Adaptable Application Interface Design For Heterogeneous Mobile Devices

Abstract

With advances in technology, various types of mobile computing devices such as palm computers, smart phones, wireless laptops and wearable computers have become a reality. The heterogeneity of these devices makes a single application hard to run on multiple devices without changes. This raises the challenge of how applications can readily adapt to various devices of different sizes and resource constraints. To develop an application for multiple devices, a straightforward way is to develop various versions of the application, each one suited for a certain type of devices. Whereas this approach sounds simple, it is inefficient because it demands too much effort from developers in creating such various versions. Ideally, we want to develop adaptive applications which are written once but can adapt themselves to run on various devices and interface technologies, and even future devices automatically or with minimum human intervention. In this thesis we address the problem of user interface adaptation. We propose an interactor framework which can be used to construct an application interface once and transform it onto different devices. The abstract interactors used as interface-building elements are a complete set of interaction types, and they can be used to specify application inter aces independent of device types and technologies. These abstract interactors can be mapped to various concrete interactors from different interface technologies.