Paper Reading #18 - DMacs: Building MultiDevice User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions

Comments:
Michael Atkinson
Paola Garza

Reference Info:
DMacs: Building MultiDevice User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions
Jan Meskens, Kris Luyten, Karin Coninx
UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New York, New York, USASummary:
This paper discusses the problem of having to design different user interfaces for different platforms for the same program. An example given is YouTube. THere is a seperate design for the web and telephone. The more variety of platforms, the more difficult it becomes to manually code the UI for the given program. Design tool Macros (D-Macs) is a multi-device GUI builder allowing designers to automate repetitive design actions. The main goal is to automate these transitions of UI from platform to platform in an appealing way. This tool allows developers to make a UI once and have it imported to other platforms.

Discussion:
I found this an interesting article. I think it would be nice to have a way to develop a UI for one platform and have it readily available in a pleasing way for another. This will also cut down on so much time of coding extra UI for different platforms. In today's world, people want to be able to use their services in a variety of platforms and this will help us achieve that.