[p2p-research] University of Washington's Prefab tool promises to 'unlock the desktop'

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: University of Washington's
Prefab tool promises to 'unlock the desktop' via Engadget by Donald
Melanson on 4/1/10
The University of Washington may be overstating things a just a tad
with a headline like "what if all software was open source," but the
so-called "Prefab" software tool developed by some researchers at the
university does indeed manage to pull of some fairly impressive tricks.
The short of it is that the tool promises to you let you (or
developers) modify any application without actually modifying it. To do
that, the software constantly looks for easily identifiable elements of
an application (dialog boxes, scroll bars, buttons, etc.) and
then "alters their behavior" by effectively taking over your display,
leaving the actual program running in the background and displaying the
augmented version instead. According to the researchers, the
possibilities from there on out are virtually endless, and include
things like adding iTunes buttons to your Word toolbar and tweaking
Photoshop to display previews for a whole range of effects at once.
Head on past the break for a quick demo video, and look for more to be
unveiled at the CHI 2010 conference in Atlanta next month.

[Thanks, Keith]
Continue reading University of Washington's Prefab tool promises
to 'unlock the desktop'

University of Washington's Prefab tool promises to 'unlock the desktop'
originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:01:00 EST.
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