Multi-Platform Document-Oriented GUIs

In recent years, increasing complexity of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of applications has led to problems in GUI management, since there is no single layout to fulfill every user’s needs. GUI editors have been developed to enhance end-user options but they commonly fail to preserve personalized GUIs. This paper presents an extension to the GUI editor built into the Auckland Layout Model (ALM) that can permanently store user-defined GUI layouts and reproduce them on different platforms. A novel technique called the document-oriented approach has been exploited to empower end-user customization, which allows GUI layouts to be dynamically edited, saved using a standardized XML-based GUI description language, and loaded in a platform-independent manner.