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BezelCopy: an efficient cross-application copy-paste technique for touchscreen smartphones

Published: 27 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Copy-Paste (CP) operations on touchscreen smartphones are not as easy to perform as compared with similar operations on desktop computers. The smaller screen size and input area make both text selection and application switching more difficult to perform. To enable faster copy-paste on touchscreen smartphones, we introduce BezelCopy, a copy-paste technique that uses a bezel-swipe gesture to determine a rough area of interest in the document. Chosen text is magnified in a new panel to enable fast and precise selection. With the new panel, users can perform easy tap-and-drag gestures to select the exact content, and tap the application icon on the bottom of the panel to paste it to the target application. Users can further adjust the location of the pasted text in the target application using drag and drop. We conducted two experiments to compare the performance of BezelCopy with alternative approaches, and our results show that BezelCopy outperform existing copy-paste techniques for a number of commonly performed copy-paste tasks.

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References

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    AVI '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
    May 2014
    438 pages
    ISBN:9781450327756
    DOI:10.1145/2598153
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • Centro Cultura Volta: Centro Cultura Volta
    • Politecnico di Milano: Politecnico di Milano

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 May 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. bezel interaction
    2. copy-paste
    3. handheld device
    4. input
    5. mobile computing
    6. smartphone

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    AVI' 14
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    • Centro Cultura Volta
    • Politecnico di Milano

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    AVI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 112 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 490 submissions, 26%

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    • (2023)1D-Touch: NLP-Assisted Coarse Text Selection via a Semi-Direct GestureProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36264837:ISS(463-482)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
    • (2023)GeShort: One-Handed Mobile Text Editing and Formatting with Gestural Shortcuts and a Floating ClipboardProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042597:MHCI(1-23)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
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    • (2022)A technique to improve text editing on smartphones2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC53370.2022.9833120(1-3)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
    • (2021)Press-n-Paste: Copy-and-Paste Operations with Pressure-sensitive Caret Navigation for Miniaturized Surface in Mobile Augmented RealityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34571465:EICS(1-29)Online publication date: 29-May-2021
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