zdesktop

Zoomable User Interfaces

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Research: Zoomable User Interfaces - Multiple Description Coding - Audio Adaptive Playout - Peer2Peer - LDPC/DF - BioElectronic 

Teaching: MicroElectronics (UniBG) - MultiMedia Coding (UniMI) - Thesis projects 

Miscellanea: About me - Remarks - Blog

Download

FileMage Mar 27th, 2008 (zipped exe 5Mb, zipped dll 4Mb, zipped doc .4Mb) 

FileMage Aug 21st, 2007 (zipped jar 1.8Mb)   (zipped exe 2Mb)

SpellBook Aug 21st, 2007  (zipped jar 1.1Mb)

Zdesktop May 11th, 2007 (zipped jar 800kb)  (zipped exe 1Mb)

Support: contact authors

Partners

The project is owned and sponsored by STM. All rights reserved. 

Zoomable FileSystem Viewer

FILEMAGE and SPELLBOOK 

Codename: FILEMAGE. New prototype of a zoomable file-system viewer, really faster! The successor of ZDESKTOP. FILEMAGE is a zoomable application based on SPELLBOOK library.

    Explorer & Picture Manager                 FileMage view

Other resources

1994 Pad++ University of Maryland 

1999 Jazz University of Maryland 

2002 ZVTM open source project

2003 Piccolo University of Maryland

Dasher zoomable text-entry system

 

Developers

        

     Zooming into a hierarchy of nested directories (FileMage)

STMicroelectronics (STM)

 

The project is being developed by UniBG. 

FILEMAGE is the new prototype of the zoomable file-system viewer. The successor of ZDESKTOP. These are the most important differences with respect to previous version:

ZDESKTOP

Codename: ZDESKTOP. Prototype of a zoomable user interface (ZUI) developed at the University of Bergamo (Engineering faculty) . It is written in Java and it is based on Piccolo Toolkit. The project is owned and sponsored by STMicroelectronics. All rights reserved. 

Classical Explorer View          Zoomable View (ZDesktop)

 Stefano Zanchi (UniBG)

 Zoomable User Interfaces

Command line interfaces are very powerful but they are suited only to expert / advanced users. Graphical user interfaces are intuitive but what you see is all you get: you cannot automate manipulations as in scripts, you cannot indicate what is not immediately visibile, etc. Today the user interface is crowded by windows, icons, menus you can point at; the graphics is fancier (animations, transparency) but not useful (high-resolutions screens often display as much information as an old 80-by-25 character display).  

Zoomable user interfaces exploit a natural way to organize / navigate files. You can zoom out to get the overview or zoom in to details, as desired. There is no need to open the application, load the data, edit, save the data and close the application. Just zoom in, edit and zoom out when you are done.

What we have now

ZDESKTOP is a zoomable file system viewer. Directories are rendered as square boxes. Hierarchy of directories are rendered as a hierarchy of nested boxes. Text files and images are simply rendered as they are. Objects in a directory are layout in a square grid, some space (user selectable) is left among neighboring objects.

ZDESKTOP is designed for efficiency: speed and low memory consumption. Directory's content is loaded only if the directory is whithin the area visible on the screen and if it is big enough; otherwise the corresponding thumbnail is used. Thumbnails are generated when directories are visited, a default thumbnail can be specified.

ZDESKTOP is easy to use. The interaction is implemented as follow (it can be changed in the future):

ZDESKTOP is java based, hence it is multiplatform. It has been tested under Microsoft Windows, Linux and MacOS.

What we are doing

Here's a short to do list.

What we see in the future

Here's some idea for the future.

Interaction enhancements

(Scalable) Graphics 

(Active) Metadata

Plug-in (formats support)

The far future

 History

2007 v3 by Silvio Moioli 

Partial rewriting. Multi-thread management of semantic zoom. Server/client split.

2006 v2 by Michele Bologna

Complete rewriting. Visualization of directory trees. Semantic zoom: automatic creation and use of thumbnails. Objects can be moved. User configurable visualization parameters.

2005 v1 by Vincenzo Manzoni

Zoomable visualization of images, text and directory trees. Metadata in XML files. Only pan and zoom of the desktop.

2004 v0 by Andrea Vitali

Idea to replicate the application designed in 1984 by Jef Raskin, Apricus Inc., to ease the management of database in hospitals. When started, you were presented with the city map. You could zoom in hospitals, buildings, floors and finally rooms. When patient data was visible it could be edited.

Silvio Moioli (UniBG) 

 

 

 Michele Bologna (UniBG) 

 

 Vincenzo Manzoni (UniBG) 

Created: 2nd April 2007. Updated: 19th June 2008.