continuous

This paper describes ActiveText, a method for creating dynamic and interactive texts. ActiveText uses an object-based hierarchy to represent texts. This hierarchy makes it easy to work with the ASCII component and pixel component of the text at the same time. Static, dynamic and interactive properties of text can be easily intermixed and layered. The user can enter and edit text, adjust static and dynamic layout, apply dynamic and interactive behaviors, and adjust their parameters with a common set of tools and a common interface. Support for continuous editing allows the user to sketch dynamically. A prototype application called It's Alive! has been implemented to explore the ActiveText functionality. The documents produced by It's Alive! can be of use in a wide-range of areas, including chat-spaces, email, web-sites, fiction and poetry writing, and low-end film & video titling.

Informal prototyping tools have shown great potential in facilitating the early stage design of user interfaces. How-ever, continuous interactions, an important constituent of highly interactive interfaces, have not been well supported by previous tools. These interactions give continuous visual feedback, such as geometric changes of a graphical object, in response to continuous user input, such as the movement of a mouse. We built Monet, a sketch-based tool for proto-typing continuous interactions by demonstration. In Monet, designers can prototype continuous widgets and their states of interest using examples. They can also demonstrate com-pound behaviors involving multiple widgets by direct ma-nipulation. Monet allows continuous interactions to be eas-ily integrated with event-based, discrete interactions. Con-tinuous widgets can be embedded into storyboards and their states can condition or trigger storyboard transitions. Monet achieves these features by employing continuous function approximation and statistical classification techniques, without using any domain specific knowledge or assuming any application semantics. Informal feedback showed that Monet is a promising approach to enabling more complete tool support for early stage UI design.