Impulse-86: a substrate for object-oriented interface design

TL;DR: Impulse-86 provides a general and extensible substrate upon which to construct a wide variety of interactive user interfaces for developing, maintaining, and using knowledge-based systems.

Abstract: Impulse-86 provides a general and extensible substrate upon which to construct a wide variety of interactive user interfaces for developing, maintaining, and using knowledge-based systems. The system is based on five major building blocks: Editor, Editor Window, PropertyDisplay, Menu, and Operations. These building blocks are interconnected via a uniform framework and each has a well-defined set of responsibilities in an interface.Customized interfaces can be designed by declaratively replacing some of the building blocks in existing Impulse-86 templates. Customization may involve a wide range of activities, ranging from simple override of default values or methods that control primitive operations (e.g., font selection), to override of more central Impulse-86 methods (e.g., template instantiation). Most customized interfaces require some code to be written—to handle domain-specific commands. However, in all cases, the Impulse-86 substrate provides considerable leverage by taking care of the low-level details of screen, mouse, and keyboard manipulation.Impulse-86 is implemented in Strobe, a language that provides object-oriented programming support for Lisp. This simplifies customization and extension.