Software engineering abstractions for the multi-touch revolution

Hoste, Lode

doi:10.1145/1810295.1810455

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…We intend to support developers for both incorporating common gestures and creating new ones. To abstract away programming details for creating touch gestures, prior work has explored high-level specification languages [Hoste 2010;Scholliers et al 2011]. In particular, Proton++ allows developers to specify multitouch gestures using regular expressions ].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimistic Programming of Touch Interaction

Lü

Zhang

2014

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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Touch-sensitive surfaces have become a predominant input medium for computing devices. In particular, multitouch capability of these devices has given rise to developing rich interaction vocabularies for "real" direct manipulation of user interfaces. However, the richness and flexibility of touch interaction often comes with significant complexity for programming these behaviors. Particularly, finger touches, though intuitive, are imprecise and lead to ambiguity. Touch input often involves coordinated movements of multiple fingers as opposed to the single pointer of a traditional WIMP interface. It is challenging in not only detecting the intended motion carried out by these fingers but also in determining the target objects being manipulated due to multiple focus points. Currently, developers often need to build touch behaviors by dealing with raw touch events that is effort consuming and error-prone. In this article, we present Touch, a tool that allows developers to easily specify their desired touch behaviors by demonstrating them live on a touch-sensitive device or selecting them from a list of common behaviors. Developers can then integrate these touch behaviors into their application as resources and via an API exposed by our runtime framework. The integrated tool support enables developers to think and program optimistically about how these touch interactions should behave, without worrying about underlying complexity and technical details in detecting target behaviors and invoking application logic. We discuss the design of several novel inference algorithms that underlie these tool supports and evaluate them against a multitouch dataset that we collected from end users. We also demonstrate the usefulness of our system via an example application.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimistic Programming of Touch Interaction

Lü

Zhang

2014

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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“…Higher-level specification languages can hide low-level programming details in creating multi-touch gestures [12,13,23], but these languages can lead to complex specifications and are hard to scale when the number and complexity of gestures grow. In addition, learning a new language is a nontrivial burden on developers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To do so, developers must combine multiple recognizers manually and resolve potential ambiguity. Gesture specification languages such as [12] attempt to keep developers from the programming details, but they require learning a new language and can be too complicated to be practical.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gesture coder

Lü

2012

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Multi-touch gestures have become popular on a wide range of touchscreen devices, but the programming of these gestures remains an art. It is time-consuming and errorprone for a developer to handle the complicated touch state transitions that result from multiple fingers and their simultaneous movements. In this paper, we present Gesture Coder, which by learning from a few examples given by the developer automatically generates code that recognizes multi-touch gestures, tracks their state changes and invokes corresponding application actions. Developers can easily test the generated code in Gesture Coder, refine it by adding more examples and, once they are satisfied with its performance, integrate the code into their applications. We evaluated our learning algorithm exhaustively with various conditions over a large set of noisy data. Our results show that it is sufficient for rapid prototyping and can be improved with higher quality and more training data. We also evaluated Gesture Coder's usability through a withinsubject study in which we asked participants to implement a set of multi-touch interactions with and without Gesture Coder. The results show overwhelmingly that Gesture Coder significantly lowers the threshold of programming multi-touch gestures.

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“…Software programming and the design of user interfaces (UI) are already complex and challenging tasks. With the emergence of multi-touch technology, these tasks have become even more intricate (Hoste, 2010). It is noticeable that particularly for multi-touch applications, there is a lack of visual editors and toolkits, which meet the additional requirements or unify the process of designing and programming in one application.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liquid: Library for Interactive User Interface Development

Freitag¹,

Kammer²,

Tränkner³

et al. 2011

Mensch &Amp; Computer 2011

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Developing multi-touch applications is a great challenge for developers: they have to adopt a novel interaction paradigm, but lack suitable tools and reliable design guidelines. The goal of Liquid consists in introducing the concept of visual programming to multi-touch technology, implementing a promising approach to overcome the difficulties in developing applications for multi-touch devices. As a novel feature, Liquid allows the development of multi-touch applications with the help of the technology itself. This contribution illustrates the application of visual programming in the multi-touch context, presents related work, and explains the workflow of Liquid with the help of an instructive example.

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Software engineering abstractions for the multi-touch revolution

Cited by 5 publications

References 7 publications

Optimistic Programming of Touch Interaction

Optimistic Programming of Touch Interaction

Gesture coder

Liquid: Library for Interactive User Interface Development

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