Personalization of End User Software on Mobile Devices

Applications for mobile devices, especially mobile phones, are rarely used today - apart from games. They neither take the special features of each device into account nor the individuality of the user who usually has a much closer emotional relationship to her mobile phone than to many other technical devices. Useful and successful mobile applications can thus be presumably only those that address these deficits. In this paper, we present a novel approach for solving these problems by personalizing Java based mobile applications. The concept centres on a powerful and flexible XML information model that can easily be utilized for adding personalized data and features to an application. The information is weaved into the code by a pre-processor prior to compilation. We also present an example of its usage and discuss some of the consequences