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A technique I am using quite a bit is to make sticky widgets - GUI widgets that autonomously remember some part of their state. For example, a text field that remembers its last value; a window that remembers its last size and shape; a file dialog that remembers the directory it last showed.
These widgets make it very easy to create a user interface with some persistent state. This saved state makes the GUI much easier on the users.
In my case the widgets are written in Java using Swing. Each widget takes a preferences key as a constructor argument. The given key and the class name make the full key. This allows the widget to save and restore its state without reliance on any application globals, and without writing any application code specifically to handle the stickyness. The widget registers itself as a listener to itself so it is notified when its state changes and it persists its new state.
This is work code so I won't post it but it is really pretty easy to do and very handy.
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