Groupware Support in the Windowing System

In this paper, we discuss the advantages of integrating groupware support for Single Display Groupware (SDG) into the windowing system. For the domain of SDG, a Groupware Windowing System (GWWS) has several advantages over traditional SDG toolkits and applications. A GWWS provides SDG support for legacy applications, custom built SDG applications and supports the execution of multiple applications simultaneously. A GWWS combines the traditional single-user single-input axiom and novel multi-user multi-input desktop environments. We present the Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX), the first GWWS that supports SDG natively, together with our Multi-Pointer Window Manager (MPWM). MPX and MPWM support an arbitrary number of true systems cursors, sophisticated floor control and per-window annotation overlay. To ease the interaction with such a GWWS, we implemented the DeviceShuffler, a system to couple input devices from any computer. The physical connection point of a device is transparent to both the windowing system and the application. This supports true ad-hoc collaboration on shared screens.

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