GO Corporation – PenPoint User Interface Design Reference

GO Corporation's PenPoint User Interface Design Reference is a developer documentation volume in the company's GO Technical Library.¹ It was published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company at a U.S. list price of $24.95, and is organized in two parts — a tour of the user interface elements and where to use them, followed by an account of how PenPoint itself uses those elements so that applications stay consistent.² It sits alongside companion volumes in the GO Technical Library: the PenPoint Application Writing Guide, the PenPoint Architectural Reference (Volumes I and II), and the PenPoint API Reference (Volumes I and II).²

The Notebook User Interface the book documents was one of the central innovations GO introduced when it announced the PenPoint operating system on January 22, 1991.³ In the NUI, a notebook with a table of contents serves as PenPoint's central organizational and navigational structure, with documents identified by page numbers and reached through the table of contents, and the interface incorporates handwriting recognition and pen-drawn “gestures” — such as writing an X to delete or circling to edit — that work consistently throughout the system.³ GO co-founder Robert Carr, the company's vice president of software, said PenPoint had been designed around the idea of pen and paper rather than adding a pen to an existing keyboard-oriented system, so that users could write in a natural, seamless way.³

GO positioned PenPoint for third-party developers from the start: on the day of the operating system's unveiling it announced that 40 software companies had committed to develop for or provide technology for PenPoint.⁴ In October 1991 the company expanded its licensing, education, and beta programs, reporting that more than 500 individuals and organizations had begun PenPoint development since the January developer release, and it established an Authorized Education Center program to deliver PenPoint technical, sales, and development training, with the production release of PenPoint 1.0 planned for the first quarter of 1992.⁵

GO announced the commercial release of PenPoint on April 16, 1992, and began shipping the PenPoint Software Development Kit — which bundled an executable copy of the operating system together with the tools and documentation developers needed — through GO Corporation, Merisel, and Ingram/Micro D beginning that April.⁶ On the same day GO announced industry-wide support for PenPoint alongside its hardware and software partners, and company president and chief executive William V. Campbell pointed to PenPoint's object-oriented architecture as giving applications a more consistent user interface that made them easier to learn and use.⁷ The design reference itself states that when PenPoint's interface elements are used consistently, users can apply their understanding of PenPoint across all applications.²

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes