Designing a Framework to Support the Development of Smart Cross-device Applications

We live surrounded by computing devices, but applications are mostly confined to run on a single device. It should be possible to make better use of the multiple devices around us by coming up with ways of integrating and combining them, while leveraging the specific strengths of some devices and minimizing the individual weaknesses of others. We want to explore the possibility of building applications that have their user interface seamlessly distributed across co-located devices. We created the YanuX Framework to provide the guidelines and tools needed by developers to build those applications. This paper presents the framework and its architecture, which is outlined along with the description of its components. We end by presenting an early evaluation of YanuX and by discussing the status of our work along with directions for further research.