Adaptive runtime layout of hierarchical UI components

Model-Driven Engineering of Multi-target Plastic User Interfaces

“…Some generate a description of the interface in a language that can be read at run-time. For example, GrafiXML generates a UsiXML description [10]. These tools provide little guidance on creating usable UIs, but they cannot handle widgets that change dynamically.…”

“…Finally, a lot of interesting features that come from automatic generation tools could be easily integrated in our tool because it is model-driven. Another manifestation of multi-presentation UIs also exist through adaptive layout [10], Art Resizing [5], and multi-device presentations [13].…”

The Comets Inspector: Towards Run Time Plasticity Control Based on a Semantic Network

“…For plasticity at run time, Keränen and Plomp [11] present an algorithm for repurposing a UI layout depending on its container dimensions. An interesting feature consists in its animation of the adaptation process.…”

“…through a Web browser) or by execution (e.g., after the compilation of code in an interactive development environment); (2) the Concrete UI (CUI) expresses any FUI independently of any term related to a peculiar rendering engine, that is independently of any markup or programming language; (3) the Abstract UI (AUI) expresses any CUI independently of any interaction modality (e.g., graphical, vocal, tactile) via the mechanisms of Abstract Interaction Objects (AIO) [22] as opposed to Concrete Interaction Objects (CIO) for the CUI; and (4) the Task & Concept level, which describes the various interactive tasks to be carried out by the end user and the domain objects that are manipulated by these tasks. We refer to [11] and to www.usixml.org for its translation into models uniformly expressed in the same User Interface Description Language (UIDL), selected to be UsiXML (which stands for User Interface eXtensible Markup Language). In Figure 1, two contexts of use are represented with the possibility of moving from one context to another one through three relationships: abstraction, reification and translation for respectively reverse, forward and lateral engineering.…”

“…By context of use [2], we hereby refer to the combination C of a user U working with a platform P in a given physical environment E: C = <U,P,E>. Although the adaptation in general and the plasticity in particular both consider the three aspects of this context definition, it is noteworthy to observe that the P aspect is the most frequently and extensively researched area (among them are [3], [4], [6], [8], [9], [11], [14][15][16][17][18], [20]): the platform is probably the facet which affects the UI the most immediately and concretely. This is challenging since a UI which was designed for a given platform in mind may no longer fit another one with extended or reduced interaction capabilities if they were not considered before.…”