As users become increasingly conscious of their energy footprint—either to improve battery life or to respect the environment—improved energy efficiency of systems has gained in importance. This is especially important in the context of information appliances such as e-book readers that are meant to replace books, since their energy efficiency impacts how long the appliance can be used on a single charge of the battery. In this article, we present a new software and hardware architecture for information appliances that provides significant advantages in terms of device lifetime. The architecture combines a low-power microcontroller with a high-performance application processor, where the low-power microcontroller is used to handle simple user interactions (e.g., turning pages, inking, entering text) without waking up the main application processor. We demonstrate how this architecture is easily adapted to the traditional way of building user interfaces using a user interface markup language. We report on our initial measurements using an E Ink-based prototype. When comparing our hybrid architecture to a simpler solution we found that we can increase the battery life by a factor of 1.72 for a reading task and by a factor of 3.23 for a writing task. We conclude by presenting design guidelines aimed at optimizing the overall energy signature of information appliances.

The availability of flexible capacitive sensors that can be fitted around mice, smartphones, and pens carries great potential in leveraging grasp as a new interaction modality. Unfortunately, most capacitive sensors only track interaction directly on the surface, making it harder to differentiate among grips and constraining user movements. We present a new optical range sensor design based on high power infrared LEDs and photo-transistors, which can be fabricat-ed on a flexible PCB and wrapped around a wide variety of graspable objects including pens, mice, smartphones, and slates. Our sensor offers a native resolution of 10 dpi with a sensing range of up to 30mm (1.2"") and sampling speed of 50Hz. Based on our prototype wrapped around the barrel of a pen, we present a summary of the characteristics of the sensor and describe the sensor output in several typical pen grips. Our design is versatile enough to apply not only to pens but to a wide variety of graspable objects including smartphones and slates.

Nowadays the Web and Web browsers have become the most important and universal platform for people to search, view, process, and exchange various kinds of information. Consequently, today's users usually open many Web pages simultaneously in order to perform multiple tasks in parallel, which makes Web browsers crucial in our daily task management. However, no existing Web browser provides users with sufficient support for the management of many tabs or windows of opened pages. On the other hand, wide displays have become more affordable and prevalent, while extra space on those displays is not utilized effectively in Web browsing. In this paper, we propose a new Web browser interface aiming to support efficient task management in Web browsing on wide displays. In order to help users switch between opened Web pages, we show thumbnails of the pages in the extra space around the currently focused page. In the page thumbnails, we emphasize distinctive elements in each page in order to make the selection of the thumbnails easier. In addition, we calculate the relevance between pages based on users' switching history, and emphasize pages relevant to the current page by adjusting the size or opacity of the thumbnails. This further helps users find the thumbnails of needed pages, and also helps users get the overview of the page set related to the current task.