The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 16, 1999
Filed:
Jul. 03, 1997
Thomas J Walton, Colorado Springs, CO (US);
Kipper K Fulghum, Colorado Springs, CO (US);
Thomas R Batcha, Colorado Springs, CO (US);
Michael T Juran, Highlands Ranch, CO (US);
Eric J Kuzara, Colorado Springs, CO (US);
Thomas F Kraemer, Corvalis, OR (US);
Roy L Johnson, Fort Collins, CO (US);
Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A system for providing a simple, easy to learn and flexible means of creating user interfaces to products under development without the need of a programming language or the need to learn a large set of complicated commands. The Visual Software Engineering ('VSE') system of the invention uses a simple concept of defining both input to and output from graphical objects in an object-oriented system by providing examples of what the user desires the graphical object to do. This technique is referred to herein as 'animation by example'. In accordance with this process, the user creates a user interface by drawing the user interface with a graphics editor and then defining the output behavior (i.e., graphics manipulation) of the user interface components by showing each state or frame as an animation. This is accomplished by changing the object using a graphic editor function such as move or rotate and storing each of the frames with the object as a behavior state. Just as with defining the output, the input is defined by giving the graphic object an example of what type of input to look for, and once it finds that input, it tells the object which frame to output or change to. Application code can then drive the animation or read the input by accessing the frame numbers assigned to each of the example frames.