TANY: Tips ANYwhere

  Nowadays, it becomes more and more popular to use handheld devices for Web browsing. While enjoying the convenience of accessing the Web at anytime from anywhere, users always suffer from the low efficiency and unfavorable browsing experience since most existing Web pages are originally designed for desktops. Among all serious obstacles, screen size limitation calls for special attention as it is the key factor of affecting user’s browsing experience. We propose a customized browser for small screen devices, called the TANY browser, aiming to allowing efficient and favorable user experience during Web browsing on small screen devices through automatic adaptation of Web pages both according to the limited screen size and to user preference.

  TANY is for short of “Tips ANYwhere”. The spirit of the TANY browser is to provide users with enriched tips in the browser interface, which can help users to generate context information at any time and meanwhile not interrupt user’s browsing process. There are two objectives in our research: 1) making adaptation to the limited screen size in order to bridge the physical gap between desktops and small screen devices; 2) making adaptation to user preference in order to migrate user behaviors from desktops to small screen devices and enhance user’s browsing experience.

  Four research issues need to be stressed on, including:
Web page content analyzing (Web page segmentation, etc.);
Web page re-authoring (single-column adjustment, etc.);
Modeling on user’s browsing behaviors;
Graphical user interface design (thumbnail, etc.).

  Currently, we have implemented the TANY browser as a simulator running on desktops. The screen size is 240*320, which is typical for handhelds. See Figure 1 for the demonstration.

Figure 1. A Web page (http://www.amazon.com) displayed in the TANY browser with (left) and without (right) thumbnail

DEMO:

TANY Demo (Released date: October 21st, 2007)