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The Almighty Buck Technology

Integrating A GUI Into An Existing Medical Device 129

Posted by Hemos from the build-it-from-the-bottom-up dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "As I'm not quite familiar with medical devices, I was fascinated by this long article from Medical Electronics Manufacturing. It tells us that "new technology makes graphical user interfaces (GUIs) a fast and cost-effective way to add features and improve on existing designs" of these medical devices. And it really looks simple to use. You just need a standard PC and an HTML authoring tool to develop your GUI. It is then compiled in micro-HTML and embedded in silicon, leading to a graphical OS chip which doesn't need to be powerful or have tons of memory. "The GUI shipped with the Amulet Technologies starter kit, for example, contains almost half a megabit of information in HTML. When all of the gifs, widgets, and other files are imported and compiled into micro-HTML, the file size is reduced to a mere 66 Kb of memory." This overview contains more details and a photograph of such a GUI at work."
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Integrating A GUI Into An Existing Medical Device More

Integrating A GUI Into An Existing Medical Device

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  • Micro HTML eh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by nizcolas ( 597301 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:07AM (#7297913) Homepage Journal
    How long before we get the first micro pop up ad?
    • . [goatse.cx]

      Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
      Reason: You can type more than that for your comment.
    • I work for a medical imaging company; we don't make devices like ultrasounds, but our image viewing software displays the images they take. I've already had a few calls for users about Messenger popups advertising cheap university degrees, on Windows-based ultrasounds. MicroHTML sounds all well and good, but it's about 10 years behind the times for medical devices. Most medical devices these days are running either a full or embedded OS (often Windows-based for ultrasounds, and some flavour of Unix for
      • I've already had a few calls for users about Messenger popups advertising cheap university degrees, on Windows-based ultrasounds. MicroHTML sounds all well and good, but it's about 10 years behind the times for medical devices.

        How can you put these two statements next to each other and not notice something is wrong?

        Behind the times? Was the Saturn V behind the times because it could only carry 3 passengers when a car could already carry 4?

        I don't want someone playing solitare on the X-ray machine. There
        • Yes, a MicroHTML interface embedded in silicon is behind the times for medical devices, because very few of them use embedded silicon for anything anymore. The average medical device does far more than you could hope to embed in silicon without blowing the cost of the unit sky-high. On top of that, users want the ability to upgrade the unit's capabilities quickly and easily. I agree that, obviously, the security on those ultrasounds that allow Messenger popups is terrible, but I have no control over how

  • Who wrote this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JoshuaDFranklin ( 147726 ) * <.moc.oohay. .ta. ... nilknarfdauhsoj.> on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:11AM (#7297930) Homepage
    Jim Todd is director of sales and marketing for Amulet Technologies

    Makes you wonder if any of it is true.

    • Re:Who wrote this? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It pretty much is. He's a nice guy too.

      I'm working on a commercial product using Amulet Technologies' chip (really!), and it's very nice. The compiler could be a bit more verbose, and you could have a bit finer grained control over the functionality of the GUI module, but the rapid development and ease of coding are really quite good. You can whip together a GUI very, very quickly, using HTML and standard graphics files. There is a dizzying array of functionality available - wiping graphics such as the

    • Re:Who wrote this? (Score:5, Informative)

      by westendgirl ( 680185 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:21AM (#7297969) Homepage
      I'm a marketing freelancer & consultant who frequently ghostwrites articles and success stories for companies. It's unlikely that the director of marketing wrote the article. More likely, a coordinator or specialist wrote it -- or they outsourced to a freelancer. So you're not even getting the goods from a senior manager. :)
      In fact, even when you see an article with a byline that credits an engineer or other techie, there's a huge chance that someone in marketing wrote it. This doesn't mean that the article is garbage. It just means that they interviewed the techs and wrote it up. The tech people still have to sign off on it. When something that isn't true goes through, I find it's often because the techies weren't willing to take the time to read it through before signing off on it. Of course, I admit that sometimes the marketers go off on a Dilbert-style tangent. But that's often because no one takes the time to read their stuff before okaying it!
      Still, I have to admit that Amulet took a bizarre step in crediting its marketing director. Usually, you could find *someone* in R&D to take the credit. ;)

      • Your making the assumption that marketing always give the techie the right to vet what is being written by marketing, or that the techie will be credited with what they have done.

        In my experience marketing seem to believe they are a law unto themselves - even going so far as to claim that accuracy isn't important in the things they put out.

        Marketing are grouped with lawyers and accountants for a reason.

        • I'm not assuming that the techies always vet the materials -- I am just saying that it is frequently the case. And, usually, the techie/programmer/engineer gets the byline because it lends credibility to the story. All the quotes in press releases are made up, too, but the CEO (or whoever is cited) has to sign off.

          If you are dealing with marketers who don't care about accuracy, you are dealing with people who do not deserve to be called professional marketers. The marketer's role should be to help the cli

    • Hello, I am the E&E Public Relations Media Manager for Amulet Technologies. It's a pleasure to work with Amulet Technologies. What you read was completely legitimate and 100% true. Amulet has a solution that is so practical, it makes you wonder why someone didn't come up with it a long time ago. The potential applications are endless! I've watched Jim Todd demo this solution and witnessed just how amazed and enthralled designers are. This is legitimate and very exciting.
  • From "almost half a megabit" to 66kb?

    500,000 bits is 62,500 bytes.

    I hope they meant 0.5 megabytes.

  • Cannot avoid thinking of Therac (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EggSausageBaconAndSp ( 718656 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:15AM (#7297943)
    I cannot read such an article without thinking of the Therac-25 catastrophe (several people being killed or severely injured because of a poorly designed X-ray device).

    My 2 cents: When developing a medical device, don't focus on a nice'n'cool UI, but on safety.
    • Safety does also include making it easy and intuitive for people to use it so that they can operate it safely..
    • Safety and ease-of-use are interconnected. I participated in a project where we did replace an old text-based menu system (designed in the 1980's) using a tcl/tk on top of a largish medical Fortran-based simulation and planning system. I am pretty sure that the gui actually made it safer to use. The selection of tcl was done at a time when python was still at 1.3, and leaked memory like hell. Today, I would choose Python for the gui-building tool, if I would have to add a GUI to a system like that. However
    • But...

      The accident was because of an uncool UI! The uncool UI showed 5 where there should be 5000.
      How uncool is that! With a cool UI that would never have happened.
    • I cannot read such an article without thinking of the Therac-25 catastrophe (several people being killed or severely injured because of a poorly designed X-ray device).

      My 2 cents: When developing a medical device, don't focus on a nice'n'cool UI, but on safety.

      Or rather, focus on building a good and simple UI so that there are no chances for mistakes.
    • I was just at a lecture about the Therac disaster. The fact that it had a bad, uninformative UI was a factor in the disaster. In no way was it "nice'n'cool".

      It was text-based, and you basically pressed particular keys to get it to do things (for example 'e' put it in electron mode, 'p' performed a pulse, I think.) The problem happened when the technician kept pressing a key, thinking that an error had occurred and that nothing was happening. Meanwhile the patient was getting painfully zapped by the Therac
      • the gui should be able to show that internal state, and inform of problems.

        which quite well defeats the 'easy' part of the gui building.

        as well as why would you go with a budget solution that can be developed on your home pc on a _medical_device_? like, maybe for a thermometer.. but that's just about as far as the line goes. however it seems like a real nice kit to develop user interfaces for other machinery, vcr's, home automation, hobby projects,cd players & etc(where budget solution IS preferable y
      • I KNOW this is slashdot, and I KNOW that most people here probably think a UNIX command line is better than a proper GUI, but for non-programmers, such as medical technicians, a GUI is far better way to interact with complex devices. I'd much sooner that my doctors were using devices with GUIs rather than cryptic key sequences or commands.

        I agree. This is the scene I pictured when I thought of dostors using a CLI.

        Doctor:What was that command again?

        [doctor@hospital doctor]$ dd if=/dev/xray of=/mnt/p

  • Actually, many do run MS OS's (Score:5, Informative)

    by eericson ( 103272 ) <harlequin@eCHEETAHarthlink.net minus cat> on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:16AM (#7297946) Homepage
    You'd actually be suprised how many systems run Winnt or 98 as their OS. A good example are the Siemens Allegra series ultrasound systems (mid range, specializes in General Imaging, not cardio). They run WINNT as a backend with a custom app handling HW interaction. (Which is causing an interesting political battle with their Semi-Recent aquisition, and my old employer, Acuson. All of our systems ran a custom build of Linx OS as the OS with UI in X11.

    Most of the MRI, CT, and PACS systems are built on industrial grade Unix OSs, but you'll still see a ton of MS around on the lower end devices.

    • I've gotten Laser eye corrective surgery (LASIK). A friend of mine accompanied me to the surgery, he didn't tell me until after the operation that the $1 000 000 surgical Laser had a controller screen running Win98.

      Some complain about using Win98? Well, *I* have had it fire Laser beams at my eyes :)
      • You sure it was really $1,000,000.00? I bet it was only $250,000.00 which is expensive enough that most generalize as "$1million" :)

        • Actually, when I take a closer look at the exchange rates (I'm Norwegian), it's more like $870,000. And yeah, about that I'm pretty sure, as I know the surgeon well. It was a big investment for him.

          That specialized Laser equipment can be expensive, you know :)
      • That would certainly worry me.

        Some years ago we bought some MIL1553 chips which had been labelled with a laser.

        They were all recalled because someone had installed a network card on the Windows machine. The network card driver interrupted the laser writing process long enough for the laser to burn through the package.
    • I still work for them. The political battle is essentially over, and the forces from Redmond have won, a there are a few holdouts like me continuing the underground resistance.

      Siemens Windows strategy is strange. It's a result of wishful thinking, marketspeak, and reality, all colliding a lightspeed. They've declared the number one ultrasound platform in the market (Sequoia) to be obsolete, while their shiny new WinNT based system (Antares) has abysmal sales. They can't admit that Antares is a failure, but
      • Oh geez, it's not that bad. It's not like Stanford refused to acept delivery on them or anything...

        (Off topic, but I can one up you. I'm the sucker that gets to integrate SF General's brand spanking new KinetDx system with their Nova Rad.... OH HAPPY DAYS!)
    • Medical tech is a very, very slow industry much like industrial controls mentioned last week. It takes a company like Siemens 3-5 years just to get a new technology [like a change from Unix to Windows] from the drawing board to the field. Most of these companies didn't start a windows push til the very late 90's! It's almost ironic that the push NOW is from Windows to Linux...These poor guys just can't win after all.

    • In my previous job I worked for a company here in the UK making MRI control systems. The most important customers were Chinese hospitals and universities.

      The control software ran on Win98/WinNT, and allowed control of the Imaging System from Excel via ActiveX/COM - no joke!

      I inherited development of the application, and it was frightening to see how little the previous developers understood basic programming fundamentals, never mind Windows API or COM: threading was totally screwed up; Delay() calls

    • A local bank around here runs windows 98 with custom software for the tellers,, i was making a $6000 deposit and while he was typing it in bsod'd on him.. needless to say I made sure I got a signed receipt that the money actually ended up in my account... shorty after I changed banks. Modern GUIs never seem nearly as stable as as legacy text based systems...

      Reece,

  • I worry... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by littlerubberfeet ( 453565 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:16AM (#7297947)

    How robust is this? I hope they are using QNX or VxWorks. I do think that a GUI could eliminate some errors and make training easier.

    an application:Centrifuge. One company evaluating a GUI has a significant stake in the centrifuge market. Its design teams' core competencies are motors and speed control.

    As the centrifuge spins too fast and destroys the samples. Maybe destrying DNA evidence and getting a death row inmate killed.

    Newly available technology enables medical device manufacturers to avoid additional costs and design complexity without sacrificing time to market

    Are they more worried about medical safety or time-to market?

    • *anything* with a medical application (i.e. anything classed in law as a "medical device") goes through more testing, validation and proving than you can possibly imagine. trust me on this, i do it for a living. aside from the obvious ethical requirements, the liability you'd be letting yourself in for as a company if you produced either a faulty product or one that could be used incorrectly is enormous.

  • Think of the Children! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tsanth ( 619234 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:17AM (#7297949)
    I could see how something like this could be useful, particularly when building devices which will be used primarily by children: acute asthma sufferers, for example, are told to take daily spirometer readings. The problem with this is that many children will either forget or refuse to take the readings.

    Much of the time, children will visit their asthma doctor having "forgotten" to take their daily readings. To make up for it, they take a dozen or so readings right before the appointment: the data is flawed and as a result, treatment suffers. With cutesy GUIs like this integrated into the spirometer, children can look at their daily readings as more of a game than a chore.

  • from the finger-painting-dept. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Merik ( 172436 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:19AM (#7297956) Homepage
    A graphical OS chip eliminates the need for a marketing manager to possess a certification in C++ or other programming languages to develop the GUI. Rather, all that is needed is a PC, a commonplace text editor, and perhaps even the most basic and widely available graphics programs, such as Microsoft Paint.

    WoW! no longer will bad design be limited to the web. Now i can enjoy poor quality MSfingerpaint on my critical life support devices

  • standardised medical embedded gui (Score:4, Insightful)

    by joshwa ( 24288 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:19AM (#7297958) Homepage Journal
    ok, why is this special? it's a standardised embedded gui for medical systems. you know, like the ones offered by half a dozen other companies (symbian, qnx, etc)

    I guess it's because you get to code in html instead of C. Great, so now you can hire a TOTAL idiot html jockey to design your life-and-death medical interface instead of a (slightly-) better-trained C programmer?

    Whoop tee doo.

    • If your a C-coder, then your idea of an interface is exit(1), char** argv, STDIN, and STDOUT.

      If your an HTML jocky, you might be better versed in the aesthetics of UI design than most C coders.

      By seperating the two parts of the app, UI specialists can make a clean UI, and Systems coders can do what they like -- code systems.

      (note that these statements don't mean that all C coders are terrible @ UI design. ;) )
      • If your an HTML jocky, you might be better versed in the aesthetics of UI design than most C coders.

        I guess this is why www.apple.com looks better than Aqua?

        Oh wait...

        HTML jockeys suck ass at graphic design. Graphic artists, who design for a living, are good at UI design. Or UI developers, who use code or generators to do it are good.

        HTML jockeys are middle-managements bitch, nothing more.
    • This looks like a re-intrepetation of what Allen-Bradley did with Panelview controllers. Note that panelview came out in the EARLY 90's [possibly earlier] before HTML interfaces were common. But the procedure they discribed is very much the same for creating the cool touch-screen machine controls popular with most assembly lines nowdays.

    • ok, why is this special? it's a standardised embedded gui for medical systems. you know, like the ones offered by half a dozen other companies (symbian, qnx, etc)

      It's "special" because it was submitted by someone who admitted to not knowing much about the medical device industry. Having worked for some time in the industry I agree that stuff like this has been available for years; but if someone submits an article on a topic they know nothing about it's not surprising that they think it's new.

    • I guess it's because you get to code in html instead of C. Great, so now you can hire a TOTAL idiot html jockey to design your life-and-death medical interface instead of a (slightly-) better-trained C programmer?

      The choice of language or API does not remove the necessity of a user interface expert in either case. There is simply a higher chance that a UI expert can wield HTML effectively than he or she can wield C. So instead of two people (a UI expert and a C expert), you may need just one, possibly wit

    • From Amulet's website:

      "Products sold by Amulet Technologies, LLC have not been approved for use in critical medical, life-support, or life-saving devices or applications."

      So I highly doubt you'll be seeing these in "life-and-death" medical devices anytime soon.

      (Sorry, I just got tired of all the "Oh my god! My life support is gonna fail 'cause of these things!" jokes on here.)

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:20AM (#7297968)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • 1/2 megabit > 64Kilobit :)

    • The article said 66Kb, not 66K. Half a megabit (512 kilobits) reduced to 66 kilobits.

      • Yeah, I agree.... "Kb" refers to kilobits, whereas "KB" or just "K" refers to kilobytes.

        The one that really bugs me though, is road signs that say a junction is in "2m" when they really mean 2 miles, not 2 metres.

        • Yeah, I agree.... "Kb" refers to kilobits, whereas "KB" or just "K" refers to kilobytes.

          The one that really bugs me though, is road signs that say a junction is in "2m" when they really mean 2 miles, not 2 metres.

          What?!?! The "KB" vs "Kb" difference is extremely ambiguous...only a factor of 8 involved, when we often really want/need to know which it is.

          But it turns out humans are really good at interpreting things in context, and would never think that "2m" on a street sign meant "2 meters"...obvi

  • I wonder how this could be utilized in specialized fields? Could different departments have specialized interfaces? So that their most used functions are close at hand. Could this even be adjusted on a per patient basis? This could really save lives if a doctor/nurse wants to have critical information displayed quickly without digging through a mountain of menus. I know dialysis machines already have GUI's, but I doubt they have this level of ease of design.


  • Hmm..

    Did somebody say "a compact, fast, extensible GUI with an incredibly small memory footprint?" [ibiblio.org]

    *grin*..

    Pogo 3.0 [ibiblio.org] might be what you're looking for. Doesn't depend on gtk, Qt, or anything. Just Imlib1.

  • Without a GUI, this would happen (Score:4, Funny)

    by HungWeiLo ( 250320 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:32AM (#7298005)
    dr_pepr_> ls
    dr_pepr_> . .. hmo_files
    dr_pepr_> cd hmo_files
    dr_pepr_> ls
    dr_pepr_> . .. new_drug_test_subjects
    dr_pepr_> rm -rf new*
    dr_pepr_> uname
    dr_pepr_> unknown i586 gentoo 2.4.17custom
    dr_pepr_> uptime
    dr_pepr_> 8:08 am up 3 days load average: 0.0, 0.0, 0.0
    dr_pepr_> lynx www.slashdot.org
    Connection timed out
    dr_pepr_> lynx www.slashdot.org
    Connection timed out
    dr_pepr_> ipconfig

  • "Authoring Tool" (Score:5, Funny)

    by sbszine ( 633428 ) on Friday October 24, 2003 @01:39AM (#7298020) Journal
    You just need a standard PC and an HTML authoring tool to develop your GUI.

    I hope they mean a text editor. I would hate to entrust my life to a piece of machinery with a GUI 'authored' in FrontPage : )
  • I think I found a new profession:
    <html>
    <head>
    <title>Life Support System</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <input type="button" value="Live" onclick="live();" />
    <input type="button" value="Die" onclick="die();" />
    </body>
    </html>

  • There'll likely be regulation to contend with... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Empiric ( 675968 ) * on Friday October 24, 2003 @02:27AM (#7298123)
    Back in the day, I worked for a software company working on a project called "iVision" with Eli Lilly. This was in the pre-widespread-web days, and so the idea was to make the status of medical devices viewable via a LAN, presenting to the medical staff at the "nursing station" a consolidated graphical view of all the devices on a given hospital floor.

    One thing that I would expect developers to still have to contend with when using embedded web servers, is the very extensive approval process for medical devices. At some point of integration, functionality added to a medical device via software becomes considered part of the medical device, and as such subject to a very long regulatory approval process. This required us to make fairly counter-intuitive limitations to our prototype system, including the notion that though we could show information about the device (alarms, infusion time remaining, etc.), we could not change what the device was doing via our software (e.g. turn off an alarm on an infusion pump in another room once it was acknowledged).

    It's been several years, so I'm not sure how the regulations may have changed, but I'd suggest if you're using embedded HTTP on medical devices don't assume you can just upgrade/tweak/patch on the fly like it was a public web server--you probably can't.
    • so I'm not sure how the regulations may have changed...

      Ohhhh they're ever so much more intrusive than ever before. If you think software management in a regular commercial enterprise can be difficult, the medical world is way worse. The FDA can inspect down to the code when they drop in for a little visit and if you can't point every bit of code back to some top level end user/device requirement (along with all the changes, the reasons for the changes, the risk analysis you did for each of the changes, a
  • at the bottom of each of the product pages? It reads:
    Medical Products: Products sold by Amulet Technologies, LLC have not been approved for use in critical medical, life-support, or life-saving devices or applications.
  • Medicine's already gooey enough for me, thank you very much.

    Tom.

  • OK, so the definitive book on the topic of Embedded TCP/IP is almost certainly TCP Lean [iosoft.co.uk], by Jeremy Bentham. Any book that explains Ethernet with an O-scope trace is alright by me :-) Anyway, Jeremy documented one of the coolest TCP hacks ever. Check it out:

    So, HTML is really quite useful for embedded devices -- GUI toolkits are quite heavy, and HTML nicely and consistently exports that weight to the client. Now, that'd be the end of the story, except...we're not talking about devices that can't render
    • Short answer: Do it backwards...or more accurately, do it later. If you can't make the checksum match the payload...make the payload match the checksum! Watch:

      Now THAT is the true definition of a cool hack!
  • During my medical training when I was doing time at the neonatology unit at one of the hospitals. I was suprised/shocked to see that one of the ventilators was running a version of windows. Ok, I figured must be a specially designed cut down, more stable version, but then I looked carefully.. and beside the start button was the quick launch tool bar with an icon for internet explorer and media player - that is just plain scarry! would you trust MS with your neonates life?

    Thankfully, for the few weeks i was
  • How about a XML/XSL viewer in uHTML, so new UIs can connect these old tools to both humans AND other machines? Just add a USB port on that ribbon cable to the display.
  • I have one of the units. The developers kit comes with a touch sensitive lcd screen. The "html" you write just makes buttons and things on the lcd for you to interact with.

    When you "click" a button on the touch screen, a string of several bytes representing one of up to 255 commands is sent to whatever device you connect the amulet unit to. All the amulet does is convert a touch on the lcd screen to a number and send it out serially.

    While it's certainly a nifty thing, and I actually have a use for it (
  • OK, alot of people really aren't understanding why this is very cool and very, very important.

    You really, really don't want UI code interfering with important things, like not killing people. Ideally, there's as wide a gap between the two functions as possible.

    Realistically, the C/ASM coders have had to implement things like keypad pollers and shape routines in the same codebase as they do important, non-patient-killing things. This very much meant a failure in one killed the other.

    Offloading the entir
  • What happens when your pacemaker get slashdotted?

    Imagine a beowulf... oh nevermind

  • "With the graphical OS chip, GUI development can shift to the marketing team, allowing engineers to concentrate more on their core competencies. Marketing teams that have a closer relationship to a medical device manufacturer's customers--and herefore their end-users--have a clear understanding of how a device is used in the field. In that way, they are closer to the process of developing a GUI that is the most intuitive to the user." "A graphical OS chip eliminates the need for a marketing manager to posse
    • "With the graphical OS chip, GUI development can shift to the marketing team, allowing engineers to concentrate more on their core competencies. Marketing teams that have a closer relationship to a medical device manufacturer's customers--and herefore their end-users--have a clear understanding of how a device is used in the field. In that way, they are closer to the process of developing a GUI that is the most intuitive to the user." "A graphical OS chip eliminates the need for a marketing manager to poss
  • So when I'm 50 or so and I need a colonoscopic exam am I going to have to lie there for an extra 30 minutes with the scope inside me while they reboot "Windows-BM"?

    "Guys! Stop playing solitaire and get this thing outta me!"
  • How many of these GUIs are going to be W3C compliant?
  • "compiled into micro-HTML" - I'm pretty familiar with the HTML standards from the W3C [w3.org] (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/), and I haven't found the spec yet for "micro-HTML". Perhaps this is the marketing buzzword description for zip compression of the HTML file? Am I missing an explanation, or is this just a freely flung buzzword in an otherwise interesting article?
  • I was wondering if anyone has thought of the fact that although this may or may not work for medical devices, it can definitely work for other applications.

    I'm making a small, portable mini-itx (or maybe the Nano-ITX board when it shows up) computer as a server, and was initially going to code my own interface for a serial LCD with keypad in PERL or C, because I couldn't lug around a huge LCD panel when I wanted to connect it to a network and set IP addresses. Then I saw this and realized it would be infin
  • Computer Language Magazine, January 1994 for the original "Rovira Diagrams" article and

    Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry 1994 "Using Rovira Diagrams to Specify the User Interface, Ken Niehoff (MDDI, Jan 1994, p. 198). Keyword: Development."

    It worked then and is scalable (has scaled successfully,) from 327x displays to web-enabled devices.
  • A few years ago, a friend of mine (Werner Sharp) created a tool like this. It allowed the user to create a rich graphic application in Director with alpha channeled graphics, multi channel sound, object code, and export the entire project to C++ for use on Win CE.

    I used it on one of my projects with custom coded async animation, control registries & messaging and the results were just amazing. It's free too.

    http://www.sharp-software.com/products/index.htm

  • Might want to slow down a little, maybe zippy development of user interfaces for medical devices isn't such a great thing, might even sometimes be a bad thing [ncl.ac.uk]

    Well specified, straightforward, easy to get right, user interfaces for medical devices might be a better idea.

  • Does anyone else think they just used frontpage to create the docs and got their compression by stripping all the MS cruft from the final HTML
  • What if we GUIfied text on printed paper allowing for easy connection to digital content on a TV/DVD or PC/DVD/CD?

    http://www.discovertek.com/SPNstream.mov

    http://www.discovertek.com/WhitePaper.pdf

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