Morphing a NUI with SoftNC

TriTeal's SoftNC has a cool feature unique among NUIs -- it can instantly change the appearance of its interface after a single mouse-click. To switch among styles that resemble Windows 95, Motif, or Unix CDE, users simply click on a button in a control panel. It's the neatest trick since the morphing metallic robot in Terminator 2.

SoftNC can change its look in this m anner because the interface isn't hard-coded into the software. Instead, a proprietary description language that's similar to H TML controls the screen layout and the appearance of all the windows and widgets.

TriTeal's description language is called the SoftNC Presentation Language (SPL). An SPL script describes how a GUI should look, but it doesn't actually draw the graphics on the screen. To do that, TriTeal wrote its own library of Java classes. TriTeal's classes are broad enough to mimic almost any GUI and can adapt to different screen resolutions, color palettes, and screen types -- even monochrome displays on hand-held devices.

The new classes reside on the SoftNC client (usually an NC). When SoftNC receives a message to change the desktop's appearance, it calls upon those classes to draw the interface described by the SPL script. The mechanism for these and other types of messages in SoftNC is based on the Inter-ORB Communications Protocol (IOCP).

Mes sages can originate locally or anywhere on a network. They are encoded as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) attachments. A message might include some data and an SPL script, or a URL pointing to an SPL script elsewhere on the network. In this way, a server can centrally control SoftNC's desktop by dispatching MIME messages to all SoftNC clients.