How do you allow consumers to modify the software that’s on their desktop computers — to be able to take parts of Windows, iTunes and Photoshop and put them on the same screen — without having the entire legal departments of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and other companies knocking on their doors? The answer may lie in Prefab, a simple, elegant solution developed at the University of Washington by James Fogarty, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
So.... let me get this straight, I build out an app on this pixel manipulation API, and now I'm more or less permanently locked into a particular version and build of a piece of software I own? >>Yawn<< This seems less revolutionary and more retro to me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_scraping
Unless I'm missing something, it'll have all the same down-sides as screen scraping too. The only real difference is "data resolution"... in the 1980s it was text characters off of a green screen mainframe somewhere.... in 2010 it's pixels on your LCD monitor.
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Better Software Through Pixel Tinkering: Q&A With Prefab Dev James Fogarty
Posted by: Renay San Miguel May 4, 2010 05:00 AMHow do you allow consumers to modify the software that’s on their desktop computers — to be able to take parts of Windows, iTunes and Photoshop and put them on the same screen — without having the entire legal departments of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and other companies knocking on their doors? The answer may lie in Prefab, a simple, elegant solution developed at the University of Washington by James Fogarty, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_scraping
Unless I'm missing something, it'll have all the same down-sides as screen scraping too. The only real difference is "data resolution"... in the 1980s it was text characters off of a green screen mainframe somewhere.... in 2010 it's pixels on your LCD monitor.