First Steps

We are currently in the research and learning phase of our project.

Our first "milestone" will be an exposition of our ideas and a rough prototype of the tool, at the present term HCI class, taught by Dr. Katherine Chiluiza. Dr. Chiluiza is one of our main advisors :), she also proposed the idea for our project.

While researching about sketch recognition we stumbled upon LADDER. LADDER is a multi-domain sketch recognition framework. Actually, LADDER is a sketch description language. The framework takes the description file and generates a recognizer for the figure. It has been very interesting and we've learned a lot while learning to use it. Using the language, we have been able to write recognizers for the main building blocks for the GUI prototyping domain. Following is the short description of the building blocks and (although roughly) how they were described:

Window
- HorizontalRectangle
- horizontal Line

OKButton (in window)
- HorizontalRectangle
- contained Check

CancelButton (in window)
- HorizontalRectangle
- contained X

TextArea (in window)
- HorizontalRectangle
- contained T

ComboBox (in window)
- HorizontalRectangle
- contained Triangle

CheckBox (in window)
- Square
- Check
- Label (to the right)

RadioButton (in window)
- Ellipse
- Label (to the right)

ListBox (in window)
- HorizontalRectangle
- 3 horizontal Lines

Spinner (in window)
- ComboBox
- contained Square
- contained Triangle
- Square contains Triangles

Slider (in window)
- Line
- Triangle
- Line intersects Triangle

TabbedPane (in window)
- 2 HorizontalRectangles
- coincident h1.bottomLeft h2.topLeft

We are very enthusiastic about what we have achieved in this short time. We have several steps to go, but it seems that we are on the right track for now.