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David Canfield-Smith is famous for coining the
term "icons" in his doctoral thesis at Stanford University. Dr. Smith
was one of the principle designers of Xerox's Star interface, the
predecessor of the Macintosh OS and Microsoft Windows. During his
seven years with Xerox, Dr. Smith invented icons, generic commands, the
desktop metaphor and dialog boxes for the Star interface. Dr. Smith is
also a supporter of computers for education, having worked with Alan Kay on
educational software. The culmination of his work in computer-aided
education is a program called KidSim. It combines the theories of his
earlier thesis work: programming by demonstration and graphical
rewrite rules. KidSim allows children to build and program the
behavior of simulations without knowledge of conventional programming
languages. Another related project is Stagecast Creator, a program
much like KidSim but for older audiences. |
