models of information sharing, and runtime support based on those models, are by themselves incomplete for the task of constructing robust, practical collaborative applications. To be usable, we must provide a means for developers to access these facilities easily. This chapter has presented developer perspectives on the concepts introduced by Intermezzo. We have investigated a number of components of the developer support, or "toolkit," in this research, including notification, programming interfaces for accessing shared data, interfaces for accessing collaboration-specific functionality, and the use of scripting through embedded computation. Notification is one of the most important problems to be addressed in any developer support: how do applications (and, by extension, their users) become aware of changes in their environments? This problems is especially vexing in the case of coordination, where information that may be considered interesting is plentiful, change is rapid, and the...

Distributed client/server models are becoming increasingly prevalent in multimedia systems and advanced user interface design. A multimedia application, for example, may play and record audio, use speechrecognition input, and usea window system for graphical I/O. The software architecture of such a system can be simplified if the application communicates to multiple servers (e.g., audio servers, recognition servers) that each manage different types of input and output. This paper describes tools for rapidly prototyping distributed asynchronous servers and applications, with an emphasis on supporting highly interactive user interfaces, temporal media, and multi-modal I/O. The Socket Manager handles low-level connection management and device I/O by supporting a callback mechanism for connection initiation, shutdown, and for reading incoming data. The Byte Stream Manager consists of an RPC compiler and run-time library that supports synchronousand asynchronous calls, with both a programma...

Telephone keypad interfaces are commonly used for interacting with voice mail systems whether one is at home or in the office. Typically, after new messages are heard by the recipient, they are transferred to an archived voice mailbox. Management of messages inside the mailbox is difficult due to the limited interaction available from a 12 button interface. Users often need to recall seemingly arbitrary assignments of functions to keys. An enhanced

Active Messenger (AM) is a software agent that dynamically filters and routes email to a variety of wired and wireless delivery channels. More than just a router, AM is a dynamic process that monitors a message's progress through various channels over time. It observes which devices have been used to originate or respond to messages, recent log ins, and caller-ID when checking voice or email over the phone. Its goal is to ensure that desired messages always reach the subscriber, while decreasing message volume when the user is less reachable. AM also acts as a proxy, hiding the identity of the multiple device addresses at which the subscriber may be found. It also caches channels to guarantee seamless information delivery for the user in a heterogeneous network.

. Awareness is an important concept in coordination and collaboration at large. Based on prior research in awareness for collaboration, this work presents a data model for representing information about user activity. Fine-grained activity information can be an important tool for facilitating awareness in workgroups. Further, unlike some forms of information used for awareness, activity data is easily stored and parsed. This representational model is implemented atop the Intermezzo collaboration framework and provides a systematic approach to capturing information about users spread across a network. KEYWORDS: computer-supported cooperative work, awareness, coordination, Intermezzo. 1. INTRODUCTION AND PRIOR ART Collaborative software, by definition, involves the interaction of multiple people working together to accomplish some task. In most current collaborative settings, these users are likely to be distributed in space or, in the case of asynchronous systems, even distributed in...

Distributed clientisewer models are becoming increasingly prevalent in multimedia systems and advanced user interface design. A multimedia application, for example, may play and record audio, use speech recognition input and use a window system for graphical I/O. The software architecture of such a system can be simplified if the application communicates to multiple servers (e.g., audio servers, recognition servers) that each manage different types of input and output. This paper describes tools for rapidly prototyping distributed asynchronous servers and applications, with an emphasis on supporting highly interactive user interfaces, temporal media, and multi-modal UO. The Socket Manager handles low-level connection management and device I/O by supporting a callback mechanism for connection initiation, shutdown, and for reading incoming data. The Byte Stream Manager consists of an RPC compiler and rnn-time library that supports synchronous and asynchronous calls, with both a programmatic interface and a telnet interface that allows the server to act as a command interpreter. This paper details dte tools developed for building asynchronous servers, several audio and speech servers built using these tools, and applications that exploit the features provided by the servers. KEYWORDS Audio servers, remote procedure call, asynchronous message pass-ing, distributed client-server architecture, speech recognition and synthesis, speech and audio applications. 1