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What interfaces mean: a history and sociology of computer windows

Published: 03 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This poster presents a cursory look at the history of windows in Graphical User Interfaces. It examines the controversy between tiling and overlapping window managers and explains that controversy's sociological importance: windows are control devices, enabling their users to manage their activity and attention. It then explores a few possible reasons for the relative disappearance of windowing in recent computing devices. It concludes with a recapitulative typology.

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}}Bly, S. A. and Rosenberg, J. K. (1986). A Comparison of Tiled and Overlapping Windows. CHI'86, 101--106.
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}}Bolter, J. D. and Gromala, D. (2003). Windows and mirrors. MIT Press Cambridge.
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}}Friedberg, A. (2006). The virtual window: from Alberti to Microsoft. The MIT Press.
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}}Kay, A. (1969). The Reactive Engine. University of Utah. http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.htm.
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}}Kay, A. (1993). The early history of Smalltalk. Proceedings of the second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages, 69--95.
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}}Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
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}}litl philosophy. http://litl.com/essays/philosophy.ht.
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}}Miyata, Y. and Norman, D. A (1986). Psychological issues in support of multiple activities. User centered system design, 265--284.
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}}Moggridge, B. (2006). Designing Interactions. The MIT Press, chapter 1.
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}}Myers, B. A. (1988). A Taxonomy of Window Manager User Interfaces. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., 8(5), 65--84.
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '10: Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2010
    126 pages
    ISBN:9781450304627
    DOI:10.1145/1866218

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 03 October 2010

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    1. activity
    2. history
    3. sociology
    4. windows

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