from the other circles in the palette The user might also snap a tool to an arbitrary scene point rather than to a special point such as the caret tip For example the tool in FIG 17 is an anchor object used in snap dragging as a center of scaling or a center of rotation Here the user moves the overlay until the anchor is near a rectangle corner Without moving the rest of the overlay the anchor moves to snap to the rectangle corner The user freezes the overlay and with the dominant hand rotates the rectangle around the anchor FIG 18 shows a tool that generalizes the rotation tool of FIG 17 to perform any of rotation scaling and skewing This tool allows the placement of an anchor position the selection of an interactive operation and the performance of that operation in a single two handed gesture Specifically a pie menu of operations is locate
34. steps of operating on the data and displaying a visible represen tation thereof on the display device the visible repre sentation including an object displaying on the display device a visual depiction of a tool defining region the tool defining region specify ing at least in part an operation that is performed in response to an event within the tool defining region the tool defining region and its specified operation being referred to as the tool in response to a first set of signals from the user input facility positioning the tool defining region so as to at least partially overlap the object in response to a second set of signals from the user input facility generating a particular event that is within the tool defining region and is at a position relative to the visible representation that specifies the object and in response to the particular event performing the speci fied operation on the object 45 The method of claim 44 wherein the tool specifies an object property and said step of performing the tool s specified operation includes applying to the object the property specified by the tool 46 The method of claim 44 wherein the user input facility includes an indirect pointing device and further comprising the step of displaying a cursor on the display device so as to provide the user with a visual indication of positions speci fied by the pointing device 47 The method of claim 44 wherein the to
35. the User Input Routine the Event to Application Routine the Event to Overlay Routine the Event to Tool Routine the Translate and Execute Routine and the Com position Routine The delivery of events through overlays to applications as described above and shown in FIGS 34A 34C uses three routines the Event to Application Routine which is per formed when an event is delivered to a regular application the Event to Overlay Routine which is used when the event is delivered to an overlay and the Event To Tool Routine which is used when an event is delivered to a particular tool on an overlay Each of the these routines may call one or more of the other ones e g when an event is passed from a regular application to an overlay or from an overlay to a regular application as occurs several times in the example described above A given event E has a field belowChild that contains an array or other multi valued data structure with one entry for each application and sheet in the tree The value of each entry belowChild A is a pointer to the application or sheet that is a child of A and is the last child of A that the event has visited A similar field belowTool has for each entry belowTool O a pointer to a tool of 0 that is last tool that the event visited FIG 35 is a flowchart of the Event to Application Routine This routine assumes that some variables are initialized each time a new event is generated For exampl
36. the application s input language are directed to a parser 95 which converts them into procedure calls The drawing also shows the case where the input signal pertains to application 2 in which case the universal language commands are directed to a translator 97 and possibly then to a parser 98 to generate calls to the proce dures of application 2 The following is an example of the conversion of a command in a universal language to commands in either of two application languages Consider the example of a paint program that operates on bitmaps and a draw program that operates on vector objects Further consider the case where the overlay tool that is under the cursor specifies changing an entity s color to red Typically a command will include an operator a set of position information and possibly one or more parameters Examples of commands in the universal language could include the following SetColor lt x y gt red SelectCorner lt x y gt and Scale lt x y gt lt x y gt 2 0 Consider the SetColor command For the paint program which operates on pixels the cursor position provides all the position information necessary to determine the required action and a single command is all that is needed The relevant single command in the paint program s language might be the following SetColorPixel lt x y gt red For the draw program it would first be necessary to deter mine on the basis of the cursor pos
37. the prototype object to scene objects For example when the user strokes from the Dashes menu region to the triangle the dash pattern of the prototype object is applied to the triangle Different pie menus could be constructed that allow not only individual properties but arbitrary groups of properties or even entire shapes to be applied to the scene For example stroking from the prototype object region to the scene region might either apply all of the properties of the prototype object to the indicated object or might copy the prototype object itself into the scene A pie menu that can be used from the center out or from the outside in appears to be a novel invention in its own right However it would not make much sense out of the overlay context Single handed pie menus pop up centered on the beginning of a stroke once that stroke has begun Hopkins91 Thus there is no easy way to stroke from the outside in However because the pie menu is on the overlay the menu appears before the stroke begins and stroking inwardly is possible The idea of stroking into a button and out of a button is not limited to circular arrangements such as pie menus Any style of button could potentially allow this capability FIG 14 shows a way that the overlay can be combined with the single stroke gestures of Kurtenbach and Buxton Kurtenbach91 to form a shape creation tool While this figure shows a tool consisting of a palette of colors
38. the sections below describe how the overlay mechanism controls the activation of the visual filters 10 15 20 30 35 40 45 50 55 65 36 Ordinarily MMM output is composed from the leaf applications up To support visual filters the normal screen refresh composition has been extended to allow information to flow down and across the tree as well as up For example if the tools in FIG 34B contain one or more visual filters and if any of those visual filters is situated over the graphical editor each visual filter must examine the contents of the graphical editor which is the visual filter s sibling in the hierarchy in order to draw itself 4 10 01 Computing the Reqion of Change Some parts of the screen refresh routine provided by overlays are similar to the routine for handling input but with data passed in the reverse direction As was shown in FIG 34C the overlay routines ensure that input events pass through overlays in front to back order before being deliv ered to the destination application To compute what part of the screen must be redrawn when the contents application 3B are modified the information about the modified part of application 3B is passed along the path shown in FIG 39 which is the reverse of the path of FIG 34C As the region of change information is passed from node to node in this tree the region of change is translated into the coordinate system of each receiving node so
39. to select an operation and an operand in a single two handed gesture If the user had wished to perform a different operation a different click through button could have been used FIG 7 shows an array of click through buttons used as a color palette and the sequence of operations for changing the color of an object in the scene the pentagon In this case each button is a rectangle with a triangular region in the upper right corner designating the color different colors are denoted by different hatch patterns The user positions the part of the color palette having the desired color over the pentagon and clicks on it with a mouse Although the ellipse 5 581 670 15 is also under the relevant button only the pentagon which the user indicates with the mouse cursor has its color changed If the user clicks through the button on a region devoid of objects the program could ignore the action or could interpret the action as setting a default value In a conventional drawing program the user would move the cursor to the object whose color is to be changed possibly after first performing an action such as moving the cursor to the tool palette to obtain the selection tool click on the object to select it and move the cursor to a color palette or menu to select the desired color The color palette buttons are shown as abutting each other but they could be separated from each other as in the case of the Delete Move and Copy but
40. to them One convention for using the overlay would fix the position of these tools relative to the overlay sheet when the overlay sheet is fixed to the scene e g when the middle trackball button has been clicked Another possibility that addresses the same issues as zooming and scrolling the overlay is a tool layout where a set of tools is drawn larger and others smaller with the set that is drawn larger being under the user s control This is somewhat akin to a fisheye view of the tools allowing the user to see many tools and use a few tools without taking up much screen space 3 08 Keyboard for Moving Overlay While the embodiments described above make use of an input device such as a trackball that can easily trigger both large and small motions in the overlay as the set of posi tioning signals it is also feasible to provide the set of positioning signals from an input device that only reports on off transitions such as a keyboard For example a set of keys on a computer keyboard could be designated to move the overlay by some amount in some direction By striking these keys one or more times the user can position different delineated regions over a given workpiece The layout of tools on an overlay could be tuned to work well with this approach For example the tools could be laid out in a regular array whole spacing is a multiple of the distance the overlay moves after each click of the overlay moving keys Alternatively
41. user to get help about that application or to allow a programmer to debug the applica tion An example is a tool such that stylus gestures or mouse actions performed within the bounds of that tool cause the tool to display information about the command that the user is trying to perform For example FIG 26 shows a tool that displays a picture of the mouse When the user presses down a mouse button while the cursor is in this tool the mouse icon displayed on the tool shows which mouse button is being depressed Such a tool would be useful for instance when making videotapes of an interactive tool A more sophisticated version of this tool would also display the name of the command being performed and offer to open the source code that implements that command 2 14 Operations That Use An Insertion Point While click through buttons are a particularly interesting kind of button made possible by the overlay even regular 20 30 35 45 50 55 65 22 buttons are useful For example FIG 27 shows an array of buttons that act as a numeric keypad This keypad can be positioned near the area where a user is working and activated with a pen or cursor making a keyboard unnec essary for some operations Each time the mouse clicks on a digit the overlay moves one character s width to the right This keypad could also be used as a calculator allowing the user to insert computed numbers into a document easily 2 15 Rotatable To
42. 0 55 60 65 44 25 The method of claim 20 wherein at least one delineated region on the overlay specifies an operation that modifies an application data item in the application data structure and a selected event from the user input facility causes an application data item to be modified as specified by the particular delineated region 26 The method of claim 20 wherein the visible representation includes graphical objects at least one of which corresponds to an application data item in the application data structure a particular delineated region on the overlay specifies the creation of a graphical object and the particular operation creates an application data item that results in the display of a graphical object as specified by the particular delineated region 27 The method of claim 20 wherein the visible representation includes graphical objects at least one of which corresponds to an application data item in the application data structure a particular delineated region on the overlay specifies an attribute to be applied to application data items a specified graphical object has at least a portion over lapped by the particular delineated region and the particular operation sets the attribute for the applica tion data item to which the specified graphical object corresponds 28 In an interactive computing environment including a processor coupled to a display screen and to at least one input dev
43. 1 shows a tool with handles for moving copying and deleting the tool FIG 32 shows how tools may be composed to create new tools FIG 33 is a flowchart of the user input routine for a particular implementation FIGS 34A 34C show a hierarchy of applications a screen representation thereof and the event delivery order therefor FIG 35 is a flowchart of the Event to Application routine for the particular implementation FIG 36 is a flowchart of the Event to Overlay routine for the particular implementation FIG 37 is a flowchart of the Event to Tool routine for the particular implementation FIGS 38A and 38B show a command that includes a request for data FIG 39 shows the event delivery order for a screen redraw and FIG 40 shows the portion of the hierarchy for the redraw DESCRIPTION OF SPECIFIC EMBODIMENTS The detailed description given below is organized as follows Section 1 provides a system overview and provides a high level structural and procedural description of the overlay of the present invention including click through tools and two handed operation Section 2 describes a num ber of examples of the types of tools that are possible with an emphasis on click through tools Section 3 describes some strategies for organizing modifying and creating tools on a sheet or sheets of the overlay and some general techniques for using the overlay that work across a range of different types of tools Section 4 describe
44. 20 35 40 50 55 65 16 cent of the paper sheets and charcoal used to rub off words and text from monuments The user clicks on the ellipse through a rubbing sheet that is sensitive to the area color of objects That area color is lifted up from the picture or really copied as the color of the circle is unchanged to become part of the rubbing sheet Even part of the shape of the circle is retained as a remainder of where this color came from The user then takes the rubbing and positions its circular tab which acts as a property applicator over a rectangle When the user clicks the mouse the rectangle takes on the color from the rubbing sheet The second rubbing sheet could be used to lift a second fill color from a different object making it possible to store several colors for later application FIG 11 shows the operation of a tool that allows the user to copy a shape of an underlying object and then transfer selected portions of that shape back to the application The user Clicks the object in this case a curve through the tool at which point the curve or a copy of the curve becomes part of the tool Later when the user is drawing a new shape the tool can be used in the manner of a French curve Specifi cally the user positions the tool near a portion of the new shape clicks two points on the curve to specify which portion of the curve is to be added to the new shape the specified portion may become highl
45. EED DN ANN US005581670A United States Patent u ui Patent Number 5 581 670 Bier et al 45 Date of Patent Dec 3 1996 54 USER INTERFACE HAVING MOVABLE 3219324 9 1991 Japan SHEET WITH CLICK THROUGH TOOLS OTHER PUBLICATIONS 75 Inventors Eric A Bier Mountain View Calif Brown et al Windows on tablets as a means of acheiving William A S Buxton Toronto Canada virtual input devices In D Diaper et al Eds Human 3 Computer Interaction Interact 90 Amsterdam Elsevier 73 Assignee Xerox Corporation Stamford Conn Science Publishers B V North Holland 675 681 1990 Reprint of article pp 1 12 submitted 21 Appl No 95 598 Hardock Gary Design issues for line driven text editing 22 Filed Jul 21 1993 Annotation Systems 11715 Graphics Interface 1991 3 7 Jun 1991 Calgary 1991 Toronto ON CA pp 77 84 51 GO6F 3 14 Canvas 3 0 User Guide Chapter 1 The Fundamentals p 52 VIS CH rss 395 326 345 113 345 146 2 and Section 19 Reference pp 14 18 59 60 69 70 395 135 90 91 97 98 100 102 130 150 151 171 172 173 174 58 Field of Search 395 155 161 181 182 189 197 300 Jun 15 1991 Deneba Software 395 156 157 159 133 135 345 113 Miami FL 114 145 146 Macintosh Macpaint 1983 56 References Cited List continued on next page U S PATENT DOCUMENTS Primary Examiner Raymond J Bayerl Assistant Examiner Crescelle N
46. S Ser No 08 449 584 filed 5 24 95 which is an FWC of Ser No 08 95 445 filed 7 21 93 now abandoned Attorney Docket 13188 70 Xerox Docket D 92492Q1 BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates generally to processor controlled machines such as computers and more specifi cally to user interfaces for allowing a user to interact with the machine i A frequent use of a processor controlled machine such as a computer is to communicate information to a user of the machine and accept information from the user thereby allowing the user to perform a specified task Depending on the task at hand the user will often make use of a task specific application program such as a word processor sometimes referred to as a text editor a spreadsheet a database or a drawing program sometimes referred to as a graphics editor A reference to a specific type of program or editor is not intended to imply a stand alone application program having only the particular functionality since many programs have more than one type of functionality A typical application program consists of a set of instruc tions the application that are executed in response to input signals to create and modify associated data some times referred to as the underlying data In many instances this associated data is stored on a disk as a data file sometimes referred to as the file and portions are read into memory during program execut
47. a processor coupled to the user input facility and the display device a storage system for storing information including instruc tions defining at least one program to be executed by the processor and a set of associated data the method comprising operating the processor based machine to perform the steps of operating on the data according to the program and displaying a visible representation of the data on the display device displaying a cursor on the display device displaying on the display device a visual depiction of a tool defining region the tool defining region specify ing at least in part an operation that is performed in response to the button being clicked while the cursor is positioned within the tool defining region the tool defining region and its respective specified operation being referred to as the tool the tool having the further property that when the cursor is within the tool defining region at a given location relative to the tool defining region the result of the tool s specified operation in response to the button being clicked depends under at least some circum stances on the location of the cursor relative to the visible representation when the button is clicked in response to signals from the user input facility posi tioning the tool defining region so as to overlap a desired location in the visible representation in response to signals from the user input facility posi tioning the cursor
48. als is determined by the sequence of positions and by the one or more operations specified by the plurality of delineated regions 16 The method of claim 9 wherein the delineated regions specify different particular opera tions to be performed on the data and said step of generating a third set of signals includes modifying signals resulting from the user s actions with the user actuated device to specify the particular opera tion 17 The method of claim 2 wherein the visual depiction of the transparent overlay depends on the history of first and second signals to which the overlay has responded and on the history of third signals that the overlay has generated 18 The method of claim 2 wherein the visual depiction of the transparent overlay includes an image feature generated from an application data item copied or extracted during the history of first and second signals or the history of third signals 19 The method of claim 2 wherein said steps of responding to a first set of signals respond ing to a second set of signals and generating a third set of signals are performed by executing an overlay program and the third set of signals is delivered to the overlay program in order to modify augment delete reposition resize 5 581 670 43 or otherwise edit the appearance underlying data or behavior of the delineated regions 20 A method of operating a processor based machine the machine including a user
49. and the applications may overlap as in an overlapping window system FIG 3 is a flow diagram showing the relation among these three layers and the communication between the overlay designated 85 and application programs 87 and 88 also referred to as applications 1 and 2 The communication between the overlay and the applications is the same regardless of whether the overlay tools appear above the visible representation or below it When triggered the overlay tools deliver commands which may include arbitrary data structures to the applica tions An application may respond to the command by changing its own data structures and may also respond by returning data to the overlay In addition whenever requested to paint itself the application responds to the overlay by providing information about its visual represen tation current appearance on the screen The overlay may modify this visual representation e g using visual filters before presenting it to the user The figure also shows a reverse path from the applications to the overlay since the applications return data to the overlay in response to certain commands Although the specific example discussed below deals with the operation of a click through tool the basic description applies to con ventional tools on the overlay The overlay software operates in conjunction with a window manager 92 The window manager which may be part of the operating system draws window fra
50. arge number of tools in its interface To avoid clutter it is necessary to organize these tools and sheets so that the user can quickly find any desired tool One approach is to put all of the tools on a single sheet that can be navigated by scrolling and zooming The tools could be organized onto tiles and the resulting tiles abutted to form the single large sheet To find any tool then the user would scroll the desired tile onto the screen and scroll the desired tool into place Using scrolling and zooming functions together the user would be able to navigate in a rather large space of tiles In addition the mapping between trackball motions and the overlay motions could allow for larger motions when the trackball is moved quickly so that little trackball motion is needed For very large numbers of tiles a hierarchical organiza tion could be used in addition to this tiling organization For example the user might create a virtual box containing a number of sheets of the overlay each adapted to a particular task Alternatively each tile in an array might in fact be a stack of tiles The user could select which tile is currently visible by repeatedly clicking on a button or using pop up menus The user could also use a single tile rather than an array that cycles through a set of tile types The technique used in a current prototype allows a single sheet to show different sets of tools at different times The set to display can b
51. aron Goodisman Stylus User Inter faces for Manipulating Text In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology UIST 91 Hilton Head South Carolina Nov ACM 1991 pp 127 135 Don Hopkins The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus Dr Dobb s Journal vol 16 No 12 Dec 1991 pp 16 26 David Kurlander and Steven Feiner Interactive Constraint based Search and Replace In Proceedings of CHI 92 Monterey California May 3 7 1992 Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM New York 1992 pp 609 618 Gordon Kurtenbach and William Buxton Issues in Com bining Marking and Direct Manipulation Techniques In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Inteface Software and Technology UIST 791 Hilton Head South Carolina Nov 11 13 ACM 1991 pp 137 144 J K Ousterhout Tcl An Embeddable Command Language In winter USENIX Conference Proceedings 1990 pp 133 146 Ken Pier Eric A Bier and Maureen C Stone An Intro duction to Gargoyle An Interactive Illustration Tool Xerox PARC Technical Report EDL 89 2 Jan 1989 Also avail able in Proceedings of the Intl Conf on Electronic Publish ing Document Manipulation and Typography Nice France Apr 1988 Cambridge Univ Press 1988 pp 223 238 Dean Rubine Specifying Gestures by Example In Proceed ings of ACM SIGGRAPH 91 Computer Graphics vol 25 No 4 Jul 1991 pp 329 337 Daniel C Swinehart Polle T Zellw
52. as to be easily understood by that node In addition each overlay node may potentially modify the region of change based on current viewing filters that are visible on that overlay For example if a given overlay O includes a tool T that contains a magnifying filter O may increase the size of the screen region that will be affected by the original change to application 3B O increases the size of the region of change data structure appropriately and passes the modified data structure to the next node in the chain 4 10 02 Screen Update In the absence of visual filters producing a new screen image representing both application and overlays is accom plished by producing a drawing of each node in the hierar chy in depth first back to front pre order and post order traversal i e each application is drawn both before and after its children are drawn For the example of FIG 39 the nodes would be drawn in the order Start application 1 StartAndFinish application 2 Start application 3 StartAndFinish application 3A StartAndFinish applica tion 3B Finish application 3 StartAndFinish overlay 1 StartAndFinish application 4 StartAndFinish overlay 2 Finish application 1 However if an overlay contains one or more visual filters each such visual filter may require that part of the hierarchy be redrawn using the transformation that characterizes that visual filter The part of the hierarchy that is redrawn includes the parent
53. changes the border colors of objects might show only shape borders Such feedback would make it hard for the user to mistakenly try to use such a tool for a different purpose such as changing fill colors 5 04 Easy Customization In an application whose tools have exclusive use of a region of screen space the potential for user customization is limited Even if the user can create new buttons sliders and other interactors there is little space in which to put them However the overlay provides an essentially unlim ited space not only can tools take up the entire work area but they can be placed off screen to be scrolled on screen when needed In addition because overlay tools and visual filters can be composed by overlapping they provide an easy way for users to construct personalized macros 5 05 Reduced Learning Time Because overlay tools can combine several task steps into one users need no longer learn these steps individually For instance instead of learning to select an object and apply a 20 25 30 35 45 50 65 38 color to it the user learns to use a color click through button Likewise novices become experts in a natural way An expert user knows where various tools are located knows how to compose tools effectively and has learned to move the tools into place quickly A novice becomes an expert by learning the spatial layout of tools learning to compose tools and repeating commonly used motion
54. d around the anchor itself Again assume that the user has caused the anchor to snap to the rectangle corner The user begins an operation by click ing the mouse button with the cursor over the name of an operation say the rotate operation Once the mouse button is depressed the system rotates the object as described in the Bier and Stone paper on snap dragging Bier86 In par ticular the angle by which the object is rotated from its original position is kept equal to the angle through which the caret has been moved using the anchor as a center of rotation During the interactive operation rotation in this case the overlay preferably disappears 5 581 670 19 The above tools that snap to scene objects are also examples of using the overlay to provide the user with virtual drafting tools such as a virtual tuler compass or protractor As with the corresponding physical tools the non dominant hand can control the position and orientation of the tool while the dominant hand is used to create objects or lines As with the physical tools objects or edges that are created in proximity of the tool are affected by its con straints One benefit of using the overlay for this application is that constraints can be brought in and out of effect quickly and easily much as in the case of the palette menus 2 07 Combining On Off Buttons with Palette Menus Many systems have modes that can be turned on and off by pressing a button whose s
55. e are however certain tasks that require the use of both hands Many of the tools described below are click through tools As alluded to above the term refers to the fact that the tool is applied by clicking through the tool on a visible portion of the visible representation These tools have a number of interesting properties including the following They often allow several interaction steps to be collapsed into one The user s eyes need never leave the work area The interface is direct visual and with carefully chosen tools easy to learn The user s non domi nant hand is responsible only for coarse positioning fine positioning is done with the hand that holds the mouse The examples are primarily directed to a drawing program graphical editor environment with tools for creating modi fying and deleting graphical objects in a scene The operation of most of the tools will be described in connection with a figure that includes a series of views indicating the appearance of the drawing scene and in some cases that of the tool at the different stages of the operation For some of the examples a given operation using a tool of the present invention will be contrasted to the same opera tion using conventional drawing program tools and tech niques With the exception of FIGS 8 13 and 23 objects in the scene are drawn in dashed lines and overlay tools are drawn in solid lines consistent with the convention adopted in FIG 1
56. e belowChild O is initialized to an imaginary application program that is defined to be both a child of application A and in front of all other children of A FIG 36 is a flowchart of the Event To Overlay Routine When an input event is received by the overlay the overlay determines which of its delineated regions called tools should process the event In some cases several tools will process the event in turn If a tool is a click through tool it computes a data structure called a command list which is passed down to the tools behind it if any or to the applications that are behind the entire overlay via the overlay s parent program This routine assumes that some variables are initialized each time a new event is generated For example belowTool O is initialized to an imaginary tool that is defined to be in front of all other tools When an 5 581 670 31 overlay is first created it is not in gesture mode and none of its tools is designated as the gesture handling tool FIG 37 is a flowchart of the Event To Tool Routine When an event E is received by a particular overlay tool T T determines from the type of E what action A is to be performed If T is a conventional non click through tool it performs the action immediately Otherwise it delivers the event to an application behind its overlay either directly or via other tools on this or another overlay If E has already been processed by anothe
57. e red SetLineColor shape blue 4 08 Reverse Data Flow The actions described so far communicate commands and data from the tool to an application program It is also possible for a command to return data from the application program to the tool This is accomplished by including some empty storage in the command list For example a copy and paste tool might issue the action Select lt 23 37 gt 18 GetSelected fillIn Value Here fillInValue is a pointer to a record labelled fv for future value FIGS 38A and 38B show this record before and after the application has returned the data requested by the command This record includes a field value in which a pointer to the data returned by the application will be placed A second field ready has the value false until the field value has been filled The last field condVar contains a synchroni zation object provided by the Cedar programming language called a condition variable A condition variable includes a list of those programs that are waiting for this value When the value becomes available the application that provides the value notifies each of the programs that are waiting In this example application P will select the shape at coordinates lt 23 37 gt and then stores a pointer to it in the field value If P is running in a different process than T T must wait block until P has stored the pointer Because T maintains its poin
58. e overlay is referred to as being transparent it should be recognized that the need to delin eate regions on the overlay means that the overlay may have some opaque or semi transparent portions Ifa given delineated region is positioned over a portion of the display and an action taken in that region the action takes on an attribute of the particular delineated region Thus each delineated region may be thought of as the active region or active area of a tool that can be brought to a relevant portion of the display area and applied to that portion Given the nature of the way such tools are applied the tools are sometimes referred to as click through tools While much of the description that follows treats the overlay as a single transparent sheet the overlay may comprise what 5 581 670 9 appear as a plurality of relatively movable transparent sheets each having a number of semi transparent tools on it Having the tools appear on top of the objects to which they are to be applied seems the most intuitive approach and that approach is what will generally be assumed However there may be certain special circumstances that warrant the opposite stacking order For example there may be certain applications where it is critical that none of the application objects be obscured even by the markings on the overlay This can be accommodated by having the application appear as transparent and having the overlay appear behind the applicatio
59. e selected in several ways The user can click a special tool in the set which causes a jump to another set somewhat in the manner of the arrows in Apple Computers HyperCard TM In addition a master view provides a table of contents of the available sets thereby allowing the user to jump to any one To use different sets simultaneously the user creates additional sheets 3 03 Composing Tools Visual Macros Click through tools and visual filters can be composed by overlapping them thereby providing the user with the ability to interactively create new operations by combining old ones This provides an intuitive and powerful macro capa 10 20 25 30 35 45 50 55 65 24 bility FIG 32 shows at the user level how a tool that changes fill colors say to red is composed with a tool that changes line colors say to blue to form a tool that can change both fill and line colors In the example the two tools are brought together so that their active areas are partially overlapping If the user clicks in a portion of one of the tools that is not overlapping with the other tool the resultant operation is merely the operation that is normally provided by the single tool On the other hand if the user clicks in the overlapping region the resultant operation is a combination of the operations of both tools The composition of tools can be accomplished in two ways First the two tools can be overlapped on the same
60. eger Richard J Beach Robert B Hagmann A Structural View of the Cedar Pro gramming Environment Xerox PARC Technical Report CSL 86 1 Also available as ACM Transactions on Pro gramming Languages and Systems vol 8 No 4 1986 pp 419 490 David Korlander and Eric A Bier Graphical Search and Replace Computer Graphics vol 22 No 4 Aug 1988 pp 113 120 Myron W Krueger Thomas Gionfriddo and Katrin Hin richsen Videoplace An Artificial Reality CHI 85 Pro ceedings Apr 1985 pp 35 40 Alto User s Handbook Chapter 4 Markup User s Manual Xerox Corporation Sep 1979 pp 85 95 Ken Perlin and David Fox Pad An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface Proceedings of Siggraph 93 Ana heim California Aug 1 6 1993 Computer Graphics Pro ceedings Annual Conference Series pp 57 64 Manojit Sarkar and Marc H Brown Graphical Fisheye Views of Graphs CHI 92 Proceedings May 3 7 1992 pp 83 91 William Buxton and Brad A Myers A Study in Two Handed Input CHI 86 Proceedings Apr 1986 pp 321 326 Joel F Bartlett Transparent Controls for Interactive Graph ics WRL Technical Note TN 30 Digital Equipment Cor poration Jul 1992 pp 1 9 Paul Kabbash I Scott MacKenzie and William Buxton Human Performance Using Computer Input Devices in the Preferred and Non Preferred Hands Proceedings of Inter Chi Conference Human Factors in Computing Systems Amsterdam Apr 1993 ACM p
61. ent to Tool Routine The Event to Tool Routine may process the event further by recursively executing this flowchart beginning at circle A above Add this data point to the list of gesture data points T may draw immediate user feedback based on the partial gesture FIG 36 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 15 of 16 5 581 670 Event to Tool Routine Let A be a data structure representing the action that T performs in response to E as computed in the Event to Overlay Routine Tool T receives pointing event E at lt x y gt IsTa click through tool Perform action A No immediately Perform Perform any initial user feedback specified by A any final user feedback Yes Determine the frontmost application Q that is behind T s overlay O and is of a type that T knows how to communicate with Is T application specific From A and coordinates lt Xy gt Compose a command to deliver to Q and or a set of calls to the procedures of Q Deliver the commands and or make the calls Extract from E the list of commands L that were added to E by any tools that E has been passed to previously if any Compose a new list of Use the list of commands from A and L commands that using the Composition is part of A Routine Replace the list L in E with the new list just computed Set belowTool O
62. ents an MMM event is modified in three ways to support the overlay First an event is annotated with a representation event fields referred to as 20 30 45 50 55 65 30 belowChild and belowTool of the parts of the applica tion tree it has already visited This prevents the root application from delivering the event to the sheet more than once Second an event is tagged with a command string to be interpreted when it reaches its final application For example a color palette click through button annotates each mouse click event with the command name SetFillColor followed by a color Finally if the tool contains a visual filter the mouse coordinates of an event may be modified so the event will be correctly directed to the object that appears under the cursor through that visual filter FIG 34C shows how the event described above is deliv ered to the correct application In particular in order that the event be delivered to the sheets and application layers in the correct order and with the correct device coordinates the event travels both up and down the hierarchy of applications 4 03 Event Delivery Routines Section 4 02 above describes the way that input events are routed through possible overlay sheets to the intended application This and the following sections describe the event handling in additional detail with reference to flow charts and pseudocode for certain of the important routines namely
63. es of utility programs For example in a word processor the underlying data consists of text with associated information specifying how the document will look when it is printed out on a printer 5 581 670 3 The associated information relates to document layout such as paragraphs and columns and to text attributes such as font size style and color Depending on the particular word processor and the operating system the screen image may be limited to the text content or may show the document substantially as it will appear when printed WYSIWYG pronounced wizzywig an acronym for what you see is what you get A program designed for a character based OS such as DOS is likely to provide some thing approaching the former one designed for a GUI is likely to provide something approaching the latter A similar range of possible screen images will be found in other types of application programs For example in a drawing program the underlying data will contain a descrip tion of each graphical object that will appear on the docu ment The description includes what is needed to give the object its intended appearance including shape size line color and thickness fill color and pattern relative position in the plane of the document and stacking order whether the object is in front of or behind other objects The screen image may show only the outlines of the objects wireframe view or may be a full WYSIWYG view
64. ests whether the input is from an overlay scaling device and if it is it resizes the overlay as a function of the device movement If not it then tests whether the input is from a cursor moving device and if it is it moves the cursor as a function of the device movement Next if appropriate the event is passed to the root application which may be for instance a window manager which determines where the event will be delivered next Note that the phrase overlay moving device refers to a device that is currently designated as being for moving the overlay A particular physical device is an Overlay moving device at a particular time if a software data structure called the device table currently designates that device as an overlay moving device This designation can be changed by the user at any time The same is true for the phrase overlay scaling device 4 02 Filtering Input Through Tools and Visual Filters Ordinarily MMM input events move strictly from the root application towards the leaf applications However a system implementing the present invention may contain a number of overlay sheets interspersed with the applications In order to support the overlay input events must be passed back up this tree For example FIG 34A shows an application hierarchy among applications denoted 1 2 3 3A 3B and 4 and overlay sheets denoted 1 and 2 FIG 34B shows how the application windows and overlay sheet
65. for example these tools may include buttons that the user can click on click through or drag to cause commands to be delivered to the underlying application When several filters are composed the effect is as though the model were passed sequentially through the stack of filters from bottom to top with each filter operating on the model in turn In addition when one filter has other filters below it it may modify how the boundaries of these other filters are mapped onto the screen within its own boundary 2 01 Pushing and Shaping Objects into the Scene FIG 4 shows how adding a new shape to a graphical scene is done using a shape palette on the overlay The user has coarsely positioned a circle on the tool near a rectangle in the scene When the user pushes and holds the mouse button a new circle of that size is created in the scene the overlay disappears and the circle attaches its center for instance to the cursor arrow for fine positioning Using a gravity technique such as snap dragging Bier86 the new circle can be placed so that its center lies exactly on the comer of the rectangle When the user releases the mouse button the new shape is at its final position and the tool teappears If the user had placed a shape with several comers such as a triangle the corner nearest to the cursor 10 14 when the mouse button went down would have been the point that attached itself to the cursor In the previous example the s
66. from pocket sized to wall sized The overlay interfaces can span this range of sizes Because overlay tools scroll and zoom they can be used on tiny displays that have little or no room for fixed position tool palettes In addition on very large displays the user can move tools to any part of the screen making it unnecessary to reach across the display to access a fixed menu region 6 0 Conclusion In conclusion it can be seen that the present invention provides a new style of user interface the see through interface based on a visual depiction of a transparent overlay with active tool defining regions The see through interface offers a new design space for user interfaces based on spatial rather than temporal modes and provides a natural medium for two handed interaction Because the interface is movable and overlies the application area it takes no permanent screen space and can be conveniently adapted to a wide range of display sizes Because the overlay tools are selected and brought to the work area simply by moving the overlay the user s attention can remain focused on the work area Because the operations and views are spatially defined the user can work without changing the global context Further the overlay of the present invention when used with visual filters allows operations on an application s hidden state such as the equations in a spreadsheet the grouping of objects in a graphical editor or the position of 5
67. haped cursor 55 the position of which is controlled by mouse 27 is shown as positioned on the outline of the rectangle in the drawing window as might be the case when the user selects the rectangle in preparation for performing a desired operation on it This is a representative arrange ment for example one that might occur where the user is drafting a patent specification and creating patent drawings Depending on the computer and the task at hand there could be a single window occupying the whole display area or many windows possibly with some overlapping The computing environment and the contents of the display area as described above are standard The present invention adds another aspect to the environment a movable transparent overlay having a number of delineated regions 60 The delineated regions are shown as a plurality of abutting rectangles in a multi element grid but as will be discussed below the delineated regions need not abut each other Moreover there need not be a plurality visible on the display at the same time As an aid to distinguishing the delineated regions on the overlay from the remaining items in the display area items on the overlay are shown in solid lines and the application windows and graphical objects are shown in broken lines As will be described below the overlay preferably carries indicia such as icons or text specifying the significance of the particular delineated regions Therefore while th
68. he desired operation the mechanism may be selecting the operation from a menu or entering a command from the keyboard Similarly in a drawing program the cursor can be placed in a mode by clicking on a tool icon e g rectangle tool line tool polygon tool so that subsequent clicks and drags with the cursor result in the creation of graphical objects Click ing on an existing object with a plain cursor may result in selecting the object so that an operation may be applied via some other mechanism If a drag is initiated with the cursor on an object the result of the drag may be to cause the object to move along with the cursor or may be to cause the object to be resized depending on the cursor location on the object For users to be more productive they should be provided with tools that are relatively easy to learn easy to use and powerful These goals are sometimes easy to achieve indi vidually but rarely in combination Nevertheless consider able efforts have been expended in attempts to design user 10 15 20 30 50 55 65 4 interfaces that are more intuitive efficient and versatile The example discussed below taken from the realm of drawing programs shows the direction in which some of these efforts have led and the way that improving one aspect of a user interface can degrade another A common configuration for drawing programs has a fixed tool palette to one side of the drawing area and a menu
69. ice suitable for positioning an object with respect to the display screen and user interface software that the processor executes that controls at least a portion of the display screen and that is responsive to said input device a method for applying a software tool to a workpiece the software tool having certain properties the method comprising the steps of using the processor the user interface software and the display screen to display a window whose contents represent the workpiece using the processor the user interface software and the display screen to display a transparent object that represents the tool using the processor the user interface software and the input device to position the transparent object so as to overlap a desired portion of the workpiece and using the processor the user interface software and the input device to generate an event at a position within the transparent object which position specifies the desired portion of the workpiece and in response to the event altering the contents of the desired portion of the workpiece the nature of the alteration being determined at least in part by the properties of the tool 29 A method of operating a processor based machine the machine including a display device a pointing device for controlling the position of a cursor on the display device in response to user input a processor coupled to the pointing device and the display device the
70. iew of the picture behind O For example if T magnifies the picture under neath then coordinates from tools in front of T should have a shrinking transformation applied so that commands from such tools will be applied to the object that actually appears through T Thus if T scales up the picture behind it by a factor of 2 it should scale coordinates by a factor of 0 5 If the command received is SelectShape lt x y gt T will produce SelectShape 0 5 lt x y gt 4 09 07 About Marked Coordinates The Event to Overlay Routine identifies those coordinates lt x y gt in the command list that are marked for translation In general cursor coordinates will be so marked This marking will be preserved by the composition routines above so that when the input commands contain marked coordinates the corresponding coordinates in the commands produced by composition will also be marked 4 10 Basic Output Handling In addition to delivering input events to the application programs behind them overlays also modify the display of these application programs In particular most tools display a visible icon to indicate the boundaries of the active region of that tool In addition tools may contain visual filters that filter the view of the application modifying shapes colors sizes and other graphical properties While the basic opera tion of visual filters is described in the above referenced copending application of Stone et al
71. ighted or change color and the selected portion is added to the nearest end of the new shape 2 04 Click Through Buttons with Visual Filters In the click through buttons shown above the active area of each button was completely transparent showing the objects underneath the button just as if the button weren t there However for many applications it would be advan tageous to show a view of the objects under the button that highlights information needed to successfully perform the operation This can be accomplished using a visual filter as described above For example in FIG 12 the user is confronted with a number of stacked rectangles and wishes to select the upper left hand corner of the middle rectangle This corner is hidden by the topmost rectangle so it is hard to point at However a tool having a Select Vertex button shows a wireframe line drawing view of the picture that exposes this corner making it easy to select The combination of visual filters with the overlay tools can be especially advantageous In a conventional drawing program to produce a wireframe view of the picture the user would have to explicitly evoke a separate command Once this command was given all objects would be drawn as wireframe drawings not just the objects to be operated upon This might lose context that is crucial to helping the user identify the correct objects to operate upon Here on the other hand the user summons a local viewing
72. ijktennopgrst ABCDEF GHIIKLM 5 581 670 Sheet 10 of 16 Dec 3 1996 U S Patent FIG 30 FIG 31 AND FIG 32 U S Patent User Input Routine Move the Overlay that is connected to this device as a function of the device movement Resize the overlay that is connected to this device as a function of the device movement Move cursor as a function of the device movement Dec 3 1996 Sheet 11 of 16 Receive user input Is input from device Is input from device Is input from device Routine FIG 33 Overlay moving Overlay scaling cursor moving Pass event to the root application and perform the Event To Application 5 581 670 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 12 of 16 5 581 670 OVERLAY 2 OVERLAY 1 APP 3B FIG 34A APP 3A FIG 34C U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 13 of 16 5 581 670 Event to Application Routine Application A receives an event E Is event any program P from a pointing device selected Determine which child C of ais an ancestor of or is equal to P Translate lt x y gt of E into the coordinate ayn of C Pass event toC Is any program P in gesture mode A handles the event using the Translate and Execute Routine Determine the
73. ing the button 33 The method of claim 30 wherein the click through tool s tool defining region is displayed as a transparent region 34 A method of operating a processor based machine the machine including 20 25 35 45 50 65 46 a user input facility a display device a processor coupled to the user input facility and the display device a storage system for storing information including instruc tions defining at least one program to be executed by the processor and a set of associated data the method comprising operating the processor based machine to perform the steps of executing the program to operate on the data and display a visible representation thereof on the display device displaying on the display device a visual depiction of a plurality of tool defining regions each tool defining region specifying at least in part a respective operation that is performed in response to an event within the tool defining region each tool defining region and its respective specified operation being referred to as a tool at least a given tool referred to as a click through tool having the property that when the event occurs within the click through tool s tool defining region at a given location relative to the click through tool s tool defin ing region the result of the click through tool s speci fied operation depends under at least some circum stances on the location of the event relative to the
74. ion For at least some applications the data represents a document that is to be viewed e g printed or displayed on a screen and the application allows a user to modify the document In many instances a user provides at least some of the input signals through one or more input devices often a keyboard and a pointing device such as a mouse By way of background a mouse is a device that is moved over a work surface typically next to the keyboard and provides posi tion signals so as to cause a cursor on the screen to move in accordance with the mouse s movements The cursor is a special symbol that is used by an interactive program as a pointer or attention focusing device The mouse contains one or more pushbutton switches buttons to provide 10 15 20 30 35 40 45 50 55 65 2 additional input signals which may be interpreted as part of a cursor event A display device typically a visual display device such as a cathode ray tube CRT or a liquid crystal display LCD provides the user with information about the application and the underlying data and allows the user to generate appro priate input signals and thus control the operation of the machine to produce the intended work product The com bination of input devices display devices and the nature of the information that the application provides the user may be thought of as the user interface to the application Although it is in princ
75. iple possible for every application program to be entirely self sufficient it is almost universally the case that the application program executes in conjunc tion with an operating system OS The OS is a program that schedules and controls the machine resources to provide an interface between the application programs and the machine hardware The OS typically provides the basic housekeeping functions that all application programs are likely to require such as maintaining a file system sched uling the CPU receiving input from input devices commu nicating with storage devices sending data to display devices and providing a generic mechanism according to which a user can manage files and cause various applications to execute In the world of personal computers PCs and workstations operating systems are often associated with a particular type of hardware configuration but this is not necessarily the case Unix is an example of an OS that has been ported to run on many types of machine One type of operating system that has come into increas ing use in recent years provides a graphical user interface GUI Apple Computer s Macintosh OS IBM s OS 2 and Microsoft s Windows actually a GUI shell that runs on top of a character based operating system known as DOS are the best known GUIs in the PC realm The Macintosh OS has to date been available only on Apple s own Macintosh PCs based on the Motorola 680x0 family
76. ition which object is selected and then apply the color to that object The relevant command sequence in the draw program s language might be the following SelectObject lt x y gt SetColorSelectedShape red If the operation had been performed with a conventional tool on the overlay for setting the selected object to red the command sequence would be the same but would have come about in two stages first when the user had selected the object in the conventional way and then when the user clicked on the red button in the conventional color palette A variation on this arrangement would be to have the overlay and the application translators tightly coupled so as to avoid the conversion of input signals to commands in a universal language Rather the overlay would have to main tain information as to which applications it supported and would translate input signals directly into the appropriate application s input language 2 0 Overlay Tool Examples Overview For the overlay to be useful it must contain a set of tools that help the user make use of an application A number of 15 20 25 30 35 45 50 55 65 12 these tools are described below Some of them are novel in their own right Others are novel only in the context of the overlay Most of the tasks performed by the non dominant hand can also be performed by the dominant hand at the cost of having the dominant hand interrupt its current task Ther
77. itionals and com puted expressions Instead the current implementation restricts actions to a list of commands where each command is a command name followed by a set of values These values are computed by the overlay not by the applications 4 06 Actions with One or More Commands For example a single command specifying that P should select the frontmost object that is near the cursor point lt 23 37 gt as long as it is no farther than a quarter of an inch from the cursor might be SelectObject lt 23 37 gt 0 25 As in the language LISP an entire command is surrounded in parentheses to make it easy to tell where commands begin and end Actions may contain several commands as in the follow ing action that selects an object sets its interior to be red and its outline to be blue SelectObject lt 23 37 gt 0 25 SetFillColor red SetLineColor blue where an additional pair of parentheses delineates the begin ning and ending of the entire action This is an example of the command list referred to as L in the flowcharts above 4 07 Translation of Commands This representation of actions is particularly easy to translate in the current prototype because all of the software programs on which overlays are being implemented already interpret commands that are expressed in this form Thus to translate the above program independent command list into a command list that can be interpreted by a particular program P it is
78. ize of the object in the menu determined its size when it was applied to the application In many situations such as when selecting lines rectangles circles and other shapes one wants to select the generic shape and then specify its size and position The overlay enables a novel technique that takes advantage of the ability to use both hands to perform the selection positioning and scaling tasks in a fluid natural manner FIG 5 shows a variation on rectangle creation that allows all four edges of the rectangle to be placed at once Initially 15 45 50 55 65 the non dominant hand has positioned a rectangle on the tool over a rectangle in the scene The user clicks the tool rectangle with the mouse cursor and depresses a mouse button to create a rectangle of that initial size and position in the scene The tool disappears The rectangle corner nearest the mouse cursor snaps to that cursor A new cursor appears at the opposite corner of the rectangle the position of this new cursor is controlled by the non dominant hand Both corners of the rectangle can be positioned simulta neously and snapped into place using snap dragging When the mouse button is released the rectangle is placed and the tool reappears This two handed creation technique can be used to position other shapes including both endpoints of a straight line segment the center point and a circumference point of a circle allowing the circle to be simultaneo
79. jects that are not normally shown at all and to make it possible to interact with those objects For example a visual filter can be used to locally show guide lines or a grid FIG 20 shows three tools each of which displays a different kind of grid The first two grids on the left are rectangular with different spacings The last grid is a hex agonal grid Although each grid only appears when the visual filter is in place the coordinates of the grid are bound to the scene so that grid points do not move when the overlay moves Thus by clicking on the grid points and moving the overlay the user can edit the scene using these grids The user has started a line on a grid point moved the overlay up and finished the line using the grid In conven tional programs the effect of turning on a grid becomes apparent only once the grid is turned on With these tools however the user can see what kind of grid any given tool will provide before using it All of the visual filter tools have this property to some extent FIG 21 shows how a user can make and use a customized grid tool The customized grid tool picks up a set of selected shapes and allows the user to use them as a customized grid Like other grids this grid can be used to precisely place 15 20 30 35 40 50 55 65 20 objects This tool makes use of the properties of the overlay discussed above in Section 2 03 on clipboards The lines in the scene are a grid
80. lick through tool to become a temporary modal tool raises the issue of whether the temporary modal tool can be allowed to cooperate with other tools One approach is to allow the temporary modal tool to be com posed with other tools in the same way that a click through tool can be composed The alternative approach is to require that a temporary modal tool be the only tool that can operate on the underlying data That is putting a tool in the mode would preclude the use of the other tools In such a case the overlay sheet could be replaced during the mode by a button that allowed the user to exit the mode Getting in and out of such modes could also be done using a gesture For example double clicking in a tool might enter a mode Double clicking again would exit 3 10 Drawing Out of a Tool The typical use of a tool will include moving the mouse cursor into the tool pressing one of the mouse buttons and with possible intervening operations releasing the mouse button There are a number of possibilities between the depression and release of the mouse button These include the possibilities that the mouse doesn t move at all that the mouse moves and remains in the tool that the mouse leaves the tool and that the mouse leaves the tool and returns One possible convention is that if an operation begins in a tool that operation should persist until the mouse button is released This convention would allow tools to be relatively small
81. mand modes Spatial modes are often more desirable than temporal modes because the user can easily see what the current mode is e g by the label on the tool and how to get out of it e g move the cursor out of the tool 5 03 Better Graphical Feedback Fewer Errors Often systems with temporal modes provide feedback to the user that helps in the successful completion of the current command For example in text editing mode in a graphical editor the editor can highlight all of the editable text strings Overlay tools can provide this same type of feedback but within the boundaries of the tool In fact with several tools on screen at once several different kinds of feedback can be provided each in its own tool In addition by zooming a tool to the full size of the editor the user can achieve the same feedback available with temporal modes When several tools are visible at once the feedback in each one serves a dual role It helps the user make proper use of the tool and it helps the user choose the correct tool In addition the use of visual filters in tools provides a kind of feedback that is not traditionally provided they show a portion of the scene with a modified view while showing a standard view of the rest of the scene as context A visual filter can show hidden information like a hidden vertex In addition it can help identify those objects that are appro priate operands for a given operation For instance a tool that
82. mber the most recent set of shapes that were selected 3 06 Creating and Modifying Tools Some techniques for creating and modifying tools have already been described These include the provision for moving copying deleting and overlapping tools to orga nize the overlay discussed above and the techniques for copying object shapes and attributes to create specialized clipboard tools as discussed in section 2 03 The present invention contemplates allowing the user additional flex ibility to create and modify overlay tools For example it would also be possible to use a drawing program or word processor to produce the geometry of a new overlay tool and then apply behavior to the geometry using the Embed dedButtons architecture Bier90 Bier91a Bier92 Further it should also be possible to use one sheet of the overlay to edit another In such an environment an overlay sheet would become editable in the same manner as a drawing in a graphical editor and the various tools and techniques described above could be brought to bear More over if the non dominant hand can resize a sheet of the overlay as well as reposition it then the user can make tools larger or smaller for special applications Two toolkits for creating overlay tools are currently under development The first is a traditional toolkit in which tools are created through object oriented programming The sec ond toolkit is based on the EmbeddedButtons technology where
83. mes and oversees the creation movement resizing and destruction of windows on the display The window manager takes raw input signals from the input devices routes the signals to the correct application typically the one whose window is frontmost under the cursor and translates the position information into coordinates expressed in the application s coordinate system The window manager also provides information to the application as to where to draw the window contents Input signals to the overlay may be raw input signals from the OS e g mouse event coordinates or may be provided by a drag and drop object or by another application Addi tionally for those embodiments that allow the superposition of overlay tools the input signals may come from what may be viewed as another overlay An additional set of input signals not explicitly shown to the overlay include the signals for positioning the overlay relative to the visible representation 5 581 670 il In the illustrated embodiment the input signals are trans lated into commands in a universal language which are then directed to a translator for the appropriate application Where the input signal had position information causing commands to be routed to application 1 the commands encounter a translator 93 that converts some of them to commands in the input language of application 1 and some of them directly into calls on the procedures of application 1 Commands in
84. n As will be described in a later section the underlying operation of the overlay program will tend to be the same either way Therefore the term overlay will be used to refer to the collection of tool bearing sheets whether they appear above or beneath the other items in the display area In some instances it may be desirable to allow the user to switch from one stacking order to the other Although there are many ways for the user to position the overlay relative to the display area it is preferred that this be done with the user s non dominant hand using trackball 30 Rectilinear positioning may be accomplished by rotating ball 35 while other operations may be effected with buttons 37 Resizing the overlay and its contents may be accom plished by rotating thumbwheel 40 The click through tools and the overlay represent ele ments of a new user interface but may also be used in conjunction with standard interface elements By way of example a stylized tool palette 62 of the type used in many prior art programs is shown Depending on the program and the OS tool and attribute palettes for a given program may be rigidly fixed in that program s window or may appear as a separate window that is movable relative to other windows for the program While the detailed description of overlay tool examples in the following section deals in large part with click through tools conventional tools such as those in palette 62 can be incor
85. necessary to translate each generic command into one or more commands that P understands For example P may not have a command named Selec tObject but may have a command named Select with the required functionality Perhaps Select expects its second argument to be in pixels instead of inches at 72 pixels per inch 0 25 inches 18 pixels Similarly P may not have a command SetFillColor but may have a command SetAr eaColor If P does have a command SetLineColor then one correct translation of the command list is Select lt 23 37 gt 18 SetAreaColor red SetLineColor blue The length of the command string is not always preserved For example the action might contain a command SetFill ColorAtPoint cursorPoint red which changes the color of the object nearest the cursor to red A particular program P might not provide this operation as a single command In this case the single command SetFillColorAtPoint cursor Point red might be translated into two commands Select cursorPoint SetAreaColor red 33 If P does not already implement an interpreter for such command lists but does provide a set of procedures that provide the required functionality actions can be translated directly into procedure calls For example the action might be translated into three procedure calls in the Cedar pro gramming language as SelectShapelpicture 23 37 18 shape GetSelectedShape picture SetAreaColor shap
86. ns of the file storage system could be connected via various long distance network media Similarly the input devices and display need not be at the same location as the processor although it is anticipated that the present invention will most often be implemented in the context of PCs and workstations The input devices are for the most part standard including a keyboard 25 and one or more pointing devices A mouse 27 and a trackball 30 are shown but other devices such as touch screens graphics tablets or electronic styluses could be used While there may be instances in conventional systems where there are more than one pointing device the normal situation is that the user uses only one such device at a time The present invention derives significant advan tages by providing the user with two such devices one for each hand for simultaneous or alternating use For purposes of concreteness mouse 27 is shown as having three buttons 32 while trackball 30 is shown as having a ball 35 three buttons 37 and a thumbwheel 40 The invention can be described at a high level user point of view with reference to the illustrated contents of display area 23 The display shows a first application window 50 for a drawing program and a second application window 52 for a word processor The drawing window is shown as having three graphical objects a rectangle an ellipse and a penta gon the word processor window is shown as having text An arrow s
87. of the overlay and all of the siblings of the overlay that are behind the overlay For example if overlay 1 includes a visual filter nodes for application 2 application 3A application 3B application 3 and appli cation 1 will be redrawn in that order This tree fragment is shown in FIG 40 5 0 Advantages This section summarizes a number of advantages of various embodiments of the overlay Although some of these advantages were explicitly stated in connection with the above description of various tools it is useful to set forth these advantages in one place 5 581 670 37 5 01 Faster Completion of Tasks By combining several steps into a single step overlay tools can save time As described above click through buttons combine command choice and operand selection into a single gesture With the addition of a visual filter these buttons also create customized views in the region of the operand without requiring any keystrokes to explicitly turn such views on and off In addition both the user s gaze and the cursor can remain in the work area This keeps the user focused on the task and saves time compared to systems that require the user to move the cursor back and forth between the work area and palettes that are placed off to the side 5 02 Fewer Temporal Modes With the overlay an operation is available whenever the cursor is over a tool that provides that operation Essentially the overlay provides spatial com
88. ol defining 69 Tegion is displayed as a transparent region Fe k k
89. ols Some tools above such as the alignment line tools can translate slightly relative to the overlay sheet It is also possible to allow tools that can rotate and scale relative to the overlay sheet For example FIG 28 shows a tool for selecting a typeface and or typing text To produce text at an arbitrary angle the user can rotate the tool In this example if the user clicks on two scene points through the measuring region corners of the tool the tool orients itself to the slope of the line between the two measured points When the user subsequently selects a font from this tool the new text is added at this measured angle in the selected font While the example shown here stays reoriented until another measure ment is made it is also possible to have the tool reorient temporarily 2 16 Combining Graphical Search Guidelines and Object Creation As described above the overlay tools can combine sev eral task steps into a single two handed gesture One extreme example of step reduction is the figure labelling tool shown in FIG 29 This tool combines constraint based graphical search Kurlander92 snap dragging alignment lines visual filters and a push through object template This tool is used to put a figure label at a set position in the bounding rectangle for all illustrations When this tool is moved over a scene region constraint based graphical search is used to find all large rectangles in that region For each such
90. on Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of California Berkeley CA 94720 Eric A Bier and Aaron Goodisman Documents as User Interfaces In R Furuta ed EP90 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing Docu ment Manipulation and Typography Cambridge University Press 1990 pp 249 262 Eric A Bier EmbeddedButtons Documents as User Inter faces In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Hilton Head South Carolina Nov ACM 1991 pp 45 53 Eric A Bier and Steve Freeman MMM A User Interface Architecture for Shared Editors on a Single Screen In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology UIST 91 Hilton Head South Carolina Nov 11 13 ACM 1991 pp 79 86 Eric A Bier EmbeddedButtons Supporting Buttons in Documents Xerox PARC Technical Report ISTL ADoc 1992 10 01 Oct 1992 Also available in ACM Transac tions on Information Systems vol 10 No 4 Oct 1992 pp 381 407 Paul M English Ethan S Jacobson Robert A Morris Kimbo B Mundy Stephen D Pelletier Thomas A Polucci and H David Scarbro An Extensible Object Oriented System for Active Documents In R Furuta ed EP90 Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing Document Manipulation and Typography Cam bridge University Press 1990 pp 263 276 David Goldberg and A
91. on Electronic Publishing Document Manipulation and Typography Cambridge University Press 1990 pages 263 276 Goldberg91 David Goldberg and Aaron Goodisman Sty lus user interfaces for manipulating text In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology UIST 91 Hilton Head S C November 1991 pages 127 135 Hopkins91 Don Hopkins The design and implementation of pie menus Dr Dobb s Journal Vol 16 No 12 December 1991 pages 16 26 Kurlander92 David Kurlander and Steven Feiner Interac tive constraint based search and replace In Proceedings of CHI 92 Monterey Calif May Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM New York 1992 pages 609 618 Kurtenbach91 Gordon Kurtenbach and William Buxton Issues in combining marking and direct manipulation techniques In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology UIST 91 South Carolina November ACM 1991 pages 137 144 Ousterhout90 J K Ousterhout Tcl An embeddable com mand language In winter USENIX Conference Proceed ings 1990 Pier88 Ken Pier Eric A Bier and Maureen C Stone An Introduction to Gargoyle An Interactive Illustration Tool Proceedings of the Intl Conf on Electronic Publishing Document Manipulation and Typography Nice France April Cambridge Univ Press 1988 pages 223 238 Rubine91 Dean Rubine Specifying gestures by example In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH
92. on the desired location in the visible representation and in response to the button being clicked when the cursor is positioned on the desired location in the visible repre sentation performing the tool s specified operation on a portion of the data that corresponds to the desired location of the visible representation 5 10 20 30 35 40 45 50 48 41 The method of claim 40 wherein the visible representation includes objects the tool specifies the creation of a particular type of object and said step of performing the tool s specified operation includes creating an object of the particular type at the desired location 42 The method of claim 40 wherein the visible representation includes an object at the desired location the tool specifies an object property and said step of performing the click through tool s specified operation includes applying to the object the property specified by the tool 43 The method of claim 40 wherein the tool defining region is displayed as a transparent region 44 A method of operating a processor based machine the machine including a user input facility including at least one device that generates signals specifying position a display device a processor coupled to the user input facility and the display device a storage system for storing information including a set of data the method comprising operating the processor based machine to perform the
93. one of the second set of signals results from a user s actions with the user actuated device 10 The method of claim 9 wherein the user actuated device is a pointing device and the second set of signals results from the user performing a gesture with the user actuated device such that the gesture has a distinguished feature point 11 The method of claim 10 wherein the gesture when drawn over a particular delineated region generates a par ticular third set of signals determined by that delineated region that gesture and the distinguished feature point of that gesture 12 The method of claim 9 wherein the second set of signals received from the user actuated device includes a sequence of one or more positions 13 The method of claim 12 wherein all positions in the sequence are performed in a single delineated region and the third set of signals depends on commands specified by the delineated region and the position of the sequence of points relative to the overlay and the visual repre sentation 14 The method of claim 12 wherein the first position in the sequence is in a given delineated region with other positions either in or out of the delineated region and the third set of signals is determined by the sequence of positions and the operation specified by the delineated region 15 The method of claim 12 wherein the sequence of positions is inside a plurality of delineated regions and the third set of sign
94. operation an editing command and an operand all in a single two handed gesture 2 05 Combining the Overlay With Gestures The overlay technique of the present invention can be combined with just about any existing user interface tech nique and the combination may produce a tool with inter esting properties One such interface technique is the use of what are referred to as gestures which are typically one or more strokes with a pointing device A gesture is typically char 5 581 670 17 acterized by one or more feature points e g beginning and end points of the stroke path intersection point of two strokes For example FIG 13 shows operations using a tool that combines single stroke gestures and pie menus with the overlay The tool provides a central active area scene region surrounded by a number of attribute menu segments and a region for holding a prototype object Initially the prototype object which is part of the tool is a rectangle with a dashed outline and a first fill color The user positions the central area of the tool over a triangle in the scene having a solid outline and a second fill color By stroking dragging the cursor from the triangle to the Fill Color menu region the user indicates that the fill color of the triangle should be applied to the prototype object At this point the prototype object has been recolored However this pie menu can also be used in reverse to apply properties from
95. p 474 481 William Buxton There s More to Interaction Than Meets the Eye Some Issues in Manual Input Chapter 8 The Haptic Channel pp 366 375 from Readings in Human Computer Interaction A Multidisciplinary Approach Mor gan Kaufman Publishers Inc 1987 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 1 of 16 5 581 670 22 PROCESSOR KEYBOARD 15 17 20 A MEMORY FILE STORAGE 10 FIG 1 IMAGE DATA STRUCTURE FOR PROGRAMS 72 RENDERER T7 RENDERER 75 UNDERLYING DATA FOR OVERLAY 70 UNDERLYING DATA FOR PROGRAMS FIG 2 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 2 of 16 5 581 670 RAW DEVICE DRAGANDDROP ANOTHER ANOTHER INPUT OS OBJECT OVERLAY APPLICATION 85 OVERLAY 92 WINDOW UNIVERSAL MANAGER LANGUAGE 93 97 TRANSLATOR 1 TRANSLATOR 2 APP 1 APP 2 INPUT INPUT LANGUAGE LANGUAGE APPLICATION PROCEDURE APPLICATION PROCEDURE PARSER 1 CALLS PARSER 2 CALLS PROCEDURE PROCEDURE CALLS CALLS 87 88 APPLICATION 1 APPLICATION 2 FIG 3 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 3 of 16 5 581 670 ver Us NG SAAS OC AAN ENZ FIG 4 mn U S Patent Dec 3 1996 requiar productivity The technique italic UMMARY ORM HE INVE 0 ded a user interface gt bold italic technique that allows a user to perform many common pronmthersiy a nificantly enhancing makes use of actions with which the user tends to be familiar and therefore may be leamed rather quickl
96. parent 2 06 Snapping the Overlay Tool to the Scene In the examples above the motion of the overlay over the scene was independent of the content of the scene However the present invention also provides useful tools that auto matically reposition themselves or the whole sheet of the overlay to line up with one or more objects in the scene The examples show that the non dominant hand can be used to snap special objects onto scene points while the dominant hand is free to perform or get ready to perform other interactive operations For example FIG 15 shows a tool used to create align ment lines for ruler and compass style construction such as that used in snap dragging Bier86 The tool has a number of alignment lines passing through a common point the center of a circle at different angles The tool also has a small region for displaying an active angle When one of the alignment lines e g the line at 45 degrees passes near a software cursor e g the snap dragging caret shown in the figure that line snaps to the caret and lengthens and the tool displays the slope of the selected alignment line The user can then freeze this line in place e g by clicking a trackball button or by clicking on the circle in the middle of the tool with the mouse Finally the user can perform new operations that snap the caret to the alignment line The figure shows drawing a new line segment using the align ment line as a guide The
97. porated onto the overlay and moved along with other tools on the overlay Palette 62 is shown in solid lines suggesting that it is on the overlay The conven tional tools can share one or more overlay sheets with click through tools or can be segregated on a separate overlay sheet FIG 2 is a flow diagram showing how the various data items stored in memory 17 or file storage system 20 are processed so that they appear in display area 23 The program s underlying data designated 70 is typically stored in each program s native format which is a characteristic of the program and is presumably optimized for that pro gram s operation The data is subjected to processing by a renderer 72 which converts the data to an image data structure 73 that specifies what is to appear on the display There are a number of possible formats for example image data structure 73 can be a bitmap or a set of commands in a language such as Display Postscript or Quickdraw Regardless of the details the image data structure must contain sufficient information that it can be rasterized if not already a bitmap at the display resolution or otherwise processed for viewing on the display The overlay is characterized by a similar hierarchy wherein the overlay s underlying data designated 75 is processed by a renderer 77 which converts the data to an overlay image data structure 80 The two image data struc tures are combined at what is shown schematicall
98. r tool T may need to compose A with any other actions already associated with event E 4 04 Translate and Execute Routine Overview A given action A may in general be an arbitrary body of code written in a suitable programming language This language could be any general programming language such as C or Pascal but will better support user customization of overlay tools if it is a simple interpreted language such as Apple s HyperTalk John Ousterhout s Tcl Ousterhout90 or a small version of LISP such as that used in Interleaf English90 or in the EmbeddedButtons architecture Bier90 Bier91a Bier92 To support the use of overlay tools in an environment such as UNIX in which each application runs in its own heavyweight process A can be represented as an interprocess message such as those pro vided by the X window system The current implementation of overlay tools is in the Cedar programming environment Swinchart86 using a small LISP like language to repre sent actions and in the UNIX X Windows using X window messages to represent actions When a given software program P receives an action A it must interpret that action in its own context If A describes an action that could be performed by several programs P must translate A into its own terms and then perform A on its own P s data structures Interpreting a body of code in a particular context also called a scope is a well known computer science technique For
99. rectangle the tool draws alignment lines at a fixed distance from each edge of the rectangle Using the mouse the user can select one of the text labels on the surface of the tool and snap this label to the alignment lines by using snap dragging 2 17 Tool for Loading Documents into Windows In addition to adding one or a few objects to a picture overlay tools can be used to load an entire disk file into an editor window document frame or other region FIG 30 shows such a tool The first portion of the figure shows the tool which has a number of document icons positioned over a set of document windows When the user clicks on an icon the corresponding document which in the example con tains text and graphics opens in the window that is behind the cursor In the illustrated example the user selects a file named house from a set of available files to be placed in the selected window whereupon the contents of file house are displayed in the selected window An alternative approach would be to have the user position the tool near the desired window and drag the icon into the window 3 0 Customizing and Using the Overlay No matter how well the designer of the system is attuned to the needs of users there is no such thing as a prototypical user Accordingly it is anticipated that the system will allow the user to customize the overlay tools and tool layout to suit personal preferences and to adapt the overlay to a par
100. relative position of the sheet and the visible representa 5381158 1 1995 T AR a DE 395 161 X tion and on the position information that characterizes the pisa A peen second set of input signals The delineated regions may be FOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS thought of and referred to as click through tools 0533424 3 1993 European Pat Off 62 165232 7 1987 Japan 47 Claims 16 Drawing Sheets 17 A MEMORY 10 KEYBOARD 20 FILE STORAGE 5 581 670 Page 2 OTHER PUBLICATIONS User Interface for Data Entry with Pen Device IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin vol 37 No 1 Jan 1994 pp 33 34 Menu Manager IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin vol 34 No 12 May 1992 pp 113 116 Hopkins D Directional selection is Easy as Pie Menus Proceeding Fourth Computer Graphics Workshop 8 Oct 1987 Cambridge MA p 103 Kurtenbach G et al Issues In Combining Marking And Direct Manipulation Techniques Proceedings on the Sym posium on User Interface Software and Technology Nov 1991 South Carolina US pp 137 144 Eric A Bier and Maureen C Stone Snap Dragging In Proceedings of Siggraph 86 Dallas August Computer Graphics vol 20 No 4 ACM 1986 pp 233 240 Eric A Bier Snap Dragging Interactive Geometric Design in Two and Three Dimensions Xerox PARC Technical Report ED 89 2 Sep 1989 Also Available as Report No UCB CSD 88 416 Apr 28 1988 Computer Science Divi si
101. released does not matter 2 03 Clipboards Clipboard tools pick up shapes and properties from under lying objects acting as visible instantiations of the copy and paste keys common in many applications Clipboards can pick up entire objects or specific properties such as color dash pattern or font They can hold single or multiple copies of an object The objects or properties captured on the clipboard can be copied from the clipboard by clicking on them as in the palette tools In a sense the object or attribute that is picked up by a clipboard tool becomes a part of the tool This is but one instance of the general feature to be discussed in detail in a later section of allowing the user to customize the overlay FIG 9 shows the operation of a symmetry clipboard that picks up the shape that the user clicks on and produces all of the rotations of that shape by multiples of 90 degrees Moving the clipboard and clicking on it again the user drops a translated copy of the resulting symmetrical shape Click ing the small square in the upper left corner of the clipboard clears the clipboard so that new shapes can be clipped FIG 10 shows a pair of tools that can both pick up the graphical properties of an object and apply those properties to other objects The particular illustrated sequence is trans ferring the color of the ellipse to the rectangle These tools can be thought of as rubbings because their use is reminis 10 15
102. rlying picture but might leave the SelectShape lt x y gt command which will only change the currently selected object in that picture The resulting command would be SelectShape lt x y gt 4 09 04 Command Alteration A tool T could change the command names used in some or all of the received actions For example T could change all calls to SetFillColor to call SetFancyFillColor and all 5 581 670 35 calls to SetLineColor to SetFancyLineColor allowing a user to try out the new fancy commands while still using familiar overlay tools on the overlays in front of overlay O If such a tool T received the command GelectShape lt x y gt SetFillColor red SelectShape lt x y gt SetLineColor blue it would produce the command SelectShape lt x y gt SetFancyFillColor red SelectShape lt x y gt SetFancyLineColor blue 4 09 05 Argument Alteration In the case of argument alteration T modifies the values specified after the command name of a command For example T might modify any colors received by previous tools to make them more vivid If such a tool received the command SetLineColor blue it would produce the com mand SetLineColor vivid blue 4 09 06 Coordinate Alteration Coordinate alteration is a special case of argument alter ation In this case tool T modifies the coordinates lt x y gt specified in a command This is particularly useful if T contains a visual filter that modifies the v
103. rm visible representation refers to the visual representation of underlying data produced by a program which may be an application program or any other type of program including the OS In some embodiments the user specifies operations to the program using a set of input devices and views the results of those operations on a display device The input devices 5 581 670 5 typically include a number of user actuated devices which the user actuates to cause the generation of the first and second sets of input signals The delineated regions on the sheet specify different operations that can be applied to the underlying data via the visible representation The delin eated regions may be thought of and referred to as tools or click through tools the visible represeritation may be thought of and referred to as a workpiece A desired operation is performed by bringing the appro priate tool and the relevant portion of the visible represen tation into an overlapping relationship and performing a further act such as a mouse click within the tool to effect the operation This mode of operation where the tool is brought to and then applied to the workpiece allows the user to concentrate on the interaction of the tool and the workpiece In most cases the sheet will be transparent and appear as if it is overlying the visible representation It should be understood however that the invention may be practiced with the sheet of tool
104. s might appear on the display given the hierarchy Application 1 is the root application and its window contains all the other relevant application windows In the present implementation this would be the top level MMM rectangle editor which acts as a window system The left to right order at each of the two lower levels of this tree indicates the top to bottom order of applications on the screen with application 4 being the topmost application Overlay sheet 1 is located between applications 3 and 4 while sheet 2 is located above application 4 Applications 3A and 3B are shown as being contained in the window of application 3 but they might be otherwise associated with it Input events are first delivered to the overlay to determine if the user is interacting with a tool or visual filter If so the event is modified by the overlay In any case the event is returned to the root application which either accepts the event itself or passes it on to the child applications that appear farther to the right in the tree Consider the example where the cursor is positioned as shown in FIG 34B namely within the active area of each of the overlay sheets and over application 3B If the user gave a triggering event such as pressing a mouse button the event would pass first through sheet 2 then through sheet 1 and then to the application that contains the cursor coordinates namely application 3B The data structure that repres
105. s a current imple mentation of the overlay Section 5 describes some of the advantages of the overlay over existing techniques Section 6 concludes the description Section 7 provides a list of articles mentioned in the specification The disclosures of all articles and references including patent documents mentioned in this application are incor porated herein by reference as if set out in full 1 0 System overview FIG 1 is a block diagram of a computer system 10 embodying the present invention In accordance with known practice the computer system includes a processor 12 that communicates with a number of peripheral devices via a bus subsystem 15 These peripheral devices typically include a storage facility including a memory 17 and a file storage system 20 a number of input devices and a display 22 device having an active display area 23 The file storage system stores program and data files and typically includes such standard devices as hard disk drives and floppy disk drives and possibly other devices as CD ROM drives and optical drives In this context the term bus system is used generically so as to include any mechanism for letting the various components of the system communicate with each other as 10 15 20 25 30 35 45 50 55 65 8 intended With the exception of the input devices and the display the other components need not be at the same physical location Thus for example portio
106. s appearing as if beneath the visible representation as long as the visible representation is at least partially transparent so that the tools can be seen through it In either case the sheet will be referred to as the overlay In general the overlay can be larger than the display area and relevant tools brought into the display area when needed In specific implementations tools will be grouped according to the nature of their functions The overlay is preferably scalable as it is positioned thereby adapting to different display sizes and allowing the user to make the most effective use of the tools A visible indicium such as an icon or text that describes the tool function may be associated with a tool or group of tools where the tool function is not self evident This allows the user to quickly position the correct tool Since the overlay with the possible exception of the indicia and the tool borders is transparent the user can keep focused on the workpiece as the tool is brought to bear In some embodiments the user can customize the overlay to satisfy personal preferences and optimize efficiency At the most basic level this would include organizing the tools in a manner that makes logical sense to the user At a more powerful level the user can create new tools to provide new functionality or to facilitate the performance of frequently performed specialized tasks For example tools can be combined e g superimposed
107. s until they become part of the user s motor memory These tasks require little conscious effort 5 06 Application Independent Tools Some user commands are common to enough applications that they are built into keyboards such as the common Cut and Paste keys When the user presses such a key the window manager routes the keystroke to the user s current application The overlay represents a new substrate on which such application independent commands can be placed In particular if an overlay sheet can slide from application to application its tools can be applied to whatever application is behind them whenever that makes sense without any need for a distinguished current application For example the color changing click through buttons can change the colors of objects in different editors 5 07 Usable with One or Two Hands Many graphical user interfaces require the user to coor dinate the use of two hands For instance the user may need to hold down the Control or Shift key while simultaneously using the mouse While the overlay can be used more rapidly with two hands it can also be used with a single hand that positions the overlay and then positions the cursor sequen tially It can be operated by users with a disabled hand or by able bodied users who are using one hand for another task such as holding a telephone or a cup of coffee 5 08 Different Display Sizes Modern computers come with displays of many different sizes
108. tate toggles Such buttons can be placed on a palette menu as well making it possible to reduce cursor travel to these buttons by positioning them near the cursor with the non dominant hand and making it unnecessary for the user s gaze to move from the work area Also because palette menus can be large they need not fit on the screen all at once being easy to scroll on and off larger more expressive representations of the on off buttons can be used For example FIG 19 shows a set of on off buttons that are displayed as lines at different angles where the user can activate a class of snap dragging alignment objects A rect angle in the scene has its four corners and center point identified as hot points When the user clicks on a given alignment line e g the vertical line the line highlights and all objects with hot points trigger full length alignment lines of this class namely vertical alignment lines The tool is shown as also providing a numeric indication in a box at the lower right of the angle of the selected alignment line If the user had selected alignment lines at more than one angle the numeric indication would not be shown 2 08 Guidelines and Grids as Ghosts Section 2 04 described the combination of the overlay with visual filters In those examples the visual filter pre sented scene objects in different ways to facilitate operations on those scene objects However visual filters can also be used to show ob
109. ter to fv it can reach the value field of fv once it is notified that the value is now ready 4 09 Composition Routine When two or more overlays are overlapped as are over lays 1 and 2 in FIG 34B each event E is finally delivered to the receiving application application 3B in FIG 34C after having been processed by all the overlays in front to back order overlay 2 and then overlay 1 As a result the action A may describe an operation that includes contribu tions from some or all the overlays Such an action is said to be a composition of the actions that would be determined by each overlay individually In the current implementation each overlay O is respon sible for combining its action with the action that the event has accumulated at the time that O receives the event The new action can be computed from the existing action by one of a variety of methods including appending prepending deletion command alteration argument alteration or coor dinate alteration Each of these methods is described below 4 09 01 Appending A tool that appends its action simply adds the action s command list to the end of the existing command list to 5 581 670 10 20 30 45 50 55 65 34 create a compound action For example say an overlay O receives an event E whose coordinates lt x y gt are contained by tool T of O and say that tool T is a tool that changes outline colors Individually T s
110. that the user has created e g using an editor for specifying a template for a two column layout The user lifts this grid onto the customized grid tool whereupon the grid lines become a part of the tool However as with the grid tools discussed above the grid lines main tain their position even if the tool is moved so they remain as reliable reference points As a result the grid lines only appear when the grid tool is present The figure shows the user commencing to stretch a rectangle and finally snapping the rectangle into place in the lower portion of the left column One possible extension is to allow any scene object to be lifted out onto the overlay from the application This object would then become gravity active so that scene objects would snap to it allowing users to create their own custom ized guiding lines and curves 2 09 Measuring and Defining Tools Certain of the tools described above extract graphical properties of objects FIG 22 shows the use of a click through button tool that measures geometric properties namely coordinates lengths slopes and angles When the user clicks on an object comer through this tool the coor dinates of that corner are reported If the user clicks again the system reports the length and slope from the first point to the second If the user clicks a third time the system reports the angle made by the last three points clicked Tools that display information based on what the mo
111. the macro recording facility found in some pro grams This typically would require that the user place the system in a mode for macro creation then perform a desired sequence of operations on a single object The system would automatically produce a composite tool of all operations performed on this object This composite tool has a number of advantages For example if it is desired to apply the set of operations to a number of objects some of which may not yet have been drawn the application to additional objects requires a single step rather than reapplication of the entire sequence of individual operations Additionally the user can easily apply the set of operations in an exploratory manner either to single objects or to a set of simultaneously selected objects 3 05 Remembering Selected Objects A problem that sometimes arises is that a user selects a set of objects and performs a set of operations on them either all at once or individually At some later time the user may wish to modify or undo the operations The overlay can provide such a technique by providing each tool with the ability to remember what objects it has been applied to The user can then apply an operation to each of a group of objects realize that another operation is needed and recover the set of objects without having to remember the objects or 5 581 670 25 explicitly perform a selection operation This mechanism is useful even if the tools only reme
112. ticular 5 581 670 23 task at hand This section describes a number of possible ways that users can do so Further the overlay can be used more effectively if there is a simple and consistent set of conventions for the use of the overlay tools This section describes a number of ways in which users can make more effective use of the overlay 3 01 Moving Copying and Deleting Tools At the minimum the user is likely to want to create more of one kind of tool and fewer of another and position tools into clusters that are commonly used together If the user is to have the capability of participating in organizing the overlay the user should at least be provided with the capability of moving copying and deleting tools from the overlay sheet FIG 31 shows one technique for providing this capability namely providing handles that perform these operations on the tools The specific example is the rubbing tool described in connection with FIG 9 As shown in FIG 31 the handles are icons to the side of the tool for providing the desired operations The user is shown as clicking on a handle to move the tool In practice the handles on tools should probably be smaller and less detailed than those shown Alternatively the handles could be made so that they are invisible and ineffective during normal use and are only subjected to these operations in a tool editing mode 3 02 Tool Organization A typical application is likely to have a l
113. ties In general a button refers to a defined area on the display which when clicked causes an operation to occur Some of the buttons used in the overlay allow the user to control the particular result by clicking at a particular location on the button In general a menu often preceded by the adjective pull down or pop up is a list of items or properties that the user can select by clicking the menu bar or menu icon and dragging to the desired item The term palette refers to a visible collection of buttons where one or more can be selected by clicking 5 581 670 13 A tear off menu in effect substitutes a palette for a pull down or pop up menu Thus menu selection involves the single step of selecting the menu item rather than the compound step of selecting the menu from the menu bar and then selecting the menu item The term palette menu is used below to denote a palette or tear off menu that is movable with the non dominant hand and so can be brought into the work area and then moved away without distracting the user from the main task at hand Some of the specific tools described below make use of what is referred to as a visual filter a filter or a lens This refers to a technique described in a commonly owned copending application of Maureen C Stone Eric A Bier and Anthony DeRose entitled USER DIRECTED METHOD FOR OPERATING ON AN OBJECT BASED MODEL DATA STRUCTURE THROUGH A SECOND CONTEXTUAL IMAGE
114. tion the third set of signals further specifying that for at least one type of particular operation the particular opera tion interact with the application data structure in a manner that depends on the position information 21 The method of claim 20 wherein the user input facility includes a user actuated device at least one of the first and second sets of signals results from a user s actions with the user actuated device 22 The method of claim 20 wherein at least one delineated region on the overlay specifies an operation that adds an application data item to the application data structure and a selected event from the user input facility causes an application data item to be added as specified by the particular delineated region 23 The method of claim 20 wherein at least one delineated region on the overlay specifies an operation that removes an application data item from the application data structure and a selected event from the user input facility causes an application data item to be removed as specified by the particular delineated region 24 The method of claim 20 wherein at least one delineated region on the overlay specifies an operation that extracts an application data item from the application data structure and a selected event from the user input facility causes an application data item to be extracted as specified by the particular delineated region 10 15 20 25 30 35 45 5
115. to provide compound func tionality or can be caused to extract attributes from the underlying data so as to facilitate subsequent actions related to those attributes In an embodiment of the invention that operates in the context of a drawing program where the visible represen tation is a representation of a set of graphical objects the overlay may include tools for creating objects and tools for copying modifying and deleting existing objects In a hardware configuration where the set of input devices includes a pointing device such as a mouse a typical operation would entail positioning the tool at an appropriate location relative to the visible representation and clicking through the tool at an appropriate location in the visible representation It is not necessary to position the tool pre cisely In the case of an object creation tool all that is necessary is that a portion of the tool overlie the intended location of the object to be created In the case of an object modification tool all that is required is that a portion of the tool overlie at least one selectable portion of the object to be modified If the user clicks through the object modification tool on a region devoid of objects the program can ignore 10 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 65 6 the action or can interpret the action as setting a default value An important aspect of certain embodiments of the present invention is that the user can
116. tons Further the colored regions on the buttons are shown as opaque but might just as well be transparent If the color regions are transparent they can cover the entire button area A similar array of click through buttons could be provided for chang ing the outline color of an object The color for a given button could be denoted as above but with the color only applied to the perimeter of the triangular region or by having the color applied to the entire perimeter of the button FIG 8 shows an array of click through buttons used as a property palette for setting the style of text in a document Each style regular bold etc has an active area on the tool In this particular example the text describing the function of the button is located in the active area Selecting the text displayed in this area changes its style In the example shown the user is selecting text within the bold button with the result that the selected text is converted to boldface The particular event that the program recognizes as selecting text is not important so long as the event begins in the desired button If the mechanism for selecting text is drag ging the cursor over the text to be selected the user would position the starting point for selection in the active region depress the mouse button drag to complete the selection and release the mouse button The fact that the cursor would likely be outside the active region when the mouse button is
117. tors scientific visualizers or meeting support tools The overlays can be used over animated media including video and computer graphics This is a particularly compelling appli cation area because people viewing moving media are particularly reluctant to glance about from the workpiece to menus off on the side because they might miss an important event In the context of animated media the media itself may provide the event that triggers a button For example to make an object orange in a succession of frames of an animation the user might just hold down a button in the place where that object appears As each new frame is drawn the button would be applied to the object at that position in that frame automatically In addition while the emphasis above has been in the use of the overlay tools in connection with application programs the overlays can be used in window systems to position windows and set param eters of the window system such as window border colors keyboard macros and the like Therefore the above description should not be taken as limiting the scope of the invention as defined by the claims 7 0 References Bier86 Eric A Bier and Maureen C Stone Snap dragging In Proceedings of Siggraph 86 Dallas August Com puter Graphics Vol 20 No 4 ACM 1986 pages 233 240 Bier88 Eric A Bier Snap Dragging Interactive Geometric Design in Two and Three Dimensions Report No UCB CSD 88 416 April 28 1988
118. use is pointing at are also useful for word processors for example a tool could display the definition of a word that is selected through the tool 2 10 Non dominant Hand Pointing While most of the tools use the non dominant hand to position the overlay and use the dominant hand for pointing it also makes sense to use the non dominant hand for pointing if the objects to be pointed at are large For example in a text document paragraphs are usually large enough to point at with the non dominant hand FIG 23 shows a tool that reveals hidden structure of the paragraph that is under the tip of the arrow which moves with the overlay This tool always displays the name of the printing format that will be used to format this paragraph for a printer In this example the arrow points to a paragraph whose format is named body 2 11 Gesture Interpreting Tool One particularly exciting application of the overlay is to provide the user with complete local input interpreters For example a drawing program might normally interpret mouse input as a set of commands such as select move create line and so forth e g see Rubine s work on editing graphics with gestures Rubine91 or Goldberg and Good isman s work on editing text with gestures Goldberg91 By positioning a gesture interpreting tool over the scene the user might interact with that same editor in a different way For example in FIG 24 the user draws an X on
119. users draw new tools and collections of tools using a graphical editor and then apply behavior e g click through button functionality to these graphical forms where the behavior is expressed in a user customization language 3 07 Zooming and Scrolling There are two equivalent ways for the user to position a sheet of the overlay over an application The scene can remain fixed while the user moves the overlay over the scene or the overlay can remain fixed while the user moves the scene under the overlay It makes sense to provide both of these kinds of functionality to the user Scrolling the application allows the user to bring off screen parts of an application to an on screen tool making manipulation of large applications possible Scrolling the overlay over the application allows the user to bring off screen tools to on screen application objects making the use of large sheets of the overlay possible References to positioning the over lay relative to the visible representation should be taken to include rotation as well as translation While it is possible to move an overlay sheet by depress ing a mouse button and dragging on the border of the sheet using the dominant hand the use of the non dominant hand and the second input device e g trackball is preferred One way of mapping trackball buttons to these functions is as follows Clicking the left button causes the trackball and thumbwheel to scroll and zoom respectively the
120. usly translated and scaled two corners of a triangle allowing the triangle to be simultaneously translated rotated and scaled 2 02 Click Through Buttons In most user interfaces the text describing the operation a button performs is placed within the active region of the button itself However on the overlay it is often preferable to have a transparent active region with text an icon or other visible indicium indicating the operation near the active region This allows the user to apply an operation to the objects that are visible within the button Each active region is referred to as a click through button Click through buttons can also be used to pick up object properties FIG 6 shows click through buttons for Delete Move and Copy operations and the sequence of operations for deleting an object the ellipse from the scene The user positions the overlay so that the Delete button is over a group of objects while pointing at one of these objects with the cursor In certain implementations while the mouse button is down the system highlights the object that will be operated upon if the mouse button is released at the current time When the user releases the mouse button the selected object is deleted While several objects intersect the Delete button only the object that the user indicates with the mouse cursor is actually deleted This allows precise specification of oper ands Also click through buttons allow the user
121. while allowing users to begin an operation in the tool and then continue it outside 3 11 Combining Click Through Tools and the Overlay with Conventional Tools As mentioned above conventional tools can be used in conjunction with overlay tools or can be used as overlay tools themselves A possible scenario is where the overlay with click through tools is provided as an upgrade to an existing program Users familiar with an earlier version of the program which used a conventional user interface might wish to proceed cautiously in the face of a powerful new user interface Thus the user might decide to keep most of the conventional tools as a series of palettes that are movable with the mouse cursor but add a few of these tools to the overlay As the user became more familiar with the use of the overlay and the use of the non dominant hand for positioning tools quickly and conveniently the user could add more tools to the overlay The user might first create one or more overlay sheets with conventional tools only start experimenting with a few click through tools and later mix the click through tools with conventional tools on the same sheet It is also possible to compose click through tools with conventional tools For example a click through color pal ette such as shown in FIG 7 could be combined with a set of conventional modal shape creation tools of the type where the user clicks on a tool and then moves the cursor to the drawing
122. y Sheet 4 of 16 5 581 670 SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention provides a user interface technique that allows a user to perform many common tasks with fewer actions thereby significantly enhancing productivity The technique makes use of actions with which the user tends to be familiar and therefore may be iearned rather quickly FIG 8 U S Patent Dec 3 ig Sheet 5 of 16 5 581 670 FIG 12 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 6 of 16 5 581 670 U S Patent Dec 3 D Sheet 7 of 16 5 581 670 T a rt o m i e i FIG 19 U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 8 of 16 1 Introduction Interfaces based on mpuse and keyboard have become dominant in recent years Format Except during typing these interfaces make a very uneven use of the user s two B ds n general thej strong dominant hand i e the right hand for right handed ody partakes of a righ interaction with the mouse while the weak non dominant hand is relggated to occasionally holding down a modifier key There is little opportunity in such interfaces to perform independent tasks simultaneously Furthermore the dominant hand spends time switching from one task to another more often than is necessary U S Patent Dec 3 1996 Sheet 9 of 16 5 581 670 LN abcdefghijklmnopgrs ABCDEFGHIJKLMN abcdefghijklmno ABCDEFGHIJKL abcdefghijklmnoparst ABCDEFGHIIKLM abedefghijklmno ABCDEFGHIJKL abcdefgh
123. y as a summing node 82 and converted to the final display image designated 83 The particular technique for combining the image data structures should ensure that the overlay appear 25 30 35 45 50 55 65 10 as a transparent sheet with opaque or partly transparent indicia As will be discussed below the overlay may include what are referred to as visual filters or may include tools that incorporate visual filters In such embodiments the sum ming node can also operate to distort or filter portions of the display image The specifics of the overlay configuration and appearance will be described below in connection with a description of various tool embodiments The see through interface of the present invention requires relative positioning of three conceptual user inter face layers a cursor layer an overlay layer and an appli cation layer The cursor layer at its minimum is defined by a distinguished point in the plane a cursor position along with one or more visible objects that move rigidly with that distinguished point The overlay layer at its minimum includes a set of tools that move together in a coordinated fashion The application layer includes one or more pro grams with visible representations Each of these layers may in turn consist of sub layers For example the cursor may carry a drag and drop object with it the tools of the overlay may be made by layering simpler tools on top of each other

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