Context-enabled applications are just emerging and promise richer interaction by taking environmental context into account. However, they are difficult to build due to their distributed nature and the use of unconventional sensors. The concepts of toolkits and widget libraries in graphical user interfaces has been tremendously successtil, allowing programmers to leverage off existing building blocks to build interactive systems more easily. We introduce the concept of context widgets that mediate between the environment and the application in the same way graphical widgets mediate between the user and the application. We illustrate the concept of context widgets with the beginnings of a widget library we have developed for sensing presence, identity and activity of people and things. We assess the success of our approach with two example context-enabled applications we have built and an existing application to which we have added contextsensing capabilities.

Current interactive user interface construction tools are often more of a hindrance than a benefit during the early stages of user interface design. These tools take too much time to use and force designers to specify more of the design details than they wish at this early stage. Most interface designers, especially those who have a background in graphic design, prefer to sketch early interface ideas on paper or on a whiteboard. We are developing an interactive tool called SILK that allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced very quickly and the medium is very flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be modified. In addition, our system allows designers to examine, annotate, and edit a complete history of the design. When the designer is satisfied with this early prototype, SILK can transform the sket...

Although information visualization (infovis) technologies have proven indispensable tools for making sense of complex data, wide-spread deployment has yet to take hold, as successful infovis applications are often difficult to author and require domain-specific customization. To address these issues, we have created prefuse, a software framework for creating dynamic visualizations of both structured and unstructured data. prefuse provides theoretically-motivated abstractions for the design of a wide range of visualization applications, enabling programmers to string together desired components quickly to create and customize working visualizations. To evaluate prefuse we have built both existing and novel visualizations testing the toolkit's flexibility and performance, and have run usability studies and usage surveys finding that programmers find the toolkit usable and effective.

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The Amulet user interface development environment makes it easier for programmers to create highly-interactive, graphical user interface software for Unix, Windows or Macintosh. Amulet uses new models for objects, constraints, animation, input, output, commands, and undo. The object system is a prototype-instance model in which there is no distinction between classes and instances or between methods and data. The constraint system allows any value of any object to be computed by arbitrary code and supports multiple constraint solvers. Animations can be attached to existing objects with a single line of code. Input from the user is handled by "Interactor" objects which support reuse of behavior objects. The output model provides a declarative definition of the graphics, and supports automatic refresh. Command objects encapsulate all of the information needed about operations, including support for various ways to undo them. An key feature of the Amulet design is that all graphical objec...

Almost as long as there have been user interfaces, there have been special software systems and tools to help design and implement the user interface software. Many of these tools have demonstrated significant productivity gains for programmers, and have become important commercial products. Others have proven less successful at supporting the kinds of user interfaces people want to build. This article discusses the different kinds of user interface software tools, and investigates why some approaches have worked and others have not. Many examples of commercial and research systems are included. Finally, current research directions and open issues in the field are discussed.

Interface builders only support the construction of the menus and dialogue boxes of an application. They do not support the construction of interfaces of many application classes (visualization, simulation, command and control, domain-specific editors) because of the dynamic and complex information that these applications process. HUMANOID is a model-based interface design and construction tool where interfaces are specified by building a declarative description (model) of their presentation and behavior. HUMANOID' s modeling language provides simple abstraction, iteration and conditional constructs to model the interface features of these application classes. HUMANOID provides an easy-touse designer's interface that lets designers build complex interfaces without programming.

The XWeb project addresses the problem of interacting with services by means of a variety of interactive platforms. Interactive clients are provided on a variety of hardware/software platforms that can access and XWeb service. Creators of services need not be concerned with interactive techniques or devices. The cross platform problems of a network model of interaction, adaptation to screen size and supporting both speech and visual interfaces in the same model are addressed.

The iStuff toolkit of physical devices, and the flexible software infrastructure to support it, were designed to simplify the exploration of novel interaction techniques in the post-desktop era of multiple users, devices, systems and applications collaborating in an interactive environment. The toolkit leverages an existing interactive workspace infrastructure, making it lightweight and platform independent. The supporting software framework includes a dynamically configurable intermediary to simplify the mapping of devices to applications. We describe the iStuff architecture and provide several examples of iStuff, organized into a design space of ubiquitous computing interaction components. The main contribution is a physical toolkit for distributed, heterogeneous environments with run-time retargetable device data flow. We conclude with some insights and experiences derived from using this toolkit and framework to prototype experimental interaction techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) augment the physical world by integrating digital information with everyday physical objects. Currently, building these UIs requires “getting down and dirty ” with input technologies such as computer vision. Consequently, only a small cadre of technology experts can currently build these UIs. Based on a literature review and structured interviews with nine TUI researchers, we created Papier-Mâché, a toolkit for building tangible interfaces using computer vision, electronic tags, and barcodes. Papier-Mâché introduces a high-level event model for working with these technologies that facilitates technology portability. For example, an application can be prototyped with computer vision and deployed with RFID. We present an evaluation of our toolkit with six class projects and a user study with seven programmers, finding the input abstractions, technology portability, and monitoring window to be highly effective.