In a firefighter emergency mission it is essential for the members of a fire brigade to get an intelligent and reliable overview of the complete situation, presented according to the role of each member. In this paper we report on the design and development of a system to support a fire brigade on site with a set of mobile services that offers a role-based focus+context user interface. It provides the required overview over the emergency situation according to the user task and context, while life-saving information is emphasized. The implementation of a context-rule-based decision module enhances the visualization of required information. Interaction with the user interface is designed for use in the wild; which in this case comes down to providing a "fat finger" interface that allows firemen to interact with the user interface on site with his gloves on.

The use of mobile computing systems continues to increase among a wider diversity of end-users. On desktop computers, a lot of research in the area of interactive visualization of graphical information has been done, but there is a growing opportunity to have the possibility of creating scalable and animated graphical data presentations on heterogeneous mobile devices. Latest trends in the mobile phone and PDA community (e.g. games and MMS) emphasize the demand for a better support of such rich graphical data that is scalable over multiple platforms. In this paper we present mobile services for the automotive after sales market that support the user in coping with the increasing functionality and complexity of cars and their repair procedures. We introduce a generic framework to sup- port the retrieval and visualization of operating instructions and car repair information according to the device, end- user (or consumer of the data) and car repair guidelines. As its core the framework provides the concept of Interactive Data Units (IDUs): graphical data blocks with a clean separation of structure, style and animation.

Since a growing number of different mobile computing devices are used in pervasive and ubiquitous environments, the need to adopt new approaches for designing and implementing pervasive interactive software with minor effort is emerging. In this paper we present a process that facilitates the design of next-generation interactive software for pervasive environments. We created a distributed runtime infrastructure that enables the distribution of software components on heterogeneous, networked and embedded hardware systems. Some of these components or compositions of components will require interaction by human users from a large range of different devices. To make the deployment of consistent and functional User Interfaces in these pervasive environments easier, Interaction Components are introduced into the runtime infrastructure which enable the presentation of component and service behavior to human users.

Abstract. Constructing multi-device interfaces still presents major challenges, despite all efforts of the industry and several academic initiatives to develop usable solutions. One approach which is finding its way into general use, is XML-based User Interface descriptions to generate suitable User Interfaces for embedded systems and mobile computing devices. Another important solution is Model-based User Interface design, which evolved into a very suitable but academic approach for designing multi-device interfaces. We introduce a framework, Dygimes, which uses XML-based User Interface descriptions in combination with selected models, to generate User Interfaces for different kinds of devices at runtime. With this framework task specifications are combined with XML-based User Interface building blocks to generate User Interfaces that can adapt to the context of use. The design of the User Interface and the implementation of the application code can be separated, while smooth integration of the functionality and the User Interface is supported. The resulting interface is location independent: it can migrate over devices while invoking functionality using standard protocols.

In this paper we describe how a component-based approach can be combined with a user interface (UI) description language to get more flexible and adaptable UIs for embedded systems and mobile com- puting devices. We envision a new approach for building adaptable user interfaces for embedded systems, which can migrate from one device to another. Adaptability to the device constraints is especially important for adding reusability and extensibility to UIs for embedded systems: this way they are ready to keep pace with new technologies.

In a time where mobile computing devices and embedded systems gain importance, too much time is spent to reinventing user interfaces for each new device. To enhance future extensibility and reusability of systems and their user interfaces we propose a runtime user interface description language, which can cope with constraints found in embedded systems and mobile computing devices. XML seems to be a suitable tool to do this, when combined with Java. Following the evolution of Java towards XML, it is logical to introduce the concept applied to mobile computing devices and embedded systems.