Adaptation of Single-user Multi-touch Components to Support Synchronous Mobile Collaboration

摘要

Mobile applications, which include calendars, browsers, and interactive maps, are part of our lives nowadays. Most mobile applications are single user; and they do not enable synchronous collaboration among the users. Mobile collaboration enables multiple users in diverse locations to combine synergistically their contributions in a convenient manner. We investigate the potential to create collaborative applications based on existing single user mobile applications. In this work, we propose an adaptation technique based on the reuse of manufacturers' SDKs (Software Development Kits) to create multi-user prototype applications. In general, adaptation is made manually; nonetheless, we conjecture that some automation is possible. This paper investigates this possibility. More specifically, we hypothesize that if the target SDK's components of mobile applications comply with certain design guidelines, automatic adaption can be enhanced. We present a reference model and an automatic process to develop high-fidelity prototype multiuser mobile applications by the conversion of multi-touch user interface found on single-user applications. We discuss two examples that illustrate our proposal and provide a quantitative Lines of Code (LOC) comparison of existing approaches.