graphical user interface (GUI)

Computer display format that allows the user to select commands, call up files, start programs, and do other routine tasks by using a mouse to point to pictorial symbols (icons) or lists of menu choices on the screen as opposed to having to type in text commands. The first GUI to be used in a personal computer appeared in Apple's Lisa, introduced in 1983; its GUI became the basis of Apple's extremely successful Macintosh (1984). The Macintosh's GUI style was widely adapted by other manufacturers of personal computers and PC software. In 1985 Microsoft Corp. introduced Windows, a GUI (which later grew into an operating system) that gave MS-DOS–based computers many of the same capabilities as the Macintosh. In addition to being used for operating-system interfaces, GUIs are used in other types of software, including browsers and application programs.

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or Hsia Kuei

(flourished 1195–1224, Qiantang, Zhejiang province, China) Chinese master of landscape painting. Xia served in the Imperial Painting Academy, and most sources agree that he followed the stylistic tradition of an earlier landscapist in the academy, Li Tang. Xia and his contemporary, Ma Yuan, were the most influential members of the academy, and a school of painting inspired by them came to be known as the Ma-Xia school. Most of Xia's surviving works are album leaves painted on silk. A typical work by him is exquisitely calculated and perfectly balanced, conveying with great precision a scene glimpsed through haze, sharply focused at a few points but obscured at others. Chinese writers spoke of his use of a “split brush” (i.e., the brush tip divided so as to make two or more strokes at once) in painting tree foliage and of his freehand drawing “without employing a ruler.” While his influence was considerable, it was only in modern times that he came to be recognized as one of the leading masters of Chinese landscape painting and one of art's great interpreters of nature.

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Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target (December 17, 1733 – 1807) was a French lawyer and politician.

Born in Paris, he acquired a great reputation as a lawyer, less by practice in the courts than in a consultative capacity. He strenuously opposed the "parlement Maupeou", devised by Chancellor Maupeou to replace the old judiciary bodies, refusing to plead before it. He was counsel for Louis René Edouard, cardinal de Rohan in the "affair of the diamond necklace". In 1785, he was elected to the Académie française. In 1789, he was returned as one of the deputies of the Third Estate in Paris to the States-General, where he supported revolutionary measures such as the union of the orders, the suspensive veto, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, etc.

His excessive obesity, which in the National Constituent Assembly made him the butt of the Royalist jokes, prevented his practising at the bar for some years before 1789. When Louis XVI invited him to undertake his defence, he excused himself on this ground. In 1792, he published some constitutional observations in extenuation of the king's actions, which, in the circumstances of the time, would have taken some courage.

Target took no part in public affairs during the Reign of Terror. Under the Directory he was made a member of the Institut de France in 1796 and of the Court of Cassation in 1798. He lived to collaborate in the earlier stages of the new criminal code.

Works

Among his writings may be mentioned a paper on the grain trade (1776) and a Memoire sur l'etat des Protestants en France (1787), in which he pleaded for the restoration of civil rights to Protestants.

References

The Britannica gives the following references:

• Victor du Bled, "Les avocats et l'Académie Française", in the Grand Revue (vol. ii. 1899).
• H. Moulin, Le Palais a l'Académie: Target et son fauteuil (Paris, 1884).
• P. Boulloche, Un avocat au 18^ieme siecle (Paris, 1893).