Software developers typically use multiple large screens in their office setup. However, they often work away from the office where such a setup is not available, instead only working with a laptop computer and drastically reduced screen real estate. We explore how developers can be better supported in ad-hoc scenarios, for example when they work in a cafe, an airport, or at a client's site. We present insights into current work practices and challenges when working away from the usual office desk sourced from a survey of professional software developers. Based on these insights, we introduce an IDE that makes use of additional personal devices, such as a phone or a tablet. Parts of the IDE can be offloaded to these mobile devices, for example the application that is being developed, a debugging console or navigational elements. A qualitative evaluation with professional software developers showed that they appreciate the increased screen real estate.

The number of smart devices that people own or share with family and friends has increased dramatically. As a result, users often want to copy data among devices such as smart-phones, tablets and desktop computers. While various chat and cloud services support the sharing of data, they require users to interrupt their workflow to copy resources. We present MyoShare, a system that allows content to be shared among devices using mid-air gestures that can be used at any time, independent of the current task and location of devices. We report on an elicitation study where participants designed a set of gestures for sharing content. In a second user study, we compared mid-air gestures with alternative interaction modes using keyboard or touch Shortcuts, Speech, and Menu Selection. We discuss the results of the study in terms of both the strengths and weaknesses of mid-air gestures, along with suggestions for future work.

With the growth of mobile devices, the necessity for a more ubiquitous network among the smartphones, tablets and computers of users increases. Sending and receiving content among personal devices should be an intuitive rather than a distracting task to be performed. With MyoShare, we propose a system that exploits the use of mid-air gestures, captured via the Myo wearable armband, to share web data among devices without requiring the user to open additional windows or copy-paste content into emails or chat applications. Users can select content from any web page and send it to another device by simply waving their hands. During the demo session, participants of the conference will be able to try out and see our system in action.

The increasing number of devices available to a user has prompted the research community to explore how these can be used in combination. Frameworks and toolkits have been proposed to facilitate the design and implementation of these cross-device applications. Still, implementing cross-device applications remains complex because of the fragmentation of the user interface and logic across devices and the flexibility required to adapt to different combinations of devices. Testing in particular has been identified as a critical challenge. To address these issues, we introduce XD-Testing, a library that provides explicit and implicit device selectors, device templates and scenarios, as well as a visualiser for application screenshots. In a case study, we demonstrate how we used the library to author human-readable tests for a cross-device gallery that verify if a UI distributes correctly and if it works as expected despite being distributed.

Current GUI builders provide a design environment for user interfaces that target either a single type or fixed set of devices, and provide little support for scenarios in which the user interface, or parts of it, are distributed over multiple devices. Distributed user interfaces have received increasing attention over the past years. There are different, often model-based, approaches that focus on technical issues. This paper presents XDStudio--a new GUI builder designed to support interactive development of cross-device web interfaces. XDStudio implements two complementary authoring modes with a focus on the design process of distributed user interfaces. First, simulated authoring allows designing for a multi-device environment on a single device by simulating other target devices. Second, on-device authoring allows the design process itself to be distributed over multiple devices, as design and development take place on the target devices themselves. To support interactive development for multi-device environments, where not all devices may be present at design and run-time, XDStudio supports switching between the two authoring modes, as well as between design and use modes, as required. This paper focuses on the design of XDStudio, and evaluates its support for two distribution scenarios.