Common UI and Application Integration

Microsoft windows have standardized the user interface for a large number of applications by providing standardization at the following levels:

=> Overall visual look and feel of the application windows

=> Menus

=> Dialog Boxes

=> Buttons

=> Help Features

=> Scroll Bars

=> Tool Bars

=> File open and save

This standardization level makes it easier for the user to interact with applications designed for the Microsoft windows operational environment. Standardization is being provided for object linking and embedding (OLE), Dynamic data exchange (DDE), and the remote Procedure calls (RPC). A compound document may consist of a number of different object types such as text, image, spread sheet data, and video. All applications required to operate on various sub-objects of a compound document cooperate in an integrated manner.

Data Exchange

The Microsoft windows clipboard allows exchanging data in any format. It can be used to exchange multimedia objects also. We can cut, and copy a multimedia object in one document and pasting it in another. These documents can be opened under different applications.

The windows clipboard allows the following formats to be stored:

->Text

->Bitmap

->Image

->Sound

->Video (AVI Format)

The data exchange capabilities can be enhanced to make applications more object-oriented, whereby complex objects may be copied to clipboard. 

The receiving applications can specify sub objects it needs from the group stored on the clipboard. The OLE model for application data interchange is being extended to other platforms like Windows NT and UNIX.