zooming interface (was: Quiet in Self =?UTF-8?Q?land=3F?=)

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Sep 16 21:32:04 UTC 2014


Mayuresh,

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

The first few versions of Self were text-only, but the various ideas
included in the Morphic user interface were part of the project from the
start. Actually, even before the start of you look at the Alternate
Reality Kit:

http://www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=8050

Based on the "artificial reality" ideas being discussed in the Self
group at the time, I wrote a short paper in 1991 about a possible user
interface:

http://merlintec.com/lsi/jpaper8.html

and soon after that built a quick and dirty prototype:

http://merlintec.com/lsi/gui.html

At that time I met Ken Perlin from New York University and he did a few
very impressive demonstrations of zooming interfaces:

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/zui/

I saw that both the 3D GUI and the ZUI had interesting features and
complemented each other. A few years later I bought Jef Raskin's Humane
Interface book and it reinforced my interest in zooming interfaces. I
didn't see anything in the book that would make it seem that such an
interface would not be a good idea for Self. In fact, when designing a
user interface for a children's computer in 1999 I thought that
combining these ideas would result in a really nice product:

http://merlintec.com/pegasus2000/e_gui.html

-- Jecel




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