Keywords
Users increasingly interact with a heterogeneous collection of computing devices. The applications that users employ on those devices, however, still largely provide user experiences that assume the use of a single computer. This failure is due in part to the difficulty of creating user experiences that span multiple devices, particularly the need to manage identifying, connecting to, and communicating with other devices. In this paper we present an infrastructure based on instant messaging that simplifies adding that additional functionality to applications. Our infrastructure elevates device ownership to a first class property, allowing developers to provide functionality that spans personal devices without writing code to manage users' devices or establish connections among them. It also provides simple mechanisms for applications to send information, events, or commands between a user's devices. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our infrastructure by presenting a set of sample applications built with it and a user study demonstrating that developers new to the infrastructure can implement all of the cross-device functionality for three applications in, on average, less than two and a half hours.
Multi-device user interface design mostly implies creating suitable interface for each targeted device, using a diverse set of design tools and toolkits. This is a time consuming activity, concerning a lot of repetitive design actions without support for reusing this effort in later designs. In this paper, we propose D-Macs: a design tool that allows designers to record their design actions across devices, to share these actions with other designers and to replay their own design actions and those of others. D-Macs lowers the burden in multi-device user interface design and can reduce the necessity for manually repeating design actions.
Users increasingly interact with a heterogeneous collection of computing devices. The applications that users employ on those devices, however, still largely provide user experiences that assume the use of a single computer. This failure is due in part to the difficulty of creating user experiences that span multiple devices, particularly the need to manage identifying, connecting to, and communicating with other devices. In this paper we present an infrastructure based on instant messaging that simplifies adding that additional functionality to applications. Our infrastructure elevates device ownership to a first class property, allowing developers to provide functionality that spans personal devices without writing code to manage users' devices or establish connections among them. It also provides simple mechanisms for applications to send information, events, or commands between a user's devices. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our infrastructure by presenting a set of sample applications built with it and a user study demonstrating that developers new to the infrastructure can implement all of the cross-device functionality for three applications in, on average, less than two and a half hours.
