editing

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.

Today's generic data management applications such as accounting, CRM or logging and tracking software, rely on form and menu based interfaces. These applications take only marginal advantage of current graphical user interfaces. This is because the data they handle does not have intrinsic visual representations upon which direct manipulation principles can be used. This article presents how we have extended an Information Visualization framework with generic data manipulation functions. These new data editing capabilities are tuned to take advantage of the characteristics of each view. They enable us to generalize the direct manipulation mechanisms to address many abstract data manipulation needs. In this article we present five uses of the features we have implemented and deduce a general workflow applicable to a variety of contexts. The workflow comprises three steps and five editing actions. The steps are: adjust view, select, and edit. The editing actions are: edit a value or group of values, clone objects, remove objects, add attributes, and remove attributes. The workflow provides complete editing access to table and hierarchical data structures using particularly terse interaction methods. It defines a general data editing model that enables powerful data manipulation tasks without requiring end-user programming or scripting.

The human visual system makes a great deal more of images than the elemental marks on a surface. In the course of viewing, creating, or editing a picture, we actively construct a host of visual structures and relationships as components of sensible interpretations. This paper shows how some of these computational processes can be incorporated into perceptually-supported image editing tools, enabling machines to better engage users at the level of their own percepts. We focus on the domain of freehand sketch editors, such as an electronic whiteboard application for a pen-based computer. By using computer vision techniques to perform covert recognition of visual structure as it emerges during the course of a drawing/editing session, a perceptually supported image editor gives users access to visual objects as they are perceived by the human visual system. We present a flexible image interpretation architecture based on token grouping in a multiscale blackboard data structure. This organization supports multiple perceptual interpretations of line drawing data, domain-specific knowledge bases for interpretable visual structures, and gesture-based selection of visual objects. A system implementing these ideas, called PerSketch, begins to explore a new space of WYPIWYG (What You Perceive Is What You Get) image editing tools.

The human visual system makes a great deal more of images than the elemental marks on a surface. In the course of viewing, creating, or editing a picture, we actively construct a host of visual structures and relationships as components of sensible interpretations. This paper shows how some of these computational processes can be incorporated into perceptually-supported image editing tools, enabling machines to better engage users at the level of their own percepts. We focus on the domain of freehand sketch editors, such as an electronic whiteboard application for a pen-based computer. By using computer vision techniques to perform covert recognition of visual structure as it emerges during the course of a drawing/editing session, a perceptually supported image editor gives users access to visual objects as they are perceived by the human visual system. We present a flexible image interpretation architecture based on token grouping in a multiscale blackboard data structure. This organization supports multiple perceptual interpretations of line drawing data, domain-specific knowledge bases for interpretable visual structures, and gesture-based selection of visual objects. A system implementing these ideas, called PerSketch, begins to explore a new space of WYPIWYG (What You Perceive Is What You Get) image editing tools.

This paper presents a novel image editing program emphasizing easy selection and manipulation of material found in informal, casual documents such as sketches, handwritten notes, whiteboard images, screen snapshots, and scanned documents. The program, called ScanScribe, offers four significant advances. First, it presents a new, intuitive model for maintaining image objects and groups, along with underlying logic for updating these in the course of an editing session. Second, ScanScribe takes advantage of newly developed image processing algorithms to separate foreground markings from a white or light background, and thus can automatically render the background transparent so that image material can be rearranged without occlusion by background pixels. Third, ScanScribe introduces new interface techniques for selecting image objects with a pointing device without resorting to a palette of tool modes. Fourth, ScanScribe presents a platform for exploiting image analysis and recognition methods to make perceptually significant structure readily available to the user. As a research prototype, ScanScribe has proven useful in the work of members of our laboratory, and has been released on a limited basis for user testing and evaluation.

Nested User Interface Components combine the concepts of Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs) with recursive nesting of active graphical user interface widgets. The resulting system of recursively nesting interface components has a number of desirable properties. The level of detail of the view of any widget component and its children, as well as the responsiveness of that component to the user's actions, can be tuned to the current visible size of that component on the screen.

We distinguish between the interaction style of a component, and the semantic result that it produces. Only the latter is used to determine the geographic parameters for that component. In this way, very large and layered control problems can be presented to the user as a cohesive and readily navigable visual surface. It becomes straightforward to layout interaction semantics that are best handled by recursion, such as filters composed of nested expressions.

We propose an interaction technique for editing splines that is aimed at professional graphic designers. These users do not take full advantage of existing spline editing software because their mental representations of drawings do not match the underlying conceptual model of the software. Although editing splines by specifying control points and tangents may be appropriate for engineers, graphic designers think more in terms of strokes, shapes, and gestures appropriate for editing drawings. Our interaction technique matches the latter model: curves can be edited by means of marks, similar to the way strokes are naturally overloaded when drawing on paper. We describe this interaction technique and the algorithms used for its implementation.

Direct-manipulation editors for structured data are increasingly common. While such editors can greatly simplify the creation of structured data, there are few tools to simplify the creation of the editors themselves. This paper presents Citrus, a new programming language and user interface toolkit designed for this purpose. Citrus offers language-level support for constraints, restrictions and change notifications on primitive and aggregate data, mechanisms for automatically creating, removing, and reusing views as data changes, a library of widgets, layouts and behaviors for defining interactive views, and two comprehensive interactive editors as an interface to the language and toolkit itself. Together, these features support the creation of editors for a large class of data and code.

When users handle large amounts of data, errors are hard to notice. Outlier finding is a new way to reduce errors by directing the user's attention to inconsistent data which may indicate errors. We have implemented an outlier finder for text, which can detect both unusual matches and unusual mismatches to a text pattern. When integrated into the user interface of a PBD text editor and tested in a user study, outlier finding substantially reduced errors.

We introduce a set of techniques for haptically manipulating digital media such as video, audio, voicemail and computer graphics, utilizing virtual mediating dynamic models based on intuitive physical metaphors. For example, a video sequence can be modeled by linking its motion to a heavy spinning virtual wheel: the user browses by grasping a physical force-feedback knob and engaging the virtual wheel through a simulated clutch to spin or brake it, while feeling the passage of individual frames. These systems were implemented on a collection of single axis actuated displays (knobs and sliders), equipped with orthogonal force sensing to enhance their expressive potential. We demonstrate how continuous interaction through a haptically actuated device rather than discrete button and key presses can produce simple yet powerful tools that leverage physical intuition.

We present three new interaction techniques for aiding users in collecting and organizing Web content. First, we demonstrate an interface for creating associations between websites, which facilitate the automatic retrieval of related content. Second, we present an authoring interface that allows users to quickly merge content from many different websites into a uniform and personalized representation, which we call a card. Finally, we introduce a novel search paradigm that leverages the relationships in a card to direct search queries to extract relevant content from multiple Web sources and fill a new series of cards instead of just returning a list of webpage URLs. Preliminary feedback from users is positive andvalidates our design.