Touchable Taskbar

The name was basically an afterthought while creating an earlier version, the principle was far from it. In an even earlier course I delved into the realm of task switching and had quite the discussions about how people use their computers and read about it. Our conclusions were that a touchable area on top of where we now have our keyboards would be a nice location for a taskbar, which was the starting point of my thesis.

This taskbar would be in your peripheral vision and within easy reach of your fingers. These two attributes would be the beginning of a long thought process about what you can do with it. It combined features from a couple of interface elements we already know from our current taskbars, but got an extra dimension by adding a "monitor-mode" in the form of a widget/gadget.

The endresult was a groupable taskbar with direct touch operations and notifications. In the end the grouping of windows into tasks and being able to close and open them together was the most favourite aspect, followed closely by being able to monitor your running windows in more detail without having to switch windows.

The tests also gave a nice insight into how people use their systems. This was done as a "benchmark" to test the prototype against. It followed a lot of the problems and behaviours I had distilled out mainly literature, which was a nice boost for credibility.

Precursor: UIST 2010

The precursor to this project ran on a Microsoft Adaptive Keyboard (a bonafide prototype) which was part of the UIST 2010 Student Innovation Contest. We did not win, but got enough "you should have"'s that we had a nice time. I am still trying to figure out who actually gave me a high-five because she wanted it now.

Since it was Microsoft hardware the entire toolbox was Microsoft's. It was implemented as a Silverlight project which meant it was a modified WPF project: C# and XAML. The keyboard basically reacts as a screen and a keyboard as you expect, with all the architecture in the runtime (contexts, messaging, etc). We had to hack the runtime quite a bit since it assumed you wanted a different view for every application. A separate window uses the Windows API to scan for running applications and broker the information for the widgets.