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... the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that servces no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what--these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.
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Authoritative overview of End-User Development (EUD) including 4 HD video interviews filmed in Rome, Italy. EUD is really all about democratization of computing.
UIST is the premier forum for innovations in developing human-computer interfaces. The symposium brings together user-interface researchers and practitioners with an interest in techniques, tools, and technology for constructing high-quality, innovative user interfaces.
The following articles are from "Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology":
Articles
Gosling, James (1996): Java: A Language Driven by a UI Vision. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. .
p. --
Brooks, Fred (1996): 3-D User Interfaces: When Results Matter. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. --.
p. 1-10
Graham, T. C. Nicholas, Urnes, Tore and Nejabi, Roy (1996): Efficient Distributed Implementation of Semi-Replicated Synchronous Groupware. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 1-10. Available online
“The Model View Controller (MVC) architecture has proven to be an effective way of organizing synchronous groupware applications. Distributed implementations of MVC, however, can suffer from poor performance. This paper demonstrates how optimized semi-replication of MVC architectures can lead to good performance over both local and wide area networks. We present a series of optimizations to network communication based on specific communication properties of groupware. These optimizations have been implemented in the Clock groupware development toolkit, allowing programmers to develop applications directly in the high-level MVC style, with Clock automatically providing optimized performance. Timings of an application developed in Clock show that usable speed was obtained in a highly interactive groupware application running between Toronto and Calgary, with a typical latency of 190 ms per round trip message. The paper discusses the tradeoffs involved in the algorithms, and presents timings to demonstrate the effectiveness of the different approaches. The timings show that when running over a wide area network, the best optimization can achieve a factor 60 speedup over the naive implementation of distributed MVC.”
Fekete, Jean-Daniel and Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel (1996): Using the Multi-Layer Model for Building Interactive Graphical Applications. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 109-118. Available online
“This article introduces the Multi-Layer Model, which uses several graphical layers to separate the graphical entities involved in visualization from those involved in feedback and interaction management. We describe its implementation and show how it can take advantage of software and hardware graphic extensions to provide good performance. We also show how it supports multiple input devices and simplifies the description of a wide variety of interaction styles. Finally, we describe our experience in using this model to implement a set of editors for a professional animation system.”
Chung, Goopeel and Dewan, Prasun (1996): A Mechanism for Supporting Client Migration in a Shared Window System. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 11-20. Available online
“Migrating collaborative applications to or near the workstations of active users can offer better performance in many scenarios. We have developed a client migration mechanism for centralized shared window systems that does not require changes to existing application and system software. It is based on logging input at the old site and replaying it at the new site. This approach raises several difficult questions: How should the log size be kept low? How should response time be kept low while migration is in progress? How should applications that depend on the rate at which input is received be accommodated? How should the transition from the replay phase to the play phase be detected at the new site? How should the software at the old and new sites be synchronized? We have developed a series of alternative approaches for answering these questions and implemented them in the XTV [1] shared window system. In this paper, we motivate, describe, illustrate and evaluate these approaches, and outline how they are implemented.”
Myers, Brad A., Miller, Robert C., McDaniel, Rich and Ferrency, Alan (1996): Easily Adding Animations to Interfaces Using Constraints. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 119-128. Available online
“Adding animation to interfaces is a very difficult task with today's toolkits, even though there are many situations in which it would be useful and effective. The Amulet toolkit contains a new form of animation constraint that allows animations to be added to interfaces extremely easily without changing the logic of the application or the graphical objects themselves. An animation constraint detects changes to the value of the slot to which it is attached, and causes the slot to instead take on a series of values interpolated between the original and new values. The advantage over previous approaches is that animation constraints provide significantly better modularity and reuse. The programmer has independent control over the graphics to be animated, the start and end values of the animation, the path through value space, and the timing of the animation. Animations can be attached to any object, even existing widgets from the toolkit, and any type of value can be animated: scalars, coordinates, fonts, colors, line widths, point lists (for polygons), booleans (for visibility), etc. A library of useful animation constraints is provided in the toolkit, including support for exaggerated, cartoon-style effects such as slow-in-slow-out, anticipation, and followthrough. Because animations can be added to an existing application with only a single extra line of code, we expect that this new mechanism will make it easy for researchers and developers to investigate the use of animations in a wide variety of applications.”
Borning, Alan, Anderson, Richard and Freeman-Benson, Bjorn (1996): Indigo: A Local Propagation Algorithm for Inequality Constraints. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 129-136. Available online
“Inequality constraints are useful for specifying various aspects of user interfaces, such as constraints that one window is to the left of another, or that an object is contained within a rectangle. However, current local propagation constraint solvers can't handle inequality constraints. We present Indigo, an efficient local propagation algorithm for satisfying acyclic constraint hierarchies, including inequality constraints.”
Zanden, Brad Vander and Venckus, Scott A. (1996): An Empirical Study of Constraint Usage in Graphical Applications. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 137-146. Available online
“One-way constraints have been widely incorporated in research toolkits for constructing graphical applications. However, although a number of studies have examined the performance of these toolkits' constraint satisfaction algorithms, there have not been any empirical studies that have examined how programmers use constraints in actual applications. This paper reports the results of a study intended to address these matters. Seven graphical applications were chosen for their diversity and profiling information was gathered about their use of constraints. The data reveal that constraint networks tend to be modular, that is, divided into a number of small, independent sets of constraints rather than one monolithic set of constraints. This finding suggests that constraint satisfaction algorithms should be able to resatisfy constraints rapidly after a change to one or more variables. It also suggests that debugging constraints should not be unduly burdensome on a programmer since the number of constraints that must be examined to find the source of an error is not terribly large. Overall, the results of this study should provide a repository of data that will be useful in directing future research on optimizing constraint solvers and developing effective debugging techniques.”
Hudson, Scott E. and Smith, Ian (1996): Ultra-Lightweight Constraints. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 147-155. Available online
“Constraint systems have been used for some time to implement various components of a user interface. High level support for flexible screen layout has been among the more important uses; layout constraints in a user interface toolkit provide a declarative mechanism for controlling the size and position of objects in an interactive display, along with an efficient update mechanism for maintaining display layouts automatically in the face of dynamic changes. This paper describes a new technique for implementing one-way layout constraints which overcomes a substantial limitation of previous systems. In particular, it allows constraints to be implemented in an extremely small amount of space -- as little as 17 bits per constraint -- and still maintain the level of performance needed for good interactive response. These ultra-lightweight constraints, while not handling all cases, cover most relationships used for layout, and allow conventional constraints to be applied when needed. This paper will consider both a general technique for ultra-lightweight layout constraints and its specific implementation in a new Java-based user interface toolkit.”
Raisamo, Roope and Raiha, Kari-Jouko (1996): A New Direct Manipulation Technique for Aligning Objects in Drawing Programs. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 157-164. Available online
“Current drawing programs provide mainly three ways for carrying out object alignment: either by issuing an alignment command, or by using direct positioning with the help of gravity active points, or by making use of constraints. The first technique has limited functionality, and the other two may be mysterious for a novice. We describe here a new direct manipulation tool for alignment. We show that while direct manipulation helps to make the tool intuitive, it has through iterative design evolved into a tool that also offers functionality not found in current commercial products.”
Ayatsuka, Yuji, Matsuoka, Satoshi and Rekimoto, Jun (1996): Penumbrae for 3D Interactions. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 165-166. Available online
“We propose a new feedback technique for 3D interaction using penumbrae which the objects cast. Rather than generating a real penumbra, which is computationally expensive, a fast, simplified algorithm is employed, which also is better suited for position feedback purposes. User studies show that 1) compared to orthographic shadow projections, 3D spatial recognition and placement tasks are substantially faster with our penumbrae, and 2) the users feel the feedback to be more natural.”
Rekimoto, Jun (1996): Tilting Operations for Small Screen Interfaces. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 167-168. Available online
“This TechNote introduces new interaction techniques for small screen devices such as palmtop computers or handheld electric devices, including pagers and cellular phones. Our proposed method uses the tilt of the device itself as input. Using both tilt and buttons, it is possible to build several interaction techniques ranging from menus and scroll bars, to more complicated examples such as a map browsing system and a 3D object viewer. During operation, only one hand is required to both hold and control the device. This feature is especially useful for field workers.”
Bederson, Benjamin B., Hollan, James D., Druin, Allison, Stewart, Jason, Rogers, David and Proft, David (1996): Local Tools: An Alternative to Tool Palettes. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 169-170. Available online
“We describe local tools, a general interaction technique that replaces traditional tool palettes. A collection of tools sit on the worksurface along with the data. Each tool can be picked up (where it replaces the cursor), used, and then put down anywhere on the worksurface. There is a toolbox for organizing the tools. These local tools were implemented in Pad++ as part of KidPad, an application for children.”
Baudisch, Patrick (1996): The Cage: Efficient Construction in 3D using a Cubic Adaptive Grid. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 171-172. Available online
“The Cage is an easy to use 3D grid. Built into a 3D modeler, it provides a visualized reference coordinate system that helps the user to orient himself in 3D space, and that supports efficient alignment and snapping methods. It can be adapted with a single mouse click to any new viewing situation and reference system. The Cage was implemented in C++ under Open Inventor on Silicon Graphics workstations. It was tested as a part of a 3D authoring tool for virtual TV studios.”
Sugiura, Atsushi and Koseki, Yoshiyuki (1996): Simplifying Macro Definition in Programming by Demonstration. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 173-182. Available online
“In order to automate repetitive tasks performed in computer applications, users are required to acquire special skills for writing macros or programs. Programming by demonstration (PBD), a method of converting a user demonstration into an executable code, is one possible solution to this problem. However, many PBD systems require users to spend much time and care in macro definition. This paper describes a PBD system, DemoOffice, which employs two techniques, action slicing and macro auto-definition, to simplify macro definition significantly. The system is able to detect user actions which might be expected to be performed again in the future and to automatically convert those actions into a macro, for which no further definition is required.”
Gross, Mark D. and Do, Ellen Yi-Luen (1996): Ambiguous Intentions: A Paper-Like Interface for Creative Design. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 183-192. Available online
“Interfaces for conceptual and creative design should recognize and interpret drawings. They should also capture users' intended ambiguity, vagueness, and imprecision and convey these qualities visually and through interactive behavior. Freehand drawing can provide this information and it is a natural input mode for design. We describe a pen-based interface that acquires information about ambiguity and precision from freehand input, represents it internally, and echoes it to users visually and through constraint based edit behavior.”
Olsen Jr, Dan R. and Deng, Xinyu (1996): Inductive Groups. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 193-199. Available online
“The notion of inductive groups is presented as a mechanism for manipulating sets of related objects. The interactive behavior of such groups is discussed along with extensible algorithms for discovering inductive relationships in general. An application using these techniques is shown.”
Rich, Charles and Sidner, Candace (1996): Adding a Collaborative Agent to Graphical User Interfaces. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 21-30. Available online
“We have implemented a collaborative agent toolkit called Collagen and used it to build a software agent that collaborates with the user of a direct-manipulation graphical interface by following the rules and conventions of human discourse. One of the main results is an interaction history that is segmented according to the structure of the agent's and user's goals, without requiring the agent to understand natural language.”
Ginsburg, Adam, Marks, Joe and Shieber, Stuart (1996): A Viewer for Postscript Documents. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 31-32. Available online
“We describe a PostScript viewer that provides navigation and annotation functionality similar to that of paper documents using simple unified user-interface techniques.”
Chalmers, Matthew, Ingram, Rob and Pfranger, Christoph (1996): Adding Imageability Features to Information Displays. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 33-39. Available online
“Techniques for improving the imageability of an existing data visualisation are described. The aim is to make the visualisation more easily explored, navigated and remembered. Starting from a rclatively sparse landscape-like representation of a set of objects, we selectively add to the visualisation static features such as clusters, and dynamic features such as view-specific sampling of object detail. Information on past usage is used in this process, making manifest an aspect of interaction which is often neglected. Issues arising from the use of such features in a shared virtual environment are discussed.”
Spenke, Michael, Beilken, Christian and Berlage, Thomas (1996): FOCUS: The Interactive Table for Product Comparison and Selection. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 41-50. Available online
“FOCUS, the Feature-Oriented Catalog USer interface, is an interactive table viewer for a common kind of table, namely the object-attribute table, also called cases-by-attribute table or relational table. Typical examples of these tables are the Roll Calls in BYTE where the features and test results of a family of hardware or software products are compared. FOCUS supports data exploration by a combination of a focus+context or fisheye technique, a hierarchical outliner for large attribute sets, and a general and easy-to-use dynamic query mechanism where the user simply clicks on desired values found in the table. A PC/Windows implementation of FOCUS is publicly available (http://www.gmd.de/fit/projects/focus.html). It is suited for tables with up to a few hundred rows and columns, which are typically stored and maintained by spreadsheet applications. Since we use a simple data format, existing tables can be easily inspected with FOCUS. With the rapidly increasing public interest in on-line services like the World Wide Web we expect a growing demand for access to on-line catalogues and databases. FOCUS satisfies this demand, allowing formulation of simple database queries with an interface as easy to use as a Web browser.”
Viega, John, Conway, Matthew, Williams, George and Pausch, Randy (1996): 3D Magic Lenses. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 51-58. Available online
“This work extends the metaphor of a see-through interface embodied in Magic Lenses to 3D environments. We present two new see-through visualization techniques: flat lenses in 3D and volumetric lenses. We discuss implementation concerns for platforms that have programmer accessible hardware clipping planes and show several examples of each visualization technique. We also examine composition of multiple lenses in 3D environments, which strengthens the flat lens metaphor, but may have no meaningful semantics in the case of volumetric lenses.”
Rohall, Steven L. and Lahtinen, Eric P. (1996): The VIEP System: Interacting with Collaborative Multimedia. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 59-66. Available online
“This paper presents a survey of the Visual Information Environment Prototype (VIEP), a system which demonstrates the next generation of Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence (C3I) systems. In particular, VIEP provides a novel integration of user interaction techniques including wireless input and large-screen output to facilitate the task of collaborating with media such as large images, audio, and video. The prototype has been implemented and demonstrated over both local and wide area networks.”
Kieninger, Thomas G. (1996): The "Growing Up" of HyperBraille -- An Office Workspace for Blind People. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 67-73. Available online
“Due to of their intuitive usage especially for novice users, graphical user interfaces (GUI) are nowadays a widespread user frontend for almost any kind of application. It is well-known that the advantages to sighted users hide strong drawbacks for the community of blind people. Their special needs are not very well catered for the common software design. The control over GUI applications with their overlapping windows and buttons are no analog to the way blind people "see" their environment as it is for sighted people. Thus, the competitiveness of these people is drastically reduced. The basic goal of HyperBraille is to enable blind or visually impaired people to participate as fully competitive members in today's information technology oriented office worlds. We did not aim to create another tool to access graphical user interfaces but rather decided to realize a textscreen-oriented application especially for blind people which integrates tools to retrieve, create and exchange printed as well as electronic documents. Thereby we used the hypertext and formatting features of the Hypertext Markup Language HTML. On the other hand we adapted the GUI concept of the pull-down menus to be customized on a Braille display. As for the sighted user, pull-down menus allow the novice user to immediately operate any application like word-processors or WWW-browsers without knowing the various key bindings. The development of HyperBraille started three years ago with the construction of a World Wide Web client that allowed easy access to all the documents of the Web [11]. This article will describe the new features of HyperBraille that are mostly driven by user feedback and by the needs for individual configurations of potential users.”
Hascoet-Zizi, Mountaz, Plaisant, Catherine, Ahlberg, Christopher, Chalmers, Matthew, Korfhage, Robert R. and Rao, Ramana (1996): Where is Information Visualization Technology Going?. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 75-77. Available online
“Over the past few years a lot of different information visualization techniques have been proposed. Being a relatively new and large field, the spectrum of emerging techniques has not clearly been identified. Another major consequence of the youthfulness of the field is that very few evaluation have been conducted so far. The aim of the panel will be to address these two points. First, panelist will characterize the spectrum of information visualization technology depending on tasks, users or data. Panelists will further discuss future trends in visualization technology by determining which are the most important features or challenges that information visualization systems should address. Second, the discussion will focus on how these systems are to be evaluated: through controlled experiments, system evaluation, long-time studies, verbal protocols, theoretical evaluations, or else?”
Poupyrev, Ivan, Billinghurst, Mark, Weghorst, Suzanne and Ichikawa, Tadao (1996): The Go-Go Interaction Technique: Non-Linear Mapping for Direct Manipulation in VR. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 79-80. Available online
“The Go-Go immersive interaction technique uses the metaphor of interactively growing the user's arm and non-linear mapping for reaching and manipulating distant objects. Unlike others, our technique allows for seamless direct manipulation of both nearby objects and those at a distance.”
Koller, David R., Mine, Mark R. and Hudson, Scott E. (1996): Head-Tracked Orbital Viewing: An Interaction Technique for Immersive Virtual Environments. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 81-82. Available online
“An interaction technique for immersive virtual environments called "head-tracked orbital viewing" is described. The user's head orientation is tracked and mapped so as to move the viewpoint of the user about the surface of a virtual sphere surrounding a center of rotation. The technique is useful for object examination tasks in a virtual world, allowing the user to quickly and easily view an object from many perspectives.”
MacIntyre, Blair and Feiner, Steven K. (1996): Language-Level Support for Exploratory Programming of Distributed Virtual Environments. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 83-94. Available online
“We describe COTERIE, a toolkit that provides language-level support for building distributed virtual environments. COTERIE is based on the distributed data-object paradigm for distributed shared memory. Any data object in COTERIE can be declared to be a Shared Object that is replicated fully in any process that is interested in it. These Shared Objects support asynchronous data propagation with atomic serializable updates, and asynchronous notification of updates. COTERIE is built in Modula-3 and uses existing Modula-3 packages that support an integrated interpreted language, multithreading, and 3D animation. Unlike other VE toolkits, COTERIE is based on a set of general-purpose parallel and distributed language concepts designed with the needs of virtual environments in mind. We summarize the requirements that we identified for COTERIE, describe its implementation, compare it with other toolkits, and provide examples that show COTERIE's advantages.”
Forsberg, Andrew, Herndon, Kenneth and Zeleznik, Robert (1996): Aperture Based Selection for Immersive Virtual Environments. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 95-96. Available online
“We present two novel techniques for effectively selecting objects in immersive virtual environments using a single 6 DOF magnetic tracker. These techniques advance the state of the art in that they exploit the participant's visual frame of reference and fully utilize the position and orientation data from the tracker to improve accuracy of the selection task. Preliminary results from pilot usability studies validate our designs. Finally, the two techniques combine to compensate for each other's weaknesses.”
Ayers, Matthew and Zeleznik, Robert (1996): The Lego Interface Toolkit. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 97-98. Available online
“This paper describes a rapid prototyping system for physical interaction devices in immersive virtual environments. Because of the increased complexity of 3D interactive environments and the lack of standard interactive tools, designers are unable to use traditional 2D hardware in 3D virtual environments. As a result, designers must create entirely new interaction devices, a both slow and expensive process. We propose a system which allows hardware designers to experiment with the construction of new 3D interaction devices both quickly and inexpensively.”
Lecolinet, Eric (1996): XXL: A Dual Approach for Building User Interfaces. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 99-108. Available online
“This paper presents XXL, a new interactive development system for building user interfaces which is based on the concept of textual and visual equivalence. XXL includes an interactive builder and a "small" C compatible special-purpose language that is both interpretable and compilable. The visual builder is able to establish the reverse correspondence between the dynamic objects that it manipulates and their textual descriptions in the original source code. Interactive modifications performed by using the builder result in incremental modifications of the original text. Lastly, XXL not only allows users to specify the widget part of the interface but can also be used to manage various behaviors and to create distributed interfaces.”
We have decided to give away world-class educational materials
because we believe that universal access to high quality education is key to the building
of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue.
To calculate just have much we have saved you, our wonderful readers, we compare our free encyclopedia to two
books we love:
As you are reading our encyclopedia on your iPad/tablet (and saving a few trees), we estimate that the price would be $90 if sold as an eBook.
With that number, we can calculate how much money we have saved our readers, based on calculating the number of readers.
How we calculate readership
Because of our online and tablet/iPad approach to publishing, we are able to precisely measure reading behaviour across hundreds of parameters in realtime: Anything from reading
speed, drop-off points in the text, reader demographics, and much more.
Based on our server logs and the Google Analytics API,
we calculate the number of readers as described in the calculation method below.
A reader is not the same as a simple pageview and a reader is not the same as a
website visitor (as described in our calculation method below).
We calculate readership for two types of readers:
Readers that have read our whole encyclopedia, much the same way you read a printed book
Readers that have reader an individual chapter
Calcalution method: How we define a reader
First we use the Google Analytics API to get a report of the number of unique human visitors to a chapter/page. Google runs its business on ads and thus completely relies on the ability to distinguish between a human visitor and an automated request. If not, you could earn millions on automating clicks on Google Ads.
We then compare that number to our Apache webserver logs, which report the much higher number of actual visits to a chapter/page (both human and automated). We calculate the difference in percent, which we call an "exaggeration factor", which we use in step 6 below.
With a large part of the visitors excluded, we further exclude any visitor who:
has not remained on the page for at least 3 minutes (this factor is calculated by recording visit durations of 1000 randomly selected visitors) or has not printed the page (i.e. has not visited the printerfriendly version of the chapter/page)
has not scrolled the page (this factor is calculated by recording scroll movements on 1000 randomly selected visitors)
We then further exclude "double readers", i.e. readers who read a portion of a chapter and then returns in,
say, a week or a month to read the rest.
Although this person's reading activity spans multiple server sessions, the person is only counted as a single reader.
We categorize a "double reader" as a visitor who:
visits a page, or multiple pages, across multiple server sessions
qualifies to be defined as a reader, cf step 1-3 above, in all server sessions
uses the same originating IP address
We then subtract 5% from the final number to counter-balance a last remaining factor, namely the situation where one reader reads a chapter on his/her tablet
using a WiFi connection (and counted as one reader) but then picks up his other tablet using a 3G dongle
(with another IP address) and re-reads some of the chapter. That will equal two readers, not one. We have no way
of calculating how many times this situation arises, but to be on the safe side we subtract 5%
from the final number.
We then take half of the "exaggeration factor" from step 2 and substract from the final number. We do this for no rational reason. We do it only as a further measure to be certain that our number of readers is not inflated.
To qualify as a reader who has read our whole encyclopedia - much the same way you read a printed book - that person must have qualified as a reader (cf. 1-6 above) of at least 80% of the encyclopedia chapters.
As a result, we have eliminated everything from automated requests to the more casual visitors. That leaves us with what we can safely call readers.
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“
... the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that servces no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what--these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.
”
Authoritative overview of End-User Development (EUD) including 4 HD video interviews filmed in Rome, Italy. EUD is really all about democratization of computing.
