WADE: Simplified GUI Add-on Development for Third-party Software

Xiaojun Meng (1) , Shengdong Zhao (1) , Yongfeng Huang (1) , Zhongyuan Zhang (1) , James R Eagan (2, 3) , Ramanathan Subramanian (4)

1 NUS - National University of Singapore
2 DIVA - Design, Interaction, Visualization & Applications
3 INFRES - Département Informatique et Réseaux
4 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [Urbana]

We present the WADE Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which simplifies the modification of the interface and functionality of existing third-party software without access to source code. WADE clones the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of a host program through dynamic-link library (DLL) injection in order to enable (1) WYSIWYG modification of the GUI and (2) the modification of software functionality. We compare WADE with an alternative state-of-the-art runtime toolkit overloading approach in a user-study, finding that WADE significantly simplifies the task of GUI-based add-on development.

Keywords: Add-on integration; WYSIWYG; IDE; GUI; WADE

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Xiaojun Meng, Shengdong Zhao, Yongfeng Huang, Zhongyuan Zhang, James R Eagan, et al.. WADE: Simplified GUI Add-on Development for Third-party Software. CHI '14: ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Apr 2014, Toronto, Canada. pp.10, ⟨10.1145/2466110.2466192⟩. ⟨hal-01115276⟩