Pen-based Interfaces in Engineering Environments

Conceptual design is usually done with paper and pen. Notepad computers open a new way for designing pen-based user interfaces for supporting such kind of design activities. However, pen-based user interfaces have some aws, such as the recognition rate of handwritten characters, the size of memory and display, which limits the application of such kind of computers. The main idea we have is to combine powerful graphical workstations with pen-based computers, each for appropriate applications, but within an integrated environment, in which the user interface adapts the applications. This paper describes our engineering subenvironment, the EXPRESS modeling environment, the design issues of using gestural interfaces for editing EXPRESS-G diagrams.