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<title>Interface Overview</title>
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<h1>STEM Interface Overview</h1>
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<p>The STEM user interface is organized into three "perspectives",
<a href="perspectives/designer.html">Designer perspective </a>,
a <a href="perspectives/simulation.html">Simulation perspective</a>
and an <a href="perspectives/analysis.html">Analysis perspective</a>. A
perspective is a collection of "editors", "views", "menu bar", "tool
bar" and a "perspective bar". An editor is a sub-window used to
interactively modify one of STEM's components while a view is a
sub-window used to display information to a user. The menu bar contains
high-level menus for options and operations that can be selected by a
user, while the tool bar contains icons that if selected (clicked on)
cause STEM to perform actions. The perspective bar is used to switch
between STEM's perspectives. These are illustrated in the image in
Figure 1 below.
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<center><a href="img/fig1a.jpg" width="1200" height="500"><img src="img/fig1a.jpg" width="1050" height="800"></a></center>
<p>Similarly in the image in Figure 2 below, is STEM's <a
	href="perspectives/simulation.html">Simulation perspective</a>. Note
that it does not have an editor area.
<center><a href="img/fig2a.jpg" width="1000" height="800"><img src="img/fig2a.jpg" width="1000" height="800"></a></center>
A user can switch back and forth between the two perspectives by
clicking on them in the perspective bar. The views are grouped together
in different areas of the perspective. Clicking on the title of a view
displayed on its tab will bring that view to the foreground. Views can
be closed by clicking on the "X" next to their name, or opened from the
"Window" menu in the menu bar. Any view can be displayed in any
perspective, though each perspective has a default set it displays when
first created.
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