Among developers of workstation software, it is increasingly important to provide a flexible software environment while maintaining consistency in the user's interface. An early attempt at providing this type of an operating environment is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,686,522 to Hernandez et al. This patent discusses a combined graphic and text processing system in which a user can invoke a dynamic object at the location of the cursor and invoke any of a variety of functions from the object. This type of natural interaction with a user improves the user interface and makes the application much more intuitive.
For a system to be intuitive to a user, system changes must be communicated in a consistent manner regardless of what application is currently active. None of the prior art references applicant is aware of provides the innovative hardware and system software features which enable all applications to obtain system changes through a generic framework for notification.