Geoduck Home Page

Project Geoduck

Welcome to the homepage of Project Geoduck. A geoduck (pronounced "gooeyduck") is a giant clam indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. Project Geoduck is an attempt to build transparent graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for a variety of UNIX utilities.

A transparent GUI is one that makes the features and options of the underlying program visible to the user. The advantages of a transparent GUI over a conventional opaque GUI are:

  • Transparent GUIs provide implcit documentation of the underlying program. As users become familiar with the GUI, they are also learning to use the program.
  • Transparent GUIs can collect information about local resources (like fonts, colors, and configuration options) and present them to the user.
  • Once a user has assembled and tested a complex command, he or she can save it as part of a script, facilitating automation.
So far, I have written prototype Geoducks for the following utilities:

a2ps

convert

find

grep

jpegtran

ls

ps

Each directory contains the Geoduck library (geoduck.tcl) and a command called "x.tcl", where x is the name of the underlying program. You should download them both to the same directory and then make x.tcl executable. On some machines, you will have to chance the first line of x.tcl to tell it where you keep wish (the Tcl/tk shell). These programs are still prototypes, but if you have comments or suggestions, send 'em in!

downey at allendowney dot com