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PyMT: a post-WIMP multi-touch user interface toolkit

Published: 23 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Multi-touch and tabletop input paradigms open novel doors for post-WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) user interfaces. Developing these novel interfaces and applications poses unique challenges for designers and programmers alike. We present PyMT (Python Multi-Touch), a toolkit aimed at addressing these challenges. We discuss PyMT's architecture and sample applications to demonstrate how it enables rapid development of prototypes and interaction techniques while being accessible to novice programmers and providing great flexibility and creative freedom to advanced users. We share experiences gathered in the open source development of PyMT to explore design and programming challenges posed by multi-touch tabletop and post-WIMP interfaces. Specifically, we discuss changes to the event model and the implementation of development and debugging tools that we found useful along the way.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITS '09: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
November 2009
240 pages
ISBN:9781605587332
DOI:10.1145/1731903
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 November 2009

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Author Tags

  1. GUI
  2. Python
  3. UI toolkits
  4. graphics
  5. multi-touch
  6. open source
  7. post-WIMP
  8. user interfaces

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  • (2018)IMRCEProceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/3267782.3267794(48-59)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Evaluation Strategies for HCI Toolkit ResearchProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173610(1-17)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2018)Resolving display shape dependence issues on tabletopsComputational Visual Media10.1007/s41095-018-0124-x4:4(349-365)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2018
  • (2018)MIODMIT: A Generic Architecture for Dynamic Multimodal Interactive SystemsHuman-Centered Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-05909-5_7(109-129)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2018
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