Section: New Results

Flexible contextual retrieval of chosen documents and windows

Users of Personal Computers interact with a large number of resources to do their work. To handle their different tasks, they need their documents to be readily available, and as the number of activities and documents increase, systems must offer adequate support for quick retrieval of these resources. The Hotkey Palette [29] is a quick retrieval facility that we designed that uses hotkeys and makes them visible and configurable through a quasi-modal always-available on-screen keyboard. This facility contributes to the state of the art in three ways. It extends on-screen keyboard interaction by providing feedback on the state of the linked resources, it provides persistent and integrated access to local windows and files and other online resources, and it provides flexible control over contextualization by leveraging existing resource hierarchies.