Automatic UI Generation Technique for Mobile Applications on Touch-Screen based Smart Phones

As touch-screen mobile phones pour into the market, demands for reusing existing mobile applications by adding a touch-screen UI are increasing. In order to service an existing application without a touch-screen UI to touch phones, an on-screen keyboard that implements a virtual keyboard on the touch screen is needed. On-screen keyboards are particularly convenient to use on small mobile phone screens because they reduce the number of keys and consequently increase the size of each. Previous on-screen keyboard generation methods generate fixed keyboard layouts that include every key defined by a system, resulting in smaller and inconvenient keys. Further, the recently studied dynamic analysis method analyzes keys used in source codes during run-time to generate on-screen keyboards optimized for applications but it generates too much overhead to control. In this study, we proposed the touch-screen UI generating technique based on content's source code by static analysis. To generate the UI automatically, we adopt the notion of key set graphs that store the UI status information of applications to identify UI states by referencing the graphs and generating optimized on-screen keyboards. This method uses effective graph data structures to effectively circumvent the overhead issues featured in the dynamic analysis method.