With the advent of in-home networking, all
kinds of interactive applications will emerge that do not just run on a single consumer
electronics device, but can be run on/from different devices in the network. Therefore, at
Philips Research, we aim to provide solutions for authoring user interfaces of networked
applications in a device independent way, so that these user interfaces can be easily
adapted to run on a variety of devices. Our goal is to minimize the authoring effort for
developing user interfaces for different devices, whilst at the same time allowing the
author to fully exploit the UI capabilities of these devices. This presentation gives an
overview of the techniques we are using and developing in order to make user interfaces
(more) device independent. Examples of these techniques are abstraction, prioritization
and advanced stylesheet mechanisms. Furthermore, we will present the approach that we take
for authoring device independent user interfaces and how these can be transformed into
concrete user interfaces. We conclude with an overview of the challenges that we face, and
that have to be solved in order for device independent UI authoring to be successful. |