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

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Abstract

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 multi-user 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.

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Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers that made suggestions to significantly improve the content of this paper. This work has been partially funded by FAPESP/Brazil under grant No. 2012/04260-4 and by CNPq/Brazil under grant No. 203037/2013-8 provided to the authors.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, ITA - Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, São José dos Campos, Brazil

    Mauro C. Pichiliani & Celso Massaki Hirata

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  1. Mauro C. Pichiliani
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  2. Celso Massaki Hirata
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Correspondence to Mauro C. Pichiliani.

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Pichiliani, M.C., Hirata, C.M. Adaptation of Single-user Multi-touch Components to Support Synchronous Mobile Collaboration. Mobile Netw Appl 19, 660–679 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-014-0512-0

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