A User Interface Toolkit for a Small Screen Device.
UOTILA, ALEKSI (2000)
2000
Tietojenkäsittelyoppi - Computer Science
Taloudellis-hallinnollinen tiedekunta - Faculty of Economics and Administration
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2000-02-28
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uta-1-8063
https://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uta-1-8063
Sisällysluettelo
1. Introduction 1 2. Concepts 3 2.1 Platform independent graphical user interfaces 3 2.1.1 User interface toolkits 3 2.1.2 Code mobility 5 2.1.3 Application context 6 2.2 Devices 6 2.3 Differences with desktop user interfaces 9 2.3.1 Output 9 2.3.2 Input 11 3. Technologies 15 3.1 Current Java user interface concepts 15 3.2 Layout management 19 3.3 WAP technology and its user interface concepts 24 3.4 General WAP and Java interoperability 27 4. Different user interface toolkit concepts 30 4.1 A subset of AWT or Swing 31 4.1.1 A subset of AWT for WAP user interface elements 32 4.2 A toolkit based on WAP user interface 33 4.2.1 WAP concept based 34 4.2.2 Wapplets embedded in Microbrowser 34 4.3 Configurations and device profiles 35 4.4 Lower level user interface API 36 4.5 Existing implementations 38 4.5.1 Existing Java toolkits 38 4.5.2 User interface markup languages 39 4.5.3 Using markup languages for specifying user interface 40 4.5.4 The Spotless system 41 5. User interface toolkit designed for small screens 44 5.1 Requirements 44 5.1.1 Interaction devices 45 5.1.2 Accessibility 46 5.1.3 The toolkit 48 5.2 Design issues 49 5.2.1 The screen size problem 49 5.2.2 The widget problem 50 5.2.3 The abstract factory problem 54 5.3 Details 56 5.3.1 Associations between semantic controls 56 5.3.2 Input abstractions 59 5.3.3 Capability mechanisms 61 5.3.4 Compound interactive controls 62 6. Conclusions 64 References
Tiivistelmä
The appearance of different kinds of networked mobile devices and network appliances creates special requirements for user interfaces that are not met by existing widget based user interface creation toolkits. This thesis studies the problem domain of user interface creation toolkits for portable network connected devices. The portable nature of these devices places great restrictions on the user interface capabilities. One main characteristic of the devices is that they have small screens compared to the existing desktop environment displays.
Mobile users want to be able to use their applications whenever and wherever possible. The same applications need to be accessible in different situations and environments and from different platforms and devices. Code mobility and wide area wireless data networks will enable us to transmit application code virtually everywhere, although existing user interface toolkits form a bottleneck for universal portability and access. The conclusion is that for globally accessible and portable applications explicit toolkit level support for application semantics is needed.
Keywords: user interface toolkit, widgets, application semantics, semantic controls, software portability, graphical user interfaces, Java, WAP, hand-held devices
Mobile users want to be able to use their applications whenever and wherever possible. The same applications need to be accessible in different situations and environments and from different platforms and devices. Code mobility and wide area wireless data networks will enable us to transmit application code virtually everywhere, although existing user interface toolkits form a bottleneck for universal portability and access. The conclusion is that for globally accessible and portable applications explicit toolkit level support for application semantics is needed.
Keywords: user interface toolkit, widgets, application semantics, semantic controls, software portability, graphical user interfaces, Java, WAP, hand-held devices