Scheduling group meetings requires access to participants' calendars, typically located in scattered pockets or desks. Placing participants' calendars on-line and using a rule-based scheduler to find a time slot would alleviate the problem to some extent, but it often is difficult to trust the results, because correct scheduling rules are elusive, varying with the participants and the agenda of a particular meeting. What's needed is a comprehensive scheduling system that summarizes the available information for quick, flexible, and reliable scheduling. We have developed a prototype of a priority-based, graphical scheduling system called Visual Scheduler (VS).A controlled experiment comparing automatic scheduling with VS to manual scheduling demonstrated the former to be faster and less error prone. A field study conducted over six weeks at the UNC-CH Computer Science Department showed VS to be a generally useful system and provided valuable feedback on ways to enhance the functionality of me system to increase its value as a groupwork tool. In particular, users found priority-based timeslots and access to scheduling decision reasoning advantageous. VS has been in use by more than 75 faculty, staff, and graduate students since Fall 1987.

No abstract

The Smalltalk Model-View-Controller (MVC) user interface paradigm uses polling for its input control. The polling loops consume CPU cycles even when the user is not interacting with the interface. Applications using Smalltalk as their front-end often suffer unnecessary performance loss. This paper presents a prototype event-driven MVC framework to solve these problems. A solution to the compatibility problem is also provided to allow interface objects built under both polling and event-driven mechanisms to be used by each other with no modification and no performance penalty,

No abstract

No abstract