Blaze - Automatizando a Interacção em Interfaces Gráficas

Abstract

Operating system users are constantly facing situations where repetitive tasks arise and there is no trivial way to automate them. It is tme that there are several application launchers currently available, but they are no match to the uniqueness of the repetitive tasks that emerge from eve,yday usage. 1\1ost of the times, to maximize their pe,formance, users struggle to find workarounds, resorting to scripting languages and macro editors. However, these are bey ond the common user's knowledge, leading them to accomplish the remainder of the task by hand. We present Blaze, a new system which is able to automate user's repetitive tasks, not in a single application but operating system-widely. Blaze brings the application launcher concept to a new level, enhancing other applica-tion launchers' features and adding the ability to be constantly monitoring users' actions, without intermpting their work. Blaze is able to establish relationships between actions and, resorting to an algorithm, based on common prefix search in a suffix-tree, detect repetition patterns in the user interaction hist01y. These repetitions are used to dynamically generate comprehensive narratives and to fi,lfi/1 the remaining of the task in the user's place. Furthermore, these automations can be stored in script files, which can later be reproduced, even in dif ferent situations from the one in which the repetition was detected.