1. Supporting 'what-if' in touch-screen web Applications
- Author
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Peter Simonyi, Jeff Wilson, Robert Biddle, and Judith M. Brown
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Interface (Java) ,business.industry ,End user ,Computer science ,05 social sciences ,020207 software engineering ,02 engineering and technology ,JavaScript library ,Undo ,World Wide Web ,Surface computing ,Human–computer interaction ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,medicine ,sort ,Web application ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,business ,Web modeling ,050107 human factors - Abstract
Surface computing encourages exploratory interaction, and many applications are designed to work this way. In essence, the fluid interaction causes the user to ask “What if?” We suggest this requires support for recording the history of such explorations and allowing reversion to earlier states. There are currently a variety of related mechanisms, but they are either underpowered for the sort of interaction history management we suggest is needed, or are restricted to very specific domains. We present a prototype implementation of an interaction history manager: Ra is a JavaScript library for supporting this exploration and version tracking in web applications. We illustrate the interface for end users seen in augmenting simple web applications; we describe the underlying technical architecture, which uses ES6 Proxy objects to maintain access to the application’s model; and we present the API, which allows an existing application to include Ra with minimal code change.
- Published
- 2015
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