Two Questions
- What is Zoomable?
- It covers a lot of aspects: the acts of zooming, scalable graphics primitives (such as SVG), LevelOfDetail to keep CPU and network costs commensurate with screen real-estate.
- In an 'ideal' ZUI, you'd be offered the illusion that all your files and hyperlinks are already open and you're just zooming in for a closer view. I.e. to view a video, you zoom in on the icon rather than double-clicking and opening an application. To enter a folder, you zoom into the folder rather than double-click and open a new window.
- ZUI requires different UI concepts for navigation, bookmarking, layout. Even the 'applications' concept must change a lot if we're to offer illusion that all files/objects are open all the time - i.e. orthogonal persistence and mostly 'settling' into quiescence in the absence of observation (so we can scale to tens of thousands of 'open' apps). A document metaphor (DocumentDefinitions) or shared-world metaphor (ObjectBrowser, OpenCroquet) may be more appropriate than the applications metaphor we use today.
- Is this one of the least-recently-used features?
A User Interface similar to a convention of hiding seldom-used functions until the user might need them, then "zooming" in on them by selecting the little "show more" arrow or by lingering with the mouse.
ZUIs are about being able to zoom into and out of graphic user interfaces by scaling the graphic elements. Jazz uses a SceneGraph to layout and group them. The graphic elements may choose to use completely different representations at different scaling levels (for example, when zoomed-in the whole document is shown, when zoomed-out only the headlines), similar to the LevelOfDetail device used in 3D systems.
More information on ZUIs:
- What is Zooming?
- For a popular ZUI application on the web, check out Prezi
- Take a look at the Jazz examples
- http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/ -- Piccolo (formerly known as Jazz) -- University of Maryland (an OpenSource implementation is available). Features: Zooming, portals, animation, picking (comfortable), group transformation, more
- Also in TheHumaneInterface by JefRaskin (see also: ZoomingInterfaceParadigm).
- Checkout: References to "Pad++". It is zooming interface that goes way back (at least in terms of the Internet). Here are few links that turned up when I searched Google:
- Implementing a Zooming User Interface: Experience Building Pad++
- Dasher has an interesting continuously panning/zooming interface.
There is a secret Zoom-based system that is a universal interface and really works
Also see
PieMenus,
GooglifyDeepMenus
CategoryUserInterface CategoryInteractionDesign