Changing a user interface without modifying source code: Geekcamp SG

Ever wanted to change software menus beyond what your software allowed? A tool called WADE (What-you-see-is-what-you-get Add-on Development Environment) allows users to delete menus, make icons bigger or smaller, even change the language for buttons, all without actually modifying the source code of the software.

Dr Shengdong Zhao from the NUS-HCI Lab, National University of Singapore School of Computing, demonstrated WADE at the sold-out GeekcampSG 2014, a purely tech conference for geeks, on October 18. In his demonstration, Zhao showed how whole menu tabs could be deleted, major functionality highlighted in different colours, font sizes enlarged, and text changed to another language. 

WADE uses an easy, novel method of customising menus through a Windows feature called dynamic-link library (DLL) injections. The tool first copies over the graphical user interface (GUI, or 'skin') of the target software and allows it to be edited in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) manner, after which it generates a DLL add-on which can be added to the software and executed every time the software is started. New software functionality can be added through entering new menu items and adding code for the items during the same editing process. 

Dr Zhao said that WADE is quicker than comparable tools as it is more intuitive and requires fewer steps for coding to occur. "Existing workarounds change the surface, or pixels of the software, or modify software with scripts which is tedious and difficult," he said. "WADE is WYSIWYG. There is very little code required, or none at all." 

According to a paper published on WADE*, the same techniques should work  on other frameworks and platforms.

*WADE: Simplified GUI Add-on Development for Third-party Software, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, by Xiaojun Meng, Shengdong Zhao, Yongfeng Huang, Zhongyuan Zhang, from the NUS-HCI Lab, National University of Singapore; James Eagan from Telecom ParisTech, and Ramanathan Subramanian from ADSC, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, CHI 2014, April 26–May 1, 2014.