The lifestreams software architecture

Abstract

\\Typical " computer users struggle to organize and nd their own electronic documents, manage their schedules and correspondence, and lter an ever increasing deluge of information. The process is made worse as users are forced to combine the disparate features of many applications to achieve these tasks. These problems suggest that our current software systems are ill-equipped to handle the demands of the typical computer user. Research has shown that common desktop environments (such asthe Macintosh \\desktop") are often badly tted to users ' needs. In an attempt to do better we have reduced \\information management " to a few simple and unifying concepts and created \\Lifestreams. " Lifestreams is a software architecture based on a simple data structure, a time-ordered stream of documents, that can be manipulated with a small numberofpowerful operators to locate, organize, summarize and monitor information. In this dissertation we rst provide motivation for Lifestreams. We then present the model and discuss the development of our research prototype. Our prototype realizes many of the system's de ning features and has allowed us to experiment with the model's key ideas with actual users (of di ering levels of computer experience) over the course of its development. Results from its use suggest that Lifestreams is an e ective software architecture for managing common computer tasks; its simple organizational storage system (the stream) combined with a small number of powerful operators provides a uni ed framework that subsumes many separate desktop applications to accomplish and handle the most common personal communication, reminding, and storage and retrieval tasks. In addition, Lifestreams suggests valuable new capabilities for electronic systems.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.