Providing Device Independence to Mobile Services

Abstract

People want user interfaces to services that are functional and well suited to the device they choose for access. To provide this, services must be able to offer device specific user interfaces for the wide range of devices available today. We propose to combine the two dominant approaches to platform independence, "Write Once, Run Every-where™" and "different version for each device", to create multiple device specific user interfaces for mobile services. This gives possibilities to minimize the work with development and maintenance, while still keeping the control of how the user interface is presented to the end user. A calendar service has been implemented with user interfaces for Java Swing, HTML and std I/O. This report is a shortened and improved version of the SICS technical report T2002-02.

Mobile access to real-time information?the case of autonomous stock brokering

“…The Ubiquitous Interactor is a working prototype with several interaction engines that handles the full set of interaction acts. Interaction acts are in turn encoded using the Interaction Specification Language (ISL) (Nylander and Bylund, 2002) , which is XML compliant. Each interaction act has a unique id, a symbolic name, a life cycle value, a modality, an information holder, and a possibility to carry metadata.…”

“…The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) (Nylander and Bylund, 2002) is a system for developing device independent services. It has three main parts (see Figure 1): interaction acts, customization forms, and interaction engines.…”

“…We will use the Ubiquitous Interactor (Nylander and Bylund, 2002), which supports information push and the development of services that present themselves differently on different devices. This is done by separating user-service interaction from presentation.…”

The Ubiquitous Interactor — Device Independent Access to Mobile Services

“…The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) combines the two approaches described above to create device independent services. UBI uses interaction acts [11] (see the design section) to describe the user-service interaction in a device independent way. This description is used by all devices to generate an appropriate user interface.…”

“…This description is used by all devices to generate an appropriate user interface. The presentation of user interfaces can be controlled through customization forms [11] (see the design section), which contain service and device specific information of how user interfaces should be presented. This makes it possible to develop services once and for all, and tailor their user interfaces to different devices.…”