A Fax Viewer

Problem

Enable billing representatives at the Norfolk Southern Corporation to view customers' faxes on-line.

Solution

As part of a project which moved most customer-care operations to a Macintosh environment, I wrote a fax-viewing window:

I modeled the Fax Viewer after Macintosh graphics-editing programs which were popular at that time. The goal, as with every other user interface I have built, was to make it as easy as possible for the user to learn this new tool. I felt this was particularly important because these users were new to the Macintosh; they were accustomed to a mainframe environment.

Architecture

Of significant architectural interest are the page-rotation icons in the window border. These icons enabled the user to rotate the page as shown, in case the original fax had been received upside down or sideways.

The icons are "interesting" because they are implementations of a general-purpose concept of a "radio button." In modern graphical user interfaces, radio buttons look like this:

The icons work like Macintosh radio buttons, as follows:

• Only one is highlighted at a time; the icon representing the current rotation is brighter than the rest. For example, if you click the , the page rotates 90° to the right, and the becomes .

• When the fax window is sent behind another window, the icons dim:

To do this, I wrote a RadioButton class. I also built a number of icons to support the RadioButton feature (and many others).