Groupware support in the windowing system

  • Authors:
  • Peter Hutterer;Bruce H. Thomas

  • Affiliations:
  • University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes SA;University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes SA

  • Venue:
  • AUIC '07 Proceedings of the eight Australasian conference on User interface - Volume 64
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the advantages of integrating groupware support for Single Display Groupware (SDG) into the windowing system. For the domain of SDG, a Groupware Windowing System (GWWS) has several advantages over traditional SDG toolkits and applications. A GWWS provides SDG support for legacy applications, custom built SDG applications and supports the execution of multiple applications simultaneously. A GWWS combines the traditional single-user single-input axiom and novel multi-user multi-input desktop environments. We present the Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX), the first GWWS that supports SDG natively, together with our Multi-Pointer Window Manager (MPWM). MPX and MPWM support an arbitrary number of true systems cursors, sophisticated floor control and per-window annotation overlay. To ease the interaction with such a GWWS, we implemented the DeviceShuffler, a system to couple input devices from any computer. The physical connection point of a device is transparent to both the windowing system and the application. This supports true ad-hoc collaboration on shared screens.