[self-interest] Quiet in Self land?

[Mayuresh Kathe]

oh, okay.

the way mr. raskin wanted it to be was to use zoomworld as a means of 
drilling down to the information you need.

one of the examples he'd told me about was to think about a warehouse 
where stuff can be stored arbitrarily, tagged and recorded in a database 
with location aware meta-data. such data can then be _presented_ via a 
zoomworld like interface where in a person requiring a drill-bit of a 
particular type would first pan around to the drills area, then start 
zooming in, panning to the type of drill he has, then zoom in further to 
the kind of bit, then further on.

do you think the above could make sense in terms of "self"?

i would like to be corrected if i'm wrong, but, what-ever little i have 
played with the "self" environment, it feels more like a room full of 
objects, one where one object can be doing something, and the other 
might be modified and updated without having to stop the operations of 
the other objects.

yes, in a certain sense, you could use a zoomworld like interface for 
inspecting an object itself, but, somehow, going beyond it would make 
the user experience *very* awkward because mapping a 3-d environment and 
representing it on a 2-d plane doesn't come out all that well.

~mayuresh



On 2014-09-16 17:34, Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com 
[self-interest] wrote:
> Yeah, I was asking why you think being able to zoom in and out over a
> collection of points of view would be a bad thing or wouldn't work.
> 
> Seemed like you had an argument to make there and I'd love to hear it.
> I'm a fan of Raskin, too. In part I'm asking because my tiny brain
> thinks it would be absolutely fantastic to have a 2&1/2 3D way of
> moving over a Self world, and I'm always glad to be wrong!
> 
> Or another way of saying it: the desktop pager gets lost if you scroll
> away from it, and even if you manage to make it work for you... uh. It
> reminds me of FVWM on Unix hosts. Blergh.
> 
> Is there nothing in the world that's more lively, direct and concrete
> than not-that?
> 
> So yeah, I'm 100% interested in user interfaces that can be
> arbitrarily scaled by the user. I'm not blind to the challenges around
> that idea either; e.g., zoom very far out and you can't rea d the text
> anymore. But user interfaces exist primarily to solve problems like
> these! An easy out of the example problem I gave can be observed on
> any Macintosh computer. Push the button, all the windows zoom away,
> click one, it comes close and into focus. This has worked for like ten
> years and people love it. It's also _not as good as what we can do_
> but if we ignore it, and that it totally works, then we're...
> ignorant?
> 
> On Sep 16, 2014, at 4:39 AM, "Mayuresh Kathe mayuresh at kathe.in
> [self-interest]" <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
>> do you need specifics on why i feel a zoomworld interface be bad for
>> a
>> "self"-like system?
>> 
>> ~mayuresh
>> 
>> On 2014-09-16 16:37, Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
>> [self-interest] wrote:
>>> Can you be more specific? I read Raskin's book, but I'm not sure
>> what
>>> you're trying to say.
>>> 
>>> On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:23 AM, "Mayuresh Kathe mayuresh at kathe.in
>>> [self-interest]" <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 2014-09-16 12:47, Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
>>>> [self-interest] wrote:
>>>>> Interesting, timely idea: Juan Vuletich just released a
>>>> sneak-peek[1]
>>>>> at his new vector-based Morphic implementation. The renderer is
>>>>> currently written in Smalltalk -- so, slow -- but the idea is
>>>> that
>>>>> we're going to adapt it to Slang so it can be translated as a
>> VM
>>>>> plugin in C. The most interesting thing is, his algorithm[2] is
>>>>> unique. It's based on signal processing theory, and provides
>>>> crisper
>>>>> rendering than anything I know of currently on or off of the
>>>> market.
>>>>> One of the goals behind the work is to realize a truly zoomable
>>>> user
>>>>> interface. Do you think that a zooming interface free of pixel
>>>>> complications would make the large contiguous Self world easier
>>>> and
>>>>> more pleasant to navigate? I do! Forget the desktop pager if I
>>>> can
>>>>> just zoom out, right?
>>>> 
>>>> based on what-ever (little) i know about "self", and my
>>>> interactions
>>>> with mr. j raskin, i would suggest staying away from a zooming
>>>> interface
>>>> for a "self"-like project.
>>>> 
>>>> a zoomworld, as was described by mr. raskin would be more apt
>> where
>>>> you
>>>> want to drill down into _knowledge_, which isn't the case with
>>>> "self".
>>>> 
>>>> do correct me if you feel my assumptions are wrong.
>>>> 
>>>> ~mayuresh