Editing Xerox Star (section)

==User interface==
[[File:Xerox 8010 compound document.jpg|thumb|right|Compound document and desktop of 8010/40 system]]
[[File:Xerox Star 8010 workstations.jpg|thumb|right|Windowed interface with scrollbars and greyscale graphics]]
[[File:Evolution of the document icon shape.jpg|thumb|Evolution of the used document icon shape]]
The key philosophy of the user interface is to mimic the office paradigm as much as possible to make it intuitive for users. The concept of "what you see is what you get" ([[WYSIWYG]]) was considered paramount. Text is displayed as black on a white background, just like paper, and the printer replicates the screen using [[Interpress]], a page description language developed at PARC.

One of the main designers of the Star, Dr. [[David Canfield Smith]], invented the concept of [[computer icon]]s and the desktop metaphor, in which the user sees a desktop containing documents and folders, with different icons representing different types of documents.<ref name="MIT">{{cite CiteSeerX |last= Lieberman |first= Henry |title= A Creative Programming Environment, Remixed |citeseerx=10.1.1.125.4685}}</ref><ref name="Nader">Salha, Nader. [http://www.sierke-verlag.de/shop/index.php/aesthetics-and-art-in-the-early-development-of-human-computer-interfaces-648.html "Aesthetics and Art in the Early Development of Human-Computer Interfaces"], October 2012.</ref><ref name="Pygmalion">Smith, David. [https://books.google.com/books/about/Pygmalion.html?id=mihHAAAAIAAJ "Pygmalion: A Creative Programming Environment"], 1975.</ref> Clicking any icon opens a window. Users do not start programs first (such as a text editor, graphics program, or spreadsheet software), but simply open the file and the appropriate application appears.

The Star user interface is based on the concept of objects. For example, a word processing document holds page objects, paragraph objects, sentence objects, word objects, and character objects. The user selects objects by clicking on them with the mouse, and press dedicated special keys on the keyboard to invoke standard object functions (open, delete, copy, move) in a uniform way. There was also a "Show Properties" key used to display settings, called property sheets, for the particular object (such as font size for a character object). These general conventions greatly simplify the menu structure of all the programs.

Object integration was designed into the system from the start. For example, a chart object created in the graphing module can be inserted into any type of document. Eventually, Apple delivered this ability in the [[Apple Lisa|Lisa]] [[operating system]], and on [[Macintosh]] as [[Publish and Subscribe (Mac OS)|Publish and Subscribe]]. It became available on [[Microsoft Windows]] with the introduction of [[Object Linking and Embedding]] (OLE) in 1990. This approach was later used on the [[OpenDoc]] software platform in the late 1990s, and in the [[AppleWorks]] (originally ClarisWorks) package for the Macintosh in 1991 and Windows in 1993.