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Application Posture
The term application posture characterizes the nature of a software application's interaction with its user. The term was coined by Alan Cooper, who characterized four 'postures' for applications: sovereign, transient, daemonic and parasitic. * A sovereign application is a program that monopolizes the user's attention for long periods of time. * Cooper defined transient applications thus: 'A transient posture program comes and goes, presenting a single, high-relief function with a tightly restricted set of accompanying controls. The program is called when needed, it appears and performs its job, then it quickly leaves, letting the user continue her more normal activity, usually a sovereign application.' * Daemonic applications are background processes that require no direct user interaction. * Parasitic or Auxiliary applications are similar to transient applications in providing a limited, focused set of functionality and occupy a small space, but they are shown persistently and c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Application
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). Machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also invoke one of many input or output operations, for example displaying some text on a computer screen; causing state changes which should be visible to the user. The processor executes the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instruct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactivity
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but most definitions are related to interaction between users and computers and other machines through a user interface. Interactivity can however also refer to interaction between people. It nevertheless usually refers to interaction between people and computers – and sometimes to interaction between computers – through software, hardware, and networks. Multiple views on interactivity exist. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels: #Not interactive, when a message is not related to previous messages. #Reactive, when a message is related only to one immediately previous message. #Interactive, when a message is related to a number of previous messages and to the relationship between them. One body of research has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books ''About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design'' and ''The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity''. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows "for his invention of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering work in establishing the field of interaction design and its fundamental tools." Biography Early life Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California, United States where he attended the College of Marin, studying architecture. He learned programming and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Attention
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data (at around one megabyte per second) can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness. Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Desk Accessory
A desk accessory (DA) in computing is a small transient or auxiliary application that can be run concurrently in a desktop environment with any other application on the system. Early examples, such as Sidekick and Macintosh desk accessories, used special programming models to provide a small degree of multitasking on systems that initially did not have any other multitasking ability. Personal information managers Early personal information managers, such as Norton Desktop and Borland's Sidekick, provided pop-up calculator, alarm, calendar and other functions for single-tasking operating systems like MS-DOS using terminate-and-stay-resident techniques. Apple Macintosh Introduced in 1984 as part of the operating system for the Apple Macintosh computer, a Desk Accessory (DA) was a piece of software written as a device driver, conforming to a particular programming model. The purpose of this model was to permit very small helper-type applications to be run concurrently with any ot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helper Application
A helper application is an external viewer program launched to display content retrieved using a web browser. Some examples include JPEGview, Windows Media Player, QuickTime Player, Real Player and Adobe Reader. Unlike a plugin whose full code is included into the browser's address space, a helper application is a standard application, typically an image viewer or similar type lacking full save functionality. The use of helper applications was more common in the early days of the World Wide Web, when HTML and file formats were still becoming standardized and computers were less powerful. Users of a slower computer could configure their browser to hand off all images using a helper application, which would cause the browser to display a standard icon as a placeholder. The user could click the icon only for images they wished to view, thus saving time and bandwidth. In addition, it was considered important for early browsers to be able to keep an image illustrating a figure or grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computing Terminology
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, engineering, mathematical, technological and social aspects. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology and software engineering. The term "computing" is also synonymous with counting and calculating. In earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by mechanical computing machines, and before that, to human computers. History The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper (or for chalk and slate) with or without the aid of tables. Computing is intimately tied to the representation of numbers, though mathematical concep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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