Chapter 7. Controls, charts, and storage
This chapter covers
- Creating forms using standard controls
- Storing data (even on applets and phones)
- Playing with 3D charts and graphs
- Writing our own skinnable control
There can’t be many programmers who haven’t heard of the Xerox Alto, if not by name then certainly by reputation. The Alto was a pioneering desktop computer created in the 1970s at the Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It boasted the first modern-style GUI, but today it’s probably best remembered as the inspiration behind the Apple Macintosh. Although graphics have become more colorful since those early monochrome days, fundamentally the GUI has changed very little. A time traveler from 1985 (perhaps arriving in a DeLorean sports car?) may be impressed by the beauty of modern desktop software but would still recognize the majority of UI widgets. UI stalwarts like buttons, lists, and check boxes still dominate. The World Wide Web popularized the hypertext pane, but that aside, very few innovations have really caught on. But then, if something works, why fix it?