Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Brett Humphrey

Paul James Reid

Jason Anthony Grieves

C Shane Evans

G Andrew Johnston, Ii

Douglas R Kirschner

Rod Toll

Dmitri A Klementiev

Robert Bryce Johnson

Ryan Demopoulos

Nicholas Wrem

Kelly Marie Renner

Matthew B Karr

Marko Lalic

Christopher Michael Sano

Rachel Shelva Nizhnikov

Vidhya Sriram

Glenn Edgar Murphy, Iii

Niranjan Shivanand Baligar

Andres E Espinoza-Masias

Donald Gary Funk

Disclosed in some examples, are methods, systems, and machine-readable mediums which provide for an automated communication session assistant that assists participants in planning and conducting communication sessions that respect one or more media customization settings of other participants. Users of the network-based communication service may register, and store in a user profile, one or more media customization settings. These media customization settings may correlate to one or more rules in a rule data store. Each rule may specify one or more media events that may impact one or more media customization settings of participants. The rules may also describe curative actions, such as prompts to participants and the like.

Automated media event detection and corrective actions for communication sessions

A remote applications application programming interface (API) system disclosed herein is implemented using various computer process instructions including accumulating one or more cross-process calls from a client process to a provider process into a remote operations object, evaluating the one or more cross-process calls from the client process to determine one or more conditional operations, generating a remote operations graph based on the conditional operations, wherein the graph including a plurality of remote operations graph nodes encoding logic of the one or more conditional operations, and communicating the remote operations graph in a single cross-process call across the process boundary to the provider process.

Remote operations application programming interface

The perceivability of user interface elements of a graphical user interface can be defined as a selection along a range. At one end of the range, a combination of settings for the graphical user interface allows for a highly-detailed user interface; at another end of the range, a combination of settings provides a graphical user interface having the highest perceivability. The high perceivability may include high contrast, but also may provide other user interface settings to address accessibility issues for an end user. The combination of settings can include attributes affecting the background, transparency, borders and text legibility. The selected combination of settings either sets, overrides or limits values for these attributes of user interface elements during rendering.

Personalizing perceivability settings of graphical user interfaces of computers

A touch screen computing device with an easy to use user interface. The computing device provides on the touch screen a control area associated with a content viewing area. Touch inputs that initiate in the control area, even if they extend into the viewing area, are interpreted as commands that manipulate the display of content. Other touch inputs are interpreted as interactions with displayed content. The control area may be formatted to allow easy access by a user holding the computing device. Through such an interface the user may input commands specifying direct manipulation of the content, without frustration that can occur from the computing device incorrectly interpreting those commands as interaction with the content.

Control area for a touch screen

Assistive buffer usage techniques are described. In one or more implementations, audio generated through text-to-speech conversion is output, the audio corresponding to text portioned in one of a plurality of buffers from an item of content. An input is received to rewind or fast forward the output of the audio. Responsive to the input, additional audio is output that was generated through text-to-speech conversion from text portioned in another one of the plurality of buffers.

Assistive buffer usage techniques

User interface elements are identified and cataloged into a user interface inventory database keyed on a global user interface element identifier. Information is collected for user interface elements activated in an executing application or applications. Scenario information is collected and is used to update the user interface inventory database. Scenario information includes information concerning user interface element usage, state changes, etc. in time. The described information can be collected over a period of time and from a number of different computer systems. The information can be analyzed to determine and quantify usage and testing of user interface elements. The analyzed information can be used to determine how thoroughly a user interface element has been tested, how often the user interface element works as expected, most commonly used user interface elements and other information. The collected information can be used to track, quantify and identify ownership of user interface elements.

User interface inventory

The present invention enables a game server to provide hosting services by connecting the game server device to a peer group, notifying at least one member of the peer group of the availability of the server device, and enabling the server device to accept and respond directly to searches for the hosting services, which are directed at the peer group by one or more gaming client devices. Discovery of peer group gaming content as well as updating such content are also provided by the present invention. The present invention further enables both peer group protocol supported and non-supported devices to interact with and provide the services provided by a peer group.

Distributed session listing and content discovery

Growing community of inventors

Seattle, WA, United States of America

Brett Humphrey