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Smartwatches and other wearables are characterized by small-scale touchscreens that complicate the interaction with content. In this paper, we present Force9, the first optimized miniature keyboard leveraging force-sensitive touchscreens on wrist-worn computers. Force9 enables character selection in an ambiguous layout by analyzing the trade-off between interaction space and the easiness of force-assisted interaction. We argue that dividing the screen’s pressure range into three contiguous force levels is sufficient to differentiate characters for fast and accurate text input. Our pilot study captures and calibrates the ability of users to perform force-assisted touches on miniature-sized keys on touchscreen devices. We then optimize the keyboard layout considering the goodness of character pairs (with regards to the selected English corpus) under the force-based configuration and the users? familiarity with the QWERTY layout. We finally evaluate the performance of the trimetric optimized Force9 layout, and achieve an average of 10.18 WPM by the end of the final session. Compared to the other state-of-the-art approaches, Force9 allows for single-gesture character selection without addendum sensors. more...

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides an environment for creating and deploying applications using one of popular development platforms. This paper presents a practical solution for building a service composition platform based on the GEMBus (GEANT Multi-domain Bus) that extends the industry accepted Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform with automated services composition functionality and core services to support federated network access to distributed applications and resources, primarily targeted for GEANT research and academic community. The ESB is widely used as a platform for SOA and Web Services based integrated enterprise solutions. However in existing practices ESB design is still based on manual development, configuration and integration. GEMBus with its extended functionality and orientation on distributed resources integration can be considered as a logical choice for creating cloud PaaS services composition and provisioning platform. The paper describes Composable Services Architecture that creates a basis for automated services composition and lifecycle management and explains how this can be implemented with GEMBus. The paper describes the combined GEMBus/ESB testbed and provides an example of the simple services composition. © 2012 Springer-Verlag. more...