[General] Radius zooming

[Richard Karpinski]

Antero Taivalsaari wrote a lovely paper, The Event Horizon User  
Interface Model For Small Devices, about a new kind of zooming system  
involving compress/expand access to unlimited amounts of information  
pushed into or pulled out of a central (white) hole on a small  
display such as a Palm Pilot.

The way it works seems to suggest that no document can exceed a  
quarter of the screen at any one time which is a serious limitation  
in my mind. And it uses compress and expand keys which are operated  
for a duration which has the problems of velocity versus  
displacement. Further, although every item can eventually be seen,  
using this one dimensional access, two dimensional motion is also  
required sometimes.

My notion of an auto-zooming world can be elaborated to include those  
benefits and rather more as well. Let the top of the world contain  
one or more white holes contained in visible circles. Once you  
navigate across that boundary, lets use zooming and dedicate a zoom  
wheel (displacement) to compress and expand from the hole while  
leaving the cursor centered. Then we can navigate to any visible  
object with the effect that the world zooms in to the right level to  
read and operate on that content.

I will leave other feature for future discussions.


Richard Karpinski, Nitpicker       dick at cfcl.com
148 Sequoia Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
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