Awareness support in a groupware widget toolkit

Abstract

Group awareness is an important part of synchronous collaboration, and support for group awareness can greatly improve groupware usability. However, it is still difficult to build groupware that supports group awareness. To address this problem, we have developed the MAUI toolkit, a Java toolkit with a broad suite of awareness-enhanced UI components. The toolkit contains both extensions of standard Swing widgets, and groupware-specific components such as telepointers. All components have added functionality for collecting, distributing, and visualizing group awareness information. The toolkit packages components as JavaBeans, allowing wide code reuse, easy integration with IDEs, and drag-and-drop creation of working group-aware interfaces. The toolkit provides the first ever set of UI widgets that are truly collaboration-aware, and provides them in a way that greatly simplifies the construction and testing of rich groupware interfaces.

Plagiarism, originality, assemblage

“…We could offer related examples from numerous other disciplines: new media design (Prior, 2007), industrial design engineering (Restrepo & Christiaans, 2005), programming (Hill & Gutwin, 2003), law (Gilo & Porat, 2006;Kahan & Klausner, 1997), cultural studies (Hebdige, 1988;Qureshi & Moores, 1999), graphic design (Carson, 2004;Lupton & Miller, 1996), and others. In most cases, the recognition of assemblages (often going under related terms such as "remix," "collage," or "boilerplate") is not represented as a replacement of other methods of writing or designing but as one valid practice among many.…”

Assisting Groupware Development with Model Checking - Case Studies from Cooperative Work in the WWW

“…Exemplary among those prototypes are Internet Foyer [4], the protocol of Palfreyman and Rodden [44], GroupScape [27], MetaWeb [60], Sideshow [12], MAUI [31] and F@ [59]. All these prototypes, however, provide solutions without guaranteed correctness.…”

Analyzing Shared Workspaces Design with Human-Performance Models

“…2. Feedthrough concerns implicit information delivered to several users reporting actions executed by one user [15]. Feedthrough is essential to provide group awareness and to construct meaningful contexts for collaboration.…”