This week鈥檚 trend in Web design is towards getting as much of a site鈥檚 key
info as possible onto one page while making that page as minimalist as possible
(you can blame Google). This is all very well, but how do you maximise the
page鈥檚 information content? Well, a new chunk of open-source software is going
to help a lot: it鈥檚 called Jazz. If webmasters adopt it, hitting a Jazz-enabled
link will let you 鈥渮oom鈥� into it, bringing up heaps more info鈥攁nd perhaps
more nested links.
Jazz lets software engineers build zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) in the
Java programming language. The software lets you zoom through hierarchical
layers. For instance, you can quickly burrow through the layers of a map, moving
from continents all the way down to tiny streets, with smooth animation and easy
mouse control. Jazz was developed by Ben Bederson and his team at the University
of Maryland鈥檚 Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), along with colleagues in
the open-source community. You can now download version 1.0 of Jazz for free at
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz (but check that you have the latest release of Java
and, as with all software, make sure your virus scanner is up to date).
AutoBAHN, which aims to give thumbnail pictures of Web-browsing sessions, is one
application that looks promising.
This will get you hooked: download for free a delightful Jazz application
for children from www.kidpad.org. KidPad is a story-writing tool for children
that allows them to illustrate their work and develop narrative structures
through the use of zooming, panning and spatial links.
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HCIL has also developed the 鈥渇isheye menu鈥�, which lets users look through a
long list of items, such as bookmarks (that normally would go beyond the bounds
of a screen) without scrolling. Menu items get scrunched up together, but as the
mouse pointer moves along the list, a few items become readable鈥攍ike
traversing the list with a reading lens. There鈥檚 a demo at
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/fisheyemenu.
