excel and word have nice zoom support
hold down ctrl and use the mouse wheel
Ctrl+Scroll-Wheel (Ctrl+two fingers on touchpad for us laptop Applers) zooms into (and back out to 100%) the whole screen
Iām not sure this is the same thing. CTRL+mousewheel in Vista is equivalent; it makes all the icons on the desktop larger or smaller. It does not do a true zoom on the desktop.
I wonder if Asa Raskin is working with Andy Hertzfeld, also at Google?
That would be neat.
I find it amusing that when I saw that image of Supreme Commander my first tought was āHey look Spring!ā. I have even played that map, or a rather identical remake.
I donāt think I will be able to test Supreme Commander in the near future so I canāt say that Spring is as good or better. But atleast itās platform agnostic and runs impressively fast even with high graphics.
Turns out I do have Calibri on my system, it looks fine in a Word document, but not so good in Firefox or IE. Very strange.
Ok, it appears that the font-size: 90% is causing the problems with the Calibri font. Even without that the font appears slightly blurry on my LCD, but the 90% causes the other differences. So perhaps itās an artifact of an LCD screen.
Calibri requires ClearType enabled to look good. Itās designed with the assumption that ClearType is available, and it looks pretty awful without it:
Good post as always Jeff. Had fun with the flash demo - in some ways itās like the computer in the film Minority Report!
One that Iāve been having fun with lately is Microsoftās HDView: http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm.
They offer a simple command line tool named HDMake which can take a large image and split it into a series of tiles compatible with the HDView viewer (a small ActiveX control).
The viewer is slick; itās similar to Google Earth in that you can very smoothly zoom in and pan around, and only the pieces of the images necessary for the current view will be downloaded. It also adjusts the projection in real-time, so as you zoom in the image surrounds you and you get a better perspective of how the image looks in real life.
As an example, hereās a 40 megapixel panoramic I created of Snoqualmie Falls in Washington: http://www.tonyschr.net/SnoqualmieSmall/SnoqualmieSmall.htm.
For a more extreme example, hereās a 13 gigapixel image of Harlem: http://www.harlem-13-gigapixels.com/harlem_hdview.html
This has been implemented, in the field, by newspaper e-readers for several years.
It is certainly interesting to see these types of developments in the UI field. We are definitely moving towards a much more natural look and feel for applications.
Definitely a believer in zoomable interfaces and have to plug for Innotive (www.innotive.com). You can see a demo on YouTube here:
Seems to me zoomable user interfaces have been āusedā in sc-fi movies for 20 years or so.
Hasnāt anyone noticed that Google Maps has zooming reversed?
I mean on most of the appplications I use that have zooming, it works so that when you scroll the wheel dowon, you zoom in. This seems natural to me, as you are getting closer into the image/document/whatever and the movement of the wheel is towards yourself.
But on Google Maps it works the opposite way. You scroll up, moving the wheel away from you, to get into the map.
I gues someone could argue that moving the wheel away from you, towards the screen you get into the map, thus come closer into it. But for me itās far more natural the other way.
Remember that file system viewer from the end of Jurassic Park. The one where the girl had to zoom into the file she needed to run. It exists here: http://fsv.sourceforge.net/.
WPF is vector-based / xHTML layout is vector-based. So there arenāt any tech restrictions on that.
Legacy Apps is another story though. Basic idea is: with greater resolutions everything becomes sharper, but not smaller.
Thereās a good reason why the scroll wheel works well for zooming:
Zooming is scrolling in the 3rd dimension.
And just like no one likes a left-to-right scrolling application or web page, with zooming: starting users too focused so that they must zoom out will be a similar faux paux.
Let me site the Adobe Flex landscape zoomer component that does a good job at such an interface
Demo: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/landscape/Declaration.html (slightly big download)
Authorās blog entry: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/components/landscape-zoomer/
The demo above is controlled using a menu on the left but it could easily be made such in Flex that the zoom happens on a click or some other event (keyboard or whatever)
Zoomable Unicode Table
http://ian-albert.com/misc/zoom-unicode.php
The same idea, but as expected (and as most of other implementations), pretty useless. Because on different levels of zoomign Iād better see different information, some kind of generalization of whatās beneath - not a blind grey recatangle, but a NAME of it - a name of the file, chapter, part of the table, picture or gallery, song, album or genre, etc.
In contrast, Google maps do it properly - they show different data at different levels.
Thanx for this article and all excellent links. Itās nice to see how research is going in the UI field. Current Desktop metaphor has became inconsistent and broken and Iām glad to see people who are working to fix this.