guest editors' introduction

User interface designers can easily become locked into the paradigm that is most conveniently supported by their tools. We interpret `tools' broadly here to include analysis and design techniques, component engineering methods, and the widget libraries avail- able. To avoid stagnation, we must constantly question if not always overturn) the ways that we develop `conventional' user interfaces. We must be on the lookout for new User Interface Tools UITs). Toward that end, herein we present ®ve papers, each of which can be considered as presenting a distinct direction for UIT innovation. These papers are extended and updated versions of select papers from the Proceedings of the First Australasian User Interface Conference themed `Stepping Out of Windows') held in Adelaide, South Australia in January 2000. They are interesting both for their diverse contributions to UIT thinking as well as to showcase the quality of work coming from the Australian and New Zealand computer science research communities. The ®rst paper, `Developing Adaptable User Interfaces for Component-based Systems' by John Grundy and John Hosking, describes the use of component user interface aspects to allow components to have adaptable user interface elements. This supports the compo- sition of components into an interface with a coherent look-and-feel, even if the components were not designed to work together. The concept, which is aimed at extending the scope of component reuse possible in interface implementation, is exempli®ed on an Itinerary Planner application. The second and third papers look anew at basic aspects of the point-and-click interfaces that are dominant today. `The Stretchable Selection Tool: An alternative to copy and paste', by Mark Apperley, Dale Fletcher and Bill Rogers, presents an alternative mechan- ism to the common paste buffer or `clipboard' approach to interchange of data between and within applications. Their Stretchable Selection Tool SST) is represented to the user as a semi-transparent pipe from the sink ®eld to an appropriate source ®eld. This repre- sentation has particular potential for collaborative applications, such as multiple users working together on ®lling out a complex form, and shows promising responses on preliminary usability tests. `Which Animation Effects Improve Indirect Manipulation?' by Bruce Thomas and Victor Demczuk reports on an experiment to test a variety of visual cues for helping users understand what would happen if the operation is committed and what would happen if it were cancelled, while a graphical transformation indirect manipulation operation is being considered. They found various visual effects signi®cantly more effective than no visual feedback for cuing the user as to the pre and post positions of the graphical objects, and the modi®ed telltale a small corner of the object pulled back towards its original position) and colour effects were signi®cantly more effective. Gerard Fischer 1989) suggested that there are both explicit and implicit dimensions to the `bandwidth' of communication between users and computers. The fourth paper, addresses Fisher's explicit bandwidth dimension. `Visual Gesture Interfaces for Virtual Interacting with Computers 14 2002) 173±174 0953-5438/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0953-543801)00051-0 www.elsevier.com/locate/intcom

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