Improved ergonomic efficiency
It has been designed with the goal of improving the ergonomic-efficiency of PC-apps.
It uses several techniques to do this:
- It does away away with the Menubar at the top, and the taskbar or status bar at the bottom of the screen, to reduce visual screen-clutter.
- It uses a visual layout technique generally focused around the center of the screen for the presentation of any information to the user.
- It minimises the need to switch between mouse and keyboard operation in the course of any user-input sequence.
- It eliminates use of the mouse for fine-grained screen-space selection and reduces the usage of mouse-drag operations.
- It eliminates the use of windows.
Operations such as resizing and aligning of windows, and, in general, window layout, are no longer needed in the usage of the UI.
InterUnit-UI design paradigm
InterUnit-UI presents a user-interface as a sequence of temporal interface-units called InterUnits.
Each InterUnit presents an interface behavior to service a specific user-goal.
It has full access to the screen and all user-input peripherals.
InterUnits can be independently optimised for ergonomic-efficiency.
A special InterUnit called the EngagementManager interfaces with the underlying OS's WIMP window.
It serves as a front-end control for all other InterUnits.
It loads and unloads other InterUnits and manages the current engagement session with the user.
It also maintains some history of app usage.
Development advantages over WIMP
- Simpler development process.
- Minimal InterUnit design conventions
- Easy to optimize the UI for use-ability
- Simple developer access to the SDK
Simpler development process
We provide a CodeEditor included in the InterUnit SDK on a per-platform basis.
This CodeEditor can be used to develop an InterUnit.
Minimal InterUnit design conventions
- The keyboard's Arrows are always used for vertical and horizontal navigation.
- The ESCAPE key always exits the current InterUnit by popping it off the InterUnit-Stack.
If the current InterUnit is the EngagementManager, the app exits. - Ctrl-H always brings up the current InterUnit's UI conventions.
Easy to optimize the UI for use-ability
Since the user interacts with a single InterUnit at a time,each InterUnit can be optimized for use-ability independently.
This makes the development of any InterUnit a lot simplersince the initial code can be refined over time.
Simple developer access to the SDK
The SDK is always provided as source code, which the developer may modify.
It includes a CodeEditor InterUnit-app as source-code.
InterUnit-UI Deployment and Licensing
- Deployment
- Copyright and intellectual property.
- Whom we license to.
- Individual Developer Licenses.
- Team Licences.
- OEM Licences.
Deployment -- Ergonomix
InterUnit-UI will be made accessible to developers via an app called Ergonomix.
Copyright and intellectual property.
Khitchdee Design is applying for copyright and intellectual property protection for InterUnit-UI technology.
Our intellectual property attorneys are Mendelsohn Dunleavy, PC.
Whom we license to.
We license Ergonomix to developers, development teams, universities and large organisations and we license the InterUnit-UI SDK to PC OEMs.
Individual developers or development teams use Ergonomix to develop and deploy InterUnits inside PC, tablet or smartphone apps.
PC OEMs may license the InterUnit-UI SDK to create OS front-end alternatives to WIMP.
Individual Developer Licenses.
An individual developer may license Ergonomix for $50 / year (TBD)
Team Licences.
A small development team (<10 people) may also license Ergonomix for $500 (TBD).
A single team license may be used by all members of a team.
Larger organisations and universities can license Ergonomix at negotiated annual rates.
OEM Licences.
OEMs may license the InterUnit-UI SDK to develop UI front-ends for an PC or mobile OS.
These licenses are negotiated and on a per seat basis.
Planned platform support
After the wxWidgets SDK, we plan to release native versions for other platforms such as: