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Graphical User Interface

Short for Graphical User Interface, the GUI was first developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, and a group of other researchers in 1981. Later Apple introduced the Lisa computer, the first commercially available computer on January 19,1983. A GUI uses windows, icons, and menus to carry out commands such as opening files, deleting files, moving files, etc. and although many GUI Operating Systems are operated by using a mouse, the keyboard can also be used by using keyboard shortcutsor arrow keys.

Unlike a command line operating system like Unix or MS-DOS, GUI Operating Systems are much easier for end-users to learn and use because commands do not need to be known or memorized. Because of their ease of use, GUI Operating Systems have become the dominant operating system used by end-users today.

Word Processor

Using a computer to create, edit, and print documents. Of all computer applications, word processing is the most common. To perform word processing, you need a computer, a special program called a word processor, and a printer. A word processor enables you to create a document, store it electronically on a disk, display it on a screen, modify it by enteringcommands and characters from the keyboard, and print it on a printer.

The great advantage of word processing over using a typewriter is that you can make changes without retyping the entire document. If you make a typing mistake, you simply back up the cursor and correct your mistake. If you want todelete a paragraph, you simply remove it, without leaving a trace. It is equally easy to insert a word, sentence, or paragraph in the middle of a document. Word processors also make it easy to move sections of text from one place to another within a document, or between documents. When you have made all the changes you want, you can send the file to a printer to get a hardcopy

Spreadsheet

A table of values arranged in rows and columns. Each value can have a predefined relationship to the other values. If you change one value, therefore, you may need to change other values as well.

Spreadsheet applications (sometimes referred to simply as spreadsheets) are computer programs that let you create and manipulate spreadsheets electronically. In a spreadsheet application, each value sits in a cell. You can define what type of data is in each cell and how different cells depend on one another. The relationships between cells are called formulas, and the namesof the cells are called labels.

Once you have defined the cells and the formulas for linking them together, you can enter your data. You can then modify selected values to see how all the other values change accordingly. This enables you to study various what-if scenarios.

DBMS

DBMS or Data Base Management System can be designated as one of the oldest application of the computers. DBMS is actually a software program which is specially designed for managing the databases, which are available on a network or on a system hard drive, at a particular point of time. Many type of database management systems are available, some of them are specially designed to manage the specific databases of a particular purpose. This article provides information about various advantages and applications of the modern DBMS system.

Utility Suites

Utility suites were more appealing when Windows included fewer safety and maintenance features than it does now, but all three currently available suites are worth considering if you want an all-in-one toolkit handy for maintenance and cleanup. All include antivirus as well, but they're not full-blown Internet security suites. As the market for utility suites has waned, vendors have been sluggish in updating them. None supports the Firefox browser, for example, although all include Internet cleanup features.

Web Authoring

A category of software that enables the user to develop a Web site in a desktop publishing format. The software will generate the required HTML coding for the layout of the Web pages based on what the user designs. Typically, the user can toggle back and forth between the graphical design and the HTML code and make changes to the Web page in either the design of the accompanying code.

Audio Editting Software

In Music, Audio editing is the process of taking recorded sound and changing it directly on the recording medium.

Audio editing was a new technology that developed in the middle part of the 20th century with the advent of magnetic tape recording. Originally, editing was done on reel-to-reel tape machines and edits were made with straight razors and special tape to connect pieces of tape that had been cut. Audio editors would listen to recorded tapes at low volumes, and then located specific sounds using a process called scrubbing, which is the slow rocking back and forth of the tape reels across the playback heads of the tape deck.

With the development of microcomputer technology, and specifically the Macintosh, Sound Recordists were able to digitize their recordings and edit them as files on a computer's hard disk. The computer programs responsible for this task are known as digital audio editors.

Bitmap Image


A bitmap is one of many types of file formats for images stored in a computerized form. It carries the extension .BMP. Computers use bits of1 and 0 to store data. A bitmap is literally a map of bits that form a particular picture when rendered to a display like a computer monitor.

To understand how a bitmap image displays, it’s important to understand the computer display screen. The display is made up of rows and columns of tiny blocks, or pixels. In a bitmap image, each pixel is assigned at least one bit to indicate whether the pixel should reflect the background color, the foreground color, or some other color.

In the case of a page of black and white text, let’s consider a single letter. The many pixels that make up that letter only require one bit of data each. Either the pixel will be black or white: 1 or 0.

When a bitmap displays a colored image, such as a lake scene, there are several shades of gradation in colors and lighting. In this case, each pixel in the bitmap might have 16, 24, or 48 bits of information associated with it. The more bits, the greater the resolution of the bitmap– and the larger the file.

Desktop Publishing Programme

Using a personal computer or workstation to produce high-quality printeddocuments. A desktop publishing system allows you to use different typefaces, specify various margins and justifications, and embed illustrations and graphs directly into the text. The most powerful desktop publishing systems enable you to create illustrations, while less powerful systems let you insert illustrations created by other programs.

As word-processing programs become more and more powerful, the line separating such programs from desktop publishing systems is becoming blurred. In general, though, desktop publishing applications give you more control over typographical characteristics, such as kerning, and provide moresupport for full-color output.

A particularly important feature of desktop publishing systems is that they enable you to see on the display screen exactly how the document will appear when printed. Systems that support this feature are called WYSIWYGs (what you see is what you get).

Until recently, hardware costs made desktop publishing systems impractical for most uses. But as the prices of personal computers and printers have fallen, desktop publishing systems have become increasingly popular for producing newsletters, brochures, books, and other documents that formerly required a typesetter.

HTML Editor

Also called an authoring tool, an HTML editor is a software program that inserts HTML code as you create a HTML file. Some editors will provide a word processing GUI enabling users to create HTML documents without knowing any HTML code. For example, many HTML editors work not only with HTML, but also with related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. In some cases they also manage communication with remote web servers via FTP and WebDAV, and version management systems such as CVS or Subversion.

Image Editor

A graphics program that provides a variety of special features for altering bit-mapped images. The difference between image editors and paint programsis not always clear-cut, but in general image editors are specialized formodifying bit-mapped images, such as scanned photographs, whereas paint programs are specialized for creating images.

In addition to offering a host of filters and image transformation algorithms, image editors also enable you to create and superimpose layers.

Multimedia

The use of computers to present text, graphics, video, animation, and sound in an integrated way. Long touted as the future revolution in computing, multimedia applications were, until the mid-90s, uncommon due to the expensive hardware required. With increases in performance and decreases in price, however, multimedia is now commonplace. Nearly all PCs are capable of displaying video, though the resolution available depends on the power of the computer's video adapter and CPU.


Vector Image

Vector graphics is the creation of digital images through a sequence of commands or mathematical statements that place lines and shapes in a given two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. In physics, a vector is a representation of both a quantity and a direction at the same time. In vector graphics, the file that results from a graphic artist's work is created and saved as a sequence of vector statements. For example, instead of containing a bit in the file for each bit of a line drawing, a vector graphic file describes a series of

points to be connected. One result is a much smaller file.

At some point, a vector image is converted into a raster graphics image, which maps bits directly to a display space (and is sometimes called a bitmap). The vector image can be converted to a raster image file prior to its display so that it can be ported between systems.

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