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Clip, connect, clone: combining application elements to build custom interfaces for information access

Published: 24 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Many applications provide a form-like interface for requesting information: the user fills in some fields, submits the form, and the application presents corresponding results. Such a procedure becomes burdensome if (1) the user must submit many different requests, for example in pursuing a trial-and-error search, (2) results from one application are to be used as inputs for another, requiring the user to transfer them by hand, or (3) the user wants to compare results, but only the results from one request can be seen at a time. We describe how users can reduce this burden by creating custom interfaces using three mechanisms: clipping of input and result elements from existing applications to form cells on a spreadsheet; connecting these cells using formulas, thus enabling result transfer between applications; and cloning cells so that multiple requests can be handled side by side. We demonstrate a prototype of these mechanisms, initially specialised for handling Web applications, and show how it lets users build new interfaces to suit their individual needs.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '04: Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2004
312 pages
ISBN:1581139578
DOI:10.1145/1029632
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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Published: 24 October 2004

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  1. customized information access
  2. end-user programming
  3. parallel exploration

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  • (2019)SuBViSProceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3337722.3337740(1-11)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2019
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