Piles Across Space: Breaking the Real-Estate Barrier on PDAs
Tony Hsieh, QuianYing Wang, Andreas Paepcke · 2005
We describe an implementation that has users `ick ' notes, images, audio, and video les into piles beyond the screen of the PDA. This scheme allows the PDA user to keep in-formation close at hand without sacricing valuable screen real estate. It also obviates the need to browse complex le trees during a working session. Multiple workspaces can be maintained in persistent store. Each workspace preserves one conguration of off-screen piles. The system allows multiple PDA owners within ad hoc radio range to share off-screen piles. They point out to each other where a shared pile is to reside in space. Once established, all sharing partners may add to the pile and see its contents. One application is to support biodiversity researchers in the eld, where they gen-erate data on their PDA and need to keep it organized until they return to their eld station. We conducted an experiment where participants used our system with up to ten simultane-ous piles. Not only were they able to operate the application, but they remembered the location of piles when placed in different physical environments and when asked to recall the locations several days after the experiment. We describe gen-der differences that suggest particular design choices for the system. ACM Classication H5.2 [Information interfaces and pre-