Animating user interfaces using animation servers

Abstract

Our approach to user interface animation involves simulating the interaction of a user with the interface by synthetically generating the input events that drive the session. The interaction is made explicit by displaying the behavior of input devices audio-visually. Such "animation" is both educational and functional, and has the potential to become a powerful new medium in the graphical user interface domain. We describe the construction of a general purpose tool for animating user interfaces - the animation server. Clients drive the server with textual scripts that describe the interaction. These may contain constructs for obtaining application context information at runtime and synchronizing with other media servers. We present a few potential applications for animation servers, including a groupware package for loosely coupled collaboration.