The Ubiquitous Interactor — Device Independent Access to Mobile Services

Abstract

The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, the same service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separating interaction between users and services from presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service.

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

“…The system only switches from one composition to another depending on the changes of the context of use. This observation is similar for the Ubiquitous Interactor [16], the vocabulary of Generic Widgets found in [18], and the ADUS system [14].…”

“…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.…”

COMET(s), A Software Architecture Style and an Interactors Toolkit for Plastic User Interfaces

“…Widget toolkits have already extensively been explored. They tackle specific plasticity issues such as multimodality [6,12], polymorphism [10,11,14], or post-WIMP UIs [13]. None of these covers the tasks operators: sequence, interleaving, or operator, and so on.…”

Automatic Generation of Device User-Interfaces?

“…Not surprising then, several systems today offer software-based user-interfaces, which include: Palm/Pocket-PC IR programs [1,11], HP's Cooltown [12], IBM's Moca [2], and Websplitter [13], Microsoft's UPnP [5,14], Sun's Jini [6,15], CMU's PUC [8] and UNIFORM [10], Cornell's Cougar [16], Swedish Institute's Universal Interactor [17], Media Lab's UI on the Fly [18], Berkeley's TinyDB [19], [20], and DAMASK [21], Stanford's ICrafter [22], U. of Washington's SUPPLE [9], and PARC/Georgia Tech's Speakeasy/Obje [23]. In most of these systems, the user-interfaces are manually implemented.…”

“…In most of these systems, the user-interfaces are manually implemented. A few systems [8,9,17,18,20,22], on the other hand, explore the intriguing idea of automatically generating these user-interfaces. While this idea is new in the domain of mobile/device computing, it has been explored for over three decades in the realm of desktop computing [24][25][26][27].…”