What is the Computer Interface?

The computer Interface is like a “tool” and “Concept” that refers to a point of interaction between components. It is applicable at the level of both hardware and software.

What are the computer interfaces?

         

1.         Physical Interfaces.
2.        Text-user Interfaces.
3.        Graphical-user Interfaces.
4.         Web Interfaces.
5.        Touch Interfaces.
6.        Natural user Interfaces.  

What is the Touch user Interface?


A touch user interface (TUI) is a computer-pointing technology based upon the sense of touch (haptics). Whereas a graphical user interface(GUI) relies upon the sense of sight, the TUI enables not only the sense of touch to innervate and activate computer-based functions, it also allows the user, particularly those with visual impairments, an added level of interaction based upon tactile or Braille input.

History of Touch Interfaces.

In 1954 Hugh Le Caine demonstrating the prototype of the ''Touch Sensitive Organ'' Le Caine began work on this instrument between 1952 and 1954 at his home studio. He brought the prototype organ to the National Research Council lab in 1954 and considerable development took place over the next year.

In 1971, a "touch sensor" was developed by Doctor Sam Hurst. He was an instructor at the University of Kentucky. This sensor called the "Elograph" was patented by The University of Kentucky Research Foundation. The "Elograph" was not transparent like modern touch screens, however, it was a significant milestone in touch screen technology and The Elograph was selected by Industrial Research as one of the 100 Most Significant New Technical Products of the Year 1973.

The first true touch screen incorporating a transparent surface came on the scene developed by Sam Hurst and Elographics. In 1977, Elographics developed and patented a resistive touch screen technology, the most popular touch screen technology in use today.

In 1977, Siemens Corporation financed an effort by Elographics to produce the first curved glass touch sensor interface, which became the first device to have the name "touch screen" attached to it. On February 24, 1994, the company officially changed its name from Elographics to Elo Touch Systems.

1979

3M patented surface capacitive technology 

1981

Tactile Array Sensor for Robotics

1982

Elo Touch Systems invented the resistive touch sensing technology

Flexible Machine Interface, the first multi touch input system, was published (Mehta, Nimish, A Flexible Machine Interface, M.A.Sc. Thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Toronto, 1982)

1984

Bob Boie at Bell Labs invented the first multi touch screen

1985

Zenith patented the Surface Acoustic Touch Panel System

Input Research Group at University of Toronto developed multi-touch tablet

1987

Elo Touch Systems puchased SAW technology from Zenith

1990

Nissha developed the FineTouch touch panel

1993

Apple’s Original Newton Message Pad H1000 was introduced

1995

MicroTouch launched the first projected capacitive touch sensor

1996

Palm introduced Palm Pilot 1000, the first commercially successful PDA with the resistive touch screen

2000

3M acquired MicroTouch

2001

Zytronic developed ZyTouch projected capacitive touch sensor and applied it to the first Tablet PC prototype

Microsoft demonstrated the first public prototype of Tablet PC

MERL developed Diamond Touch multitouch system using projected capacitive touch technology

2002

Sony published a paper about SmartSkin multitouch system. SmartSkin adopted mutual capacitive sensing that is also used in iPhone.

2003

Next Window and Smart Technologies started producing optical touch panels

Finger Works developed input peripherals based on the multi touch technology

2004

Nintendo launched Nintendo DS, a handheld gaming device with dual screen and a touch display

2005

TMD start mass production of touch-embedded TFT using optical sensors

Jeff Han demonstrated the first FTIR multi touch

2007

Apple unveiled iPhone

AUO demonstrated in-cell touch panel technology at Yokohama FPD conference

Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Surface

2008

HP released multi touch Tablet PCs

2009

Dell launched a multi-touch all-in-one PCs

Touchco was founded

2010

Apple released iPad

Amazon acquired Touchco

Evolution of Internet

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people 

in the early 1960s that saw great potential value in allowing 

computers to share information on research and development 

in scientific and military fields.

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers

 in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research 

Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to 

develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed 

the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of 

Internet connections.

Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer 
with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines.
It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also 
showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate.

Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts 

moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan 

for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed 

here are the real founders of the Internet.The Internet,then known

as ARPANET. 

Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as 
he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29, 1969. 

After the Evolution of Internet now web designers is the growth of 
smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, 
pocket PCs, smart phones, ebooks, game machines, and 
even GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the web on
 the go, and many web pages are not designed to work on that scale.

As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly 

accessible to non-technical communities, social networking and 

collaborative services have grown rapidly, enabling people to 

communicate and share interests in many more ways. Sites like Face book,Twitter,KLinked,You Tube,Flicker,Second Life,Delicious,

Blogs,Wikis and many more let people of all ages rapidly share 

their interests of the moment with others everywhere.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages.

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets(like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag . In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments, and other types of text-based content.

The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.

HTML history and evolution

In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-basedhypertext system.Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in the last part of 1990.

In that year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes from 1990 he lists "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and puts an encyclopedia first.




HTML Evolution 

How HTML works

HTML markup consists of several key components, including elements (and their attributes), character-based data types, character references and entity references. Another important component is the document type declaration, which triggers standards mode rendering.

Example  :

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello HTML</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello Guest!</p>
  </body>
</html>

What are the Advantages & Disadvantages of HTML?
Advantages 

Its plain text so is easy to edit. 

Its also fast to download (text is highly compressable). 

Is very easy to pickup\learn 

Its now a standard 

Its supported by most browsers across most if not all platforms. 

Simple to edit only requires a text editor. 

Can be easily edited with WYSIWYG editors (no coding required) 

Can be used to present just about any kind of data. 

Tags can be used (or used to be able to be used) very loosely (i.e. used to be able to omit end tags etc).

Disadvantages

It is static needs to be manually updated or needs some scripting support to change it in some way. 

Isn't rendered correctly in all browsers 

Isn't really as flexible as other standards or technologies 

Its not centralised (all pages must be edited individually). 

Very limited styling capabilities (we're not talking css here!) 

Its essentially massively outdated (xhtml and xml suite of standards). 

Different vendors added (mostly Microsoft early on) their own custom tags that aren't widely supported if at all by most browsers (e.g. marquee tag). 

Tags can be used (or used to be able to be used) very loosely (i.e. used to be able to omit end tags etc).

Basic HTML Tags

<title>

This indicates the title of this HTML page. The title is what is displayed on the upper left corner of your browser when you view a web page. For example, right now you can see "Basic Tags: html, head, title, meta, body" there. That is the title of this page.The title tag is important when it comes to search engine ranking. Many of the search engines pay special attention to the text in the <title> tag. This is because (logically) that words in the <title> tag indicate what the page content is.

<meta>

The <meta> tag information is not directly displayed when the page is rendered on the browser. Rather, this is used for the author of the HTML page to record information related to this page. Two common attributes are name and content. The <meta> tag used to hold great importance in search engine optimization, with authors carefully drafting what's inside the tag to gain better search engine ranking, but recently its importance has been decreasing steadily.

<body>

The <body> tag includes the HTML body of the document. Everything inside the <body> tag (other than those within the <script> tag) is displayed on the browser inside the main browser window.The <body> tag may contain several attributes. The most commonly used ones are listed below:

• bgcolor: This is the background color of the entire HTML document, and may be specified either by the color name directly or by the six-digit hex code.
• alink: The color of the links.
• vlink: The color of the visited links.
• topmargin: The margin from the top of the browser window.
• leftmargin: The margin from the left of the browser window.

So, in general, all HTML documents have the following format:
<html>
<head>
<title>
Here is the title of the HTML document.
</title>
<meta name=" " content=" " />
... (there may be one or more meta tags)
</meta>
</head>
<body>
Here is the body of the HTML document.
</body>
</html>