Storyboards are excellent tools to create a high level specification of an interactive system. Because of the emphasis on graphical depiction they are both an accessible means for communicating the requirements and properties of an interactive system and allow the specification of complex context-aware systems while avoiding the need for technical details. We present a storyboard meta-model that captures the high level information from a storyboard and al- lows relating this information with other models that are common for engineering interactive systems. We show that a storyboard can be used as an entry point for using UsiXML models. Finally, this approach is accompanied by a tool set to make the connection between the storyboard model, UsiXML models and the program code required for maintaining these connections throughout the engineering process.

When creating applications that should be available on multiple computing platforms, designers have to cope with dif- ferent design tools and user interface toolkits. Incompatibilities between these design tools and toolkits make it hard to keep multi-device user interfaces consistent. This paper presents Jelly, a flexible design environment that can target a broad set of computing devices and toolkits. Jelly enables designers to copy parts of a user interface from one device to another and to maintain the different user interfaces in concert using linked editing. Our approach lowers the burden of designing multi-device user interfaces by eliminating the need to switch between different design tools and by providing tool support for keeping the user interfaces consistent across different platforms and toolkits.

As the variety in network service platforms and end user devices grows rapidly, content providers must constantly adapt their production system to support these new technologies. In this paper, we present a middleware platform for deploying highly interactive (television) applications over a diverse collection of networks and end user devices. As the user interface of such interactive applications may vary depending on the capabilities of the different target devices, our middleware uses UIML for the description of generic user interfaces. Our middleware platform also provides a pluggable support for new networks. A factor that highly complicates the design is the need for strict synchronization between an interactive application and video or audio data that is broadcasted. In order to support a maximum of functionality, downloadable application logic is used to provide the interactive services. As a test case, an evaluation setup was built, targeting both set-top boxes and mobile phones.

Due to the large amount of mobile devices that continue to appear on the consumer market, mobile user interface design becomes increasingly important. The major issue with many existing mobile user interface design approaches is the time and effort that is needed to deploy a user interface design to the target device. In order to address this issue, we propose the plug-and-design tool that relies on a continuous multi-device mouse pointer to design user interfaces directly on the mobile target device. This will shorten iteration time since designers can continuously test and validate each design action they take. Using our approach, designers can empirically learn the specialities of a target device which will help them while creating user interfaces for devices they are not familiar with.

Discovering and unlocking the full potential of complex pervasive environments is still approached in application-centric ways. A set of statically deployed applications often defines the possible interactions within the environment. However, the increasing dynamics of such environments require a more versatile and generic approach which allows the end-user to inspect, configure and control the overall behavior of such an environment. A meta-UI addresses these needs by providing the end-user with an interactive view on a physical or virtual environment which can then be observed and manipulated at runtime. The meta-UI bridges the gap between the resource providers and the end-users by abstracting a resource's features as executable activities that can be assembled at runtime to reach a common goal. In order to allow software services to automatically integrate with a pervasive computing environment, the minimal requirements of the environment's meta-UI must be identified and agreed on. In this paper we present Meta-STUD, a goal- and service-oriented reference framework that supports the creation of meta-UIs for usage in pervasive environments. The framework is validated using two independent implementation approaches designed with different technologies and focuses.

The design of interactive software that populates an ambient space is a complex and ad-hoc process with traditional software development approaches. In an ambient space, important building blocks can be both physical objects within the user's reach and software objects accessible from within that space. However, putting many heterogeneous resources together to create a single system mostly requires writing a large amount of glue code before such a system is operational. Besides, users all have their own needs and preferences to interact with various kinds of environments which often means that the system behavior should be adapted to a specific context of use while the system is being used. In this paper we present a methodology to orchestrate resources on an abstract level and hence configure a pervasive computing environment. We use a semantic layer to model behavior and illustrate its use in an application.