CMSI 370
IN T E R A C T I O N DE S I G N
Fall 2006
Assignment 0914
This assignment is meant to get your feet wet with Swing and for you to learn CVS hands-on (if you don’t
already know it).
Not for Submission
1. Read Chapter 2 from Shneiderman/Plaisant.
2. Read Chapter 5 from Nielsen.
For Submission
Putting together Swing user interfaces takes a lot of
practice, particularly in the pure layout/positioning
area. The kind of programming specified in this
assignment should eventually become second na-
ture for you, because in the long run, layout/
positioning will be the least of your interaction de-
sign problems!
What to Do
Choose at least three (3) user interface displays of
sufficient complexity from existing software, and
replicate their look and layout with Swing. While
there are no hard rules for “sufficient complexity,”
these characteristics can serve as a guide:
•At least four (4) distinct types of atomic compo-
nents (i.e., labels, buttons, text fields, check
boxes, radio buttons, sliders, menu items, etc.)
•At least ten (10) actual components (e.g., 3 but-
tons, 4 labels, 2 text fields, and 2 check boxes)
•Genuine 2-dimensional layout — so, no toolbars
•Multipanel interface (e.g., tabs, master-detail,
previous-next)
Good candidates include: preference, configura-
tion, or setup dialogs; non-trivial data entry win-
dows; control panels; instrumentation displays.
When in doubt, show me the interface and I can
tell you if it’s complex enough.
Submit each of your “facsimiles” as self-contained
source code trees with Java source starting at src/
and an Ant build.xml script at the top-level direc-
tory. Your build.xml must have at least these tar-
gets: compile, for (duh) compiling the code; run, to
invoke your main method; and clean, for restoring
the directory to its “pristine” state.
How to Turn it In
Since I will access your work electronically, you
must follow the instructions below to the letter, down
to the capitalization. Many of these steps are for ini-
tial setup only, and subsequent submissions won’t
be quite so involved:
1. Your Keck lab account already comes with two
CVS subdirectories, projects and homework.
2. Caskey has prepared a script for setting up your
CVS directories so that I can read/write them
— ask him how to get to it, and run it.
3. On any computer that you will use for your
school work, check out homework.
4. Under your local copy of homework, create a
cmsi370 subdirectory.
The above steps should be one-time only; now for
the stuff that’s specific to this assignment.
5. Under the checked-out homework/cmsi370 direc-
tory, create a facsimiles subdirectory.
6. Place each of your facsimile programs in its
own subdirectory under homework/cmsi370/
facsimiles. For best results, stick with all-lower
case directory names, without spaces.
7. Add then commit the files to CVS. When in
doubt, cvs update to verify file statuses.
8. Tag the files in CVS as hw-0914.
For example, if you decided to name your 3 fac-
similes explorer, thunderbird, and gaim, respectively,
then your final CVS depot tree will look like this:
.cvs/homework/cmsi370/facsimiles
explorer/
build.xml
src/
thunrderbird/
build.xml
src/
gaim/
build.xml
src/