Space, Time, and Data

摘要

In a column alst year entitled "how rich is the Rich GUI?" I mentioned in passing an intriguing use offish-eye distortion by the Flash developer Samuel Wan (infoworld.com/1534). Similar to Mac OS X's Dock, Wan's fish-eye menu selectively magnifies items near the cursor while shrinking distant items (infoworld.com/454). The result is a list that's fully scannable without scrolling and that reveals detail in a focal zone. A reader noted that I should have credited the pioneering research of Ben Bederson, who directs the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Bederson's work on zoomable user interfaces is, in fact, cited in the source code of Wan's Flash demo.