Zooming user interface

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Example of a ZUI

In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a graphical environment where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less. A ZUI is a type of graphical user interface (GUI). Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as you zoom into a text object it may be represented as a small dot, then a thumbnail of a page of text, then a full-sized page and finally a magnified view of the page.

Some experts consider the ZUI interface paradigm as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI. But little effort is currently spent developing ZUIs, while there are ongoing efforts for developing GUIs.

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[edit] History

The longest running effort to create a ZUI has been the Pad++ project started by Ken Perlin, Jim Hollan, and Ben Bederson at New York University and continued at the University of New Mexico under Hollan's direction. After Pad++, Bederson developed Jazz and later Piccolo at the University of Maryland, College Park, which is still actively being developed in Java and C#. More recent ZUI efforts include Archy by the late Jef Raskin, and the simple ZUI of the Squeak Smalltalk programming environment and language. The term ZUI itself was coined by Franklin Servan-Schreiber while working for the Sony Research Laboratories in partnership with Ben Bederson and Ken Perlin.

Previous to the availability of ZUI toolkits, the virtual desktops feature of many X window managers, such as the window managers in KDE and GNOME, provided some of the organizational benefits of ZUIs. Mac OS X Leopard ships with virtual desktops as a feature called "Spaces." Microsoft has a limited implementation of virtual desktops in a suite of after-market XP items known as "PowerToys" under the title "Virtual Desktop Manager." Virtual desktops differ from ZUIs in that they don't provide a physical metaphor of continuous zooming but a collection of separate, fixed size desktop containers.

GeoPhoenix, a Cambridge, MA, startup associated with the MIT Media Lab, founded by Julian Orbanes Adriana Guzman, Max Riesenhuber, released the first mass-marketed commercial Zoomspace in 2002-3 on the Sony CLIÉ PDA handheld, with Ken Miura of Sony.[1] The Nintendo DS Browser uses a basic ZUI. When browsing the web, the full page appears on the bottom screen, with a frame that the user can move around. The top screen shows a zoomed-in view of the frame.

Picsel Technologies has been developing technologies since 2000 to realize very fast zooming of multiple document formats including HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and various image/movie formats. The resulting UI effect is much like that of the recently released iPhone by Apple. Although zooming of a particular document format is only a part of what a "true" ZUI can be, it is an important part towards making use of limited real estate of small screens.

Most recently, Microsoft's Live Labs has released a zooming UI for web browsing called DeepFish for the Windows Mobile 5 platform.

Apple's iPhone (premiered June 2007) uses a stylized form of ZUI, in which panning and zooming are performed through a touch interface. It is not a full ZUI implementation since these operations are applied to bounded spaces (such as web pages or photos) and have a limited range of zooming and panning.

Recently Franklin Servan-Schreiber founded Zoomorama, based on work he did at the Sony Research Laboratories in the mid-nineties. The Zooming Browser for Collage of High Resolution Images was released in Alpha in October 2007. Zoomorama's browser is all Flash based.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Sony implements GeoPhoenix interface in new CLIE PEG-NZ90 and NX series handhelds". EDP Weekly's IT Monitor. 2003-01-20. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GZQ/is_3_44/ai_96795300. Retrieved on 2008-05-13. 

[edit] External links

[edit] ZUI projects

Eagle Mode’s file manager displaying plain text source code directories

[edit] Examples

[edit] Resources

  • Zooming Group Community for folks interested in zooming interfaces and technologies.
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