University of Washington's Prefab tool promises to 'unlock the desktop'
By Donald Melanson 
posted April 1st 2010 9:01AM
posted April 1st 2010 9:01AM
The University of Washington may be overstating things a just a tad with a headline like "what if all software was open source," but the so-called "Prefab" software tool developed by some researchers at the university does indeed manage to pull of some fairly impressive tricks. The short of it is that the tool promises to you let you (or developers) modify any application without actually modifying it. To do that, the software constantly looks for easily identifiable elements of an application (dialog boxes, scroll bars, buttons, etc.) and then "alters their behavior" by effectively taking over your display, leaving the actual program running in the background and displaying the augmented version instead. According to the researchers, the possibilities from there on out are virtually endless, and include things like adding iTunes buttons to your Word toolbar and tweaking Photoshop to display previews for a whole range of effects at once. Head on past the break for a quick demo video, and look for more to be unveiled at the CHI 2010 conference in Atlanta next month.
[Thanks, Keith]
[Thanks, Keith]
Please prove read this. Holly cow!!
@rcc
Proofread?
@rcc
Proof...
@rcc *proof read
@rcc
"Prove read". It's HUMOR !!! Jeez. :)
@rcc
Yeah, they all missed the joke. I on the other hand lol'd.
@ed
While you're at it why don't you instruct him how to spell 'Holy'.
Just a joke, guys.
@rcc
Sadly, it appears that your genius may not be fully appreciated in your lifetime.
@rcc Engadget needs to proofread all their articles. They also need to stop using words that don't fit right. Kinda like when Joey wrote that poem from the TV show Friends where he replaced every word with the thesaurus equivalent.
Or they should just hire better writers that both love gadgets AND the English language.
@rcc Nice cover up. They almost had you.
Why does this sound not new?
@Schmerzlichtod Its not a completely new technology, things like Window Walker have been around for a while for reading screens to integration between different systems. I think this is a new application of existing tech in the fact that its used more like a programming method then just integration.
Yup, just what a hard working computer needs - yet another resource-hogging application running in the background for no reason at all.
@RoyFokker I think the idea is that this can be used to improve accessibility for people with difficulties using a computer. Would I want my cursor to slow down when I mouseover buttons? I dunno, probably not though, so I wouldn't run this.
Processing the pixels of running apps does seem like it will be a little bit taxing though, although their demos are quite smooth.
@RoyFokker Translation: "I personally have no use for this, therefore it is stupid."
I'll grant you that their proposed examples like "iTunes buttons on Microsoft Word" are stupid, but this would be a fantastic tool for debugging, reverse engineering, test automation, and many things of that nature (for cases in which you do not have the source code).
@Realityism Of course not. I can see the positives in this. But I'm sensing a flood of "customizations" based on the research which would allow useless for cosmetic changes that so many casual users love so much.
Greasemonkey for applications...
So.... It spoofs password dialog boxes and "augments" them. Tool every growing young cracker needs.
@Bluekkis
Yes, every cracker will now find out your password is entirely made up of middots.
If this isn't April Fools, then this is pretty sweet. Lots of applications.
April fool.
They talk about modifying apparent program behavior with a wrapper, which is really f'in cool. But then they show us how they're going to phish our passwords with it, which is really not so cool.
@Dan Fruzzetti
This has nothing to do with phishing, and everything about research! When researching User Interfaces on the academic level, you typically have to write your own code to demonstrate functionality - resulting in, quite honestly, pretty lame demos of some potentially amazing User Interface techniques. Not every grad student has the $$$ to create Surface applications like Microsoft does.
This is really cool - of COURSE it's a resource hogging waste of CPU cycles - but that's the point - it's just research! Hopefully with a cool demo, the Microsoft's and Apple's of the world will implement these widgets into their UI toolboxes as standard interface items. The user (you guys) would then have a preference to turn these things on or off - think of these techniques as more things to add to the Universal Access control panel in OS X... great for kids, old folks, people who don't know computers (amazingly enough, there's more of them out there than I would have thought!)
-Dan
@plympton You didn't really pay attention to the article and the illustration, did you? They've illustrated "off-line phishing" almost perfectly. . .
sounds like an avenue for malware to me. . .specifically a new stripe of phishing. . .
Just think, you THINK you're using iTunes but really, when you input your user/pass to buy a song, you're giving your account info to someone with nefarious motives. . .
This is nothing new, reverse engineers have been utilizing tools like this for years. IIRC, Fravia+ (RIP) had a tut on intercepting and sending WM_messages to modify application GUIs on the fly.