Its minimalist design is based on a small set of widely applicable object types and commands which are combined into more sophisticated constructions that accommodate the functionality of shells and applications of today, yet with greater integration, consistency, and simplicity. Allow users to perform office related tasks with less learning time, greater simplicity, and more flexibility than current application-based software. Provide a rich foundation for incorporating new functionality. What distinguishes Reno is how pervasively the principles of object-orientation are applied throughout the interface. The user may disassemble and reassemble these compositions to serve new purposes using consistent composition and relational operations.
Objects belong to a specific class which determines the nature of their properties and commands.
These classes share many common characteristics through Reno's narrow and deep class inheritance hierarchy making the objects behave in a consistent fashion for the user. The state of every object is maintained through automatic persistence - there is no explicit commit or discard action on the users part, although operations may be undone. Composition Objects such as simple graphic shapes and alphanumeric characters are considered primitives in Reno since they are atomic elements and cannot be decomposed further into constituent elements. One of the most common forms of composition is containment. The notion of containment is taken literally in Reno as every object resides in a unique place, i.e., another object called its container.