Adaptation of Single-user Multi-touch Components to Support Synchronous Mobile Collaboration

Mobile applications, which include calendars, browsers, and text editors, are part of our lives nowadays. Most of the mobile applications are single user, i.e. they do not allow the cooperative work of group of users simultaneously. Adaptation is a technique to transform single user application into cooperative one. A form of adaptation is based on the reuse of the manufacturers’ SDKs (Software Development Kits). In general, adaptation is made manually; nonetheless, we conjecture that some automation is possible. This paper investigates this possibility for mobile applications by assuming that the target SDK’s components comply with certain design guidelines. We present a reference model to develop collaborative mobile groupware applications by the modification of multi-touch user interface components provided by the manufacturers’ SDKs. We also present a process to convert and adapt those components. We discuss two examples that illustrate our proposal.