history

We describe Chronicle, a new system that allows users to explore document workflow histories. Chronicle captures the entire video history of a graphical document, and provides links between the content and the relevant areas of the history. Users can indicate specific content of interest, and see the workflows, tools, and settings needed to reproduce the associated results, or to better understand how it was constructed to allow for informed modification. Thus, by storing the rich information regarding the document's history workflow, Chronicle makes any working document a potentially powerful learning tool. We outline some of the challenges surrounding the development of such a system, and then describe our implementation within an image editing application. A qualitative user study produced extremely encouraging results, as users unanimously found the system both useful and easy to use.

A history-of-user-operations function helps make applications easier to use. For example, users may have access to an operation history list in an application to undo or redo a past operation. To provide an overview of a long operation history and help users find target interactions or application states quickly, visual representations of operation history have been proposed. However, most previous systems are tightly integrated with target applications and difficult to apply to new applications. We propose an application-independent method that can visualize the operation history of arbitrary GUI applications by monitoring the input and output GUI events from outside of the target application. We implemented a prototype system that visualizes operation sequences of generic Java Awt/Swing applications using an annotated comic strip metaphor. We tested the system with various applications and present results from a user study.