Attach me, detach me, assemble me like you work

  • Authors:
  • Donatien Grolaux;Jean Vanderdonckt;Peter Van Roy

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Management, Information Systems Unit;School of Management, Information Systems Unit;Dept. of Computing Science and Engineering, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • INTERACT'05 Proceedings of the 2005 IFIP TC13 international conference on Human-Computer Interaction
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Detachable user interfaces consist of graphical user interfaces whose parts or whole can be detached at run-time from their host, migrated onto another computing platform while carrying out the task, possibly adapted to the new platform and attached to the target platform in a peer-to-peer fashion. Detaching is the property of splitting a part of a UI for transferring it onto another platform. AttAaching is the reciprocal property: a part of an existing interface can be attached to the currently being used interface so as to recompose another one on-demand, according to user’s needs, task requirements. Assembling interface parts by detaching and attaching allows dynamically composing, decomposing and re-composing new interfaces on demand. To support this interaction paradigm, a development infrastructure has been developed based on a series of primitives such as display, undisplay, copy, expose, return, transfer, delegate, and switch. We exemplify it with QTkDraw, a painting application with attaching and detaching based on the development infrastructure.