Jock D. Mackinlay

Fluid annotations in an open world

Fluid Documents use animated typographical changes to provide a novel and appealing user experience for hypertext browsing and for viewing document annotations in context. This paper describes an effort to broaden the utility of Fluid Documents by using the open hypermedia Arakne Environment to layer fluid annotations and links on top of arbitrary HTML pages on the World Wide Web. Changes to both Fluid Documents and Arakne are required.

TrekTrack: A Round Wristwatch Interface for SMS Authoring

The user interface for text messaging via SMS has changed little since the technology was introduced on cell phones. Authoring text with a phone keypad is tedious and error-prone. Furthermore, the cell phone intrudes into other activities while hands hold it for authoring. In this paper we suggest a future alternative user interface for SMS messages based on a round wristwatch device. Two button-wheels are used to access a round hi-res color display. Text input is done with a round soft keyboard that maps intuitively to the button-wheels using the angular and radial movements of polar coordinates. Furthermore, a wristwatch device has an aesthetics that is less intrusive than a cell phone. Since the device is always deployed, authoring is easily interrupted to use the hands for other tasks. Informal user evaluation of a prototype implementation suggests that this novel round design provides an improved user experience for authoring SMS compared to cell phones.