Assigning hotkeys for actions performed during Instant Messaging

Assigning hotkeys for actions performed during Instant Messaging

Authors : Sagar D Joshi, Anuradha S Malvadkar, Supal J Patel, Bhavuk Srivastava, Swikar K Sugandhi, Shiekh H Abdullah

Background of Invention

There exists many applications and devices, which provide entity, based functionalities. In such applications the functionalities (operation) are always driven on a specific entity. For example, in Instant Messaging (IM) application provides various functionalities like chat, call, instant meeting, announcement, file transfer and many more. All these operations have to be performed on a specific entity (IM user).

Currently, to execute any such operations, an application provides some user interface (UI). The execution is multiple steps process like
1. Specify an operation
2. Select the entity on which you desire to perform the step1.

OR
1. Select an entity
2. Specify the operation to be performed on the selected entity

For example in context of IM application:
1. Initiate an instant meeting operation
2. Select the invitees

OR
1. Select all invitees
2. Initiate an instant meeting operation on the invitees selected in step 1.

Hence, there arises a need to facilitate application user to execute such entity-based operations quickly using single step mechanism by defining a hot key command.

Prior Art

QuickFind feature in Lotus Sametime provides the functionality for searching the buddies quickly.

Primary Contact Plugin feature in Lotus Sametime provides the functionality for the user to add the contact so that they can later directly initiate the actions on those users

Core Idea

The core idea is to enable application user to define a single hot key command to perform different operations on different entities.

1

We propose a solution to
· Facilitate user to configure:
1. A hot key letter (operation hot key) to map any operation (For e.g. 'I' for instant meeting or 'C' for instant chat)
2. A hot key letter (entity hot key) to map the entity (For e.g. 'B' for Bob and 'T' for Tom)
· Facilitate user to execute different operations by a Single hot key command ('SHIFT + ALT + I + B). Refer to diagram 1 below. This Single hot key command will comprise of following
o Hot key prefix ('SHIFT + ALT')
o Hot key operation ('I')
o Hot key entity ('B')

· Interpret a hot key command on runtime and launch the desired operation on the desired entity. For e.g. executing a hot key command ('SHIFT + ALT + I + B) will invoke a instant meeting with Bob.

Diagram 1: Semantic of a hot key command

2

Entity is not strictly restricted to people. In the scope of this proposal, file/machine/application/etc can be defined as entity.

For e.g.
· In IM application, send announcement to a group (Entity).
· In media player application,

play a particular song/album/

play lis...