InterUnit-UI: a new UI-design approach

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InterUnit-UI is a new approach for developing a UI on any device. It is specially useful for high-value or mission-critical enterprise apps.

It is based on a newly developed, temporal approach to UI represention, that makes UI design a lot simpler and results in apps with far better ergonomics.

It is most similar in function to the Flutter framework, which have been designed using legacy UI-design approaches.

The InterUnit-UI app-UI design framework has been designed with the goal of improving the ergonomic-efficiency of apps, running on PC or mobile devices.

It uses several techniques to do this:

1. 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. Instead, it uses a visual layout technique, focused around the center of the screen for the presentation of all information to the user.
2. On a device running a WIMP-based UI:

•  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 this UI.
• It minimizes 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 usage of mouse-drag operations. 

InterUnit-UI represents a user-interface as a sequence of temporal "interface-units".

The represention does not include any spatial-layout related concepts such as controls, views or widgets.

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 optimized to achieve ergonomic-efficiency.

A special InterUnit called the EngagementManager interfaces with the underlying OS's display and input peripheral access system.

It serves as a front-end controller 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.

Since InterUnit-UI is not based on WIMP or the model-view-controller paradigm or a variation of these, it is a lot simpler to understand and design using.

We provide an SDK to produce InterUnits that includes 3 elements:

1. An EngagementManager class.
2. An abstract SInterUnit struct.
3. A Hex-navigator InterUnit.

The SDK also includes a CodeEditor specially written for InterUnit-UI development.

This CodeEditor can be used in conjunction with the platform's native tool-chain to produce an app.

InterUnit-UI is best suited for use in high-value and mission-critical apps such as apps designed for enterprises. All apps have low-level access to all device capabilities and are easy to secure and deploy across PC and mobile devices.

The consistency of the UI design approach makes it easy to switch from one device to another even though device form-factors and UI peripherals are different.

Typical app categories include custom apps, CAD tools and cientific data visualisation tools.

1. On WIMP-based devices:

• 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.

2. On mobile devices:

• An on-screen escape button convention is defined.

Since the user interacts with a single InterUnit at a time,

each InterUnit can be optimized for ergonomic-efficiency independently. 

This makes the development of an InterUnit a lot simpler

since the initial code can be refined over time.

The SDK is always provided as source code,

which the developer may modify.

It includes source-code for a CodeEditor InterUnit.

This editor can parse/edit/store C/C++ code, HTML and CSS.