Life|ware: Evolving Technology
Client Manager
In recent months, Life|ware has proven itself to be a much-desired standalone control application and, as such, has begun moving away from a reliance on Windows Media Center. This movement allows us to completely open the user interface to customization. The forthcoming Life|ware architecture evolves to an even more distributed model, one that unlocks the user interface and gives installers greater control than ever before.
What's more, the future architecture opens the UI to a variety of operating systems, including Apple's OS X and various flavors of Linux including the TiVo operating system.
The addition of a Client Manager to the services layer in Life|ware adds thin client capabilities to the application model. The Client Manager is a Web Service application component responsible for managing UI layout, application flow logic and navigation, as well as generating an XML layout used by thin client rendering applications.
UI Clients
Future Life|ware application architecture includes thin client rendering technologies capable of running on a variety of application platforms. The forthcoming rendering component in Life|ware consumes and renders UI markup produced by a Client Manager and communicates user feedback to a Client Manager. This approach makes it possible to render Life|ware on a wide variety of devices with various operating systems and physical constraints.
The result is a cross-platform, open UI that unleashes more implementation flexibility than ever before possible. This evolution is the final piece that makes Life|ware a true platform product, one that is feature-rich, leverages the latest standard technologies, and can be easily configured for an infinite number of applications. This architecture will increase the viability of the product set as a platform as a result of its ability to host UI applications on a variety of non-Windows hardware devices such as Apple Macs, iPhones and iPod touch personal music players or Linux-based set-top boxes like TiVo and the new Tru2Way enabled set-top boxes from Motorola and Scientific Atlanta.
