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Series in
Computer Science
Edited by Thomas M. Stricker
Vol. 6
Thomas Frey,
Bluebottle:
A Thread-safe Multimedia and GUI
Framework for Active Oberon
2005; XVI, 176 pages/Seiten, € 64,00. ISBN 3-86628-011-4
Thirty years after the first introduction of the desktop
metaphor as a means of human computer interaction in general purpose computers,
this thesis reconsiders and evaluates interaction methods on a technical and
conceptual level in the light of the progress of hardware and software
technology over the last decades. Notably the increased CPU speed and memory
capacity, specialized processor instruction set extensions, and a clear recent
trend to commodity multiprocessor systems and multi-threaded processors lead to
new implementation requirements and decisions. Modern computer systems deliver
the computational power for innovative extensions of the traditional desktop
metaphor.
We describe the concepts and architecture of a new general purpose graphical
user interface and multimedia framework and their thread-safe implementations
in Active Oberon. The proposed user interface combines in a
new way elements taken from the traditional desktop metaphor with
interaction techniques known from zoomable and
textual user interfaces. A concurrent display space manager with support for
translucent free-form windows in a conceptually unlimited zoomable
display space was developed and serves as proof of the feasibility of the
proposed interaction concepts as well as for the evaluation and discussion of
new implementation strategies designed for today’s systems. The multimedia
framework consists of abstract APIs for different multimedia formats and a
plug-in structure for concrete implementations.
While the discussed framework can take advantage of one or more general purpose
CPUs with possibly specialized instruction set extensions for multimedia or
vector calculations, it is designed not to rely on any special purpose hardware
for graphics acceleration. The design for modern general purpose processors
offers several advantages over a design for special purpose hardware. One of
the main advantages is the simple system architecture that matches or
outperforms commercial hardware accelerated systems in common situations
through structural advantages. It also allows the system to be easily ported to
different hardware platforms, especially to small devices such as wearable
computers. The portability of the framework has been demonstrated with a port
to the QBIC wearable computer that has been developed at ETH Zürich.
The framework has been developed on top of the multiprocessor implementation of
the Active Object Runtime System for Intel SMP systems and the single processor
ports for the ARM and XSCALE processors.
Keywords: Active
Oberon, Bluebottle, GUI, Thread safety, Component system, Unicode, Multimedia
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