Penbuilder: Platform for the development of pen-based user interface

Abstract

Pen-based user interfaces is widely used in mobile computing environment, which provides natural, efficient interaction. It has substantial differences from any previous interface and it is difficult to be implemented. A well-designed platform will improve the development of pen-based user interface. In this paper, the architecture of Pen-Book-Page-Paper is presented, which is ex-tended from the metaphor of Pen-Paper. Penbuilder is a development platform based on this architecture. Pen-based user interface can be constructed from three layers of Penbuilder: modal-primitive layer, task-primitive layer and task layer. Each layer provides different extent supports for flexibility and reusability. The components of the platform are discussed in detail and some properties of the platform are argued. Penbuilder is also compliant for the development of distributed user interface. In the section of discussion, we analyze the platform through task tree. The platform provides full supports for extensibility and new interactive devices can be easily added.