Summary: UI researchers can't easily add new features designed to make software easy to use to existing software. This is a particular problem with closed sour

Summary: UI researchers can't easily add new features designed to make software easy to use to existing software. This is a particular problem with closed source software. "Prefab" is a tool that looks at the pixels on the display and infers what the underlying UI widgets are. Once this is done, additional features can be retrospectively added. This functionality is platform independent, and is demonstrated to run on YouTube videos (Flash), Mac, and PC. Examples of functionality that can be added: "Bubble cursor" - highlighting of the nearest UI element to the cursor as if the hit area of the cursor dynamically increased to the nearest element. Dynamic mouse acceleration change when cursor on a UI element Animation to indicate state changes in UI elements such as tabs, sliders and checkboxes Generation of a preview of a multi-parameter space in graphics tools such as GIMP or Photoshop. This works by automatically changing several sliders to affect parameters in a graphics transform and recording the preview image. The results are then dynamically displayed allowing users to view the effects of parameter changes in parallel using a grid of output images.