Design and implementation of vertically shared home screen system for android smart phone.
Jia Ping Lee · 2014
This project proposed a new idea to virtually share home screens among multiple smart phone systems in user level and the software architecture to implement it. A home screen, or application screen, is basically the initial screen we see when a smart phone or tablet is started, serves like a home page or main menu which typically displays a group of apps icons that can be clicked or tapped by the users to activate applications or use the internal functions. The proposed idea, called Virtually Shared Home Screen system (VSHS), allows the screens of the smart phones within a group of users to be combined into a single but bigger virtual home screen space which can be viewed and accessed by all smart phones within the group. By sharing the screens among multiple smart phones, remote apps and files on other smart phones within the group can be viewed and accessed by each user using his smart phone. As such, communication and file sharing can be integrated into one simple, direct, and fast interface for collaboration of work and file sharing among users within a group using existing swipe user interface supported in all smart phones, as compared to conventional approach requiring switching back and forth several times among several separate apps to communicate and transfer file. This project also defined the basic software architecture to implement VSHS, consisting of three independent modules, i.e. file transfer and consistency (FTC), screens and objects mapping (SOM), and seamless navigation interface (SNI). This project is the first exploration of this new idea by implementing the software architecture for the environment with two smart phones connected via Bluetooth.