Zooming User Interface (ZUI)

From a quick skim of the source code this is mostly precalulated. Basically each document is rendered as one rectange, where the shader converts the current position to the row/column of the character to be rendered. There is one texture that holds the length and starting offset of each line (using one pixel per line), and another texture that for each offset tells you which glyph to render (using one pixel per glyp). The third texture is the glyph map that holds the actual glpyhs (a simple 256x256 texture of all supported characters). The last texture is static, the other two are calculated once as the document is loaded, and there is a neat shader that uses all three textures to render the actual document view. Since the shader is sampled at fewer points if the rectangle takes up fewer pixels on your screen this works out well for zoomed out views.

A little bit of zooming can still work great when you have a very limited item count, e.g. Mission Control on MacOS to manage windows or thumbnail view of tabs in some browsers. But as core UI for the whole OS it gets quite confusing when you don't really have an intuitive understanding of where things should be.

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Johnson1991Tree.pdf

HCIL Archive: Treemap Home Page:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/treemap/

How Ben Shneiderman’s Treemaps Found Place In The Museum Of Modern Art:

https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-ben-shneidermans-treemaps-...

>Ben Shneiderman was inspired by the 1960's 'Op Art' and the exhibits that he came across at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Op Art or Optical art is a form of kinetic art related to geometric designs that create movement in the eyes.

Ben Shneiderman's Treemap Art:

https://treemapart.wordpress.com/

>This site features draft designs and full views of the Treemap Art project. View more about the exhibitions.

>By Ben Shneiderman

>Although I conceived treemaps for purely functional purposes (understanding the allocation of space on a hard drive), I was always aware that there were appealing aesthetic aspects to treemaps. Maybe my experiences with OP-ART movements of the 60s & 70s gave me the idea that a treemap might become a work of art. That idea was revived in 2013 by way of my contacts with Manuel Lima who produced a beautiful coffee-table book on the history of trees that has several chapters on treemaps and their variations.

>I believe that there are at least four aesthetic aspects of treemaps:

>1. layout design (slice-and-dice, squarified, ordered, strip, etc.), >2. color palette (muted, bold, sequential, divergent, rainbow, etc.), and, >3. aspect ratio of the entire image (square, golden ratio, wide, tall, etc.). >4. prominence of borders for each region, each hierarchy level, and the surrounding box

Ben Shneiderman: Every AlgoRiThm has ART in it: Treemap Art Project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LW4m6BdQXI

>Ben Shneiderman, distinguished university professor, University of Maryland, College Park and National Academy of Engineering member, spoke at the October 16, 2014 DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER). Ben Shneiderman described the invention of treemaps and showed examples of its usage. He then turned to the aesthetics of treemaps, which led him to create the “Every AlgoRiThm has ART in it: Treemap Art Project” exhibit on view in the Keck Center first floor galleries (www.cpnas.org). He demonstrated how users of the free treemap application can generate their own artworks, without programming.

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — Don Hopkins — October 1989 (a paper I wrote when I worked with Ben Shneiderman at his University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

>The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer

>Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become… And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore. The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.

>[Gibson, Neuromancer]

>The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer is the object browser for the other half of your brain, a fish-eye lens for the macroscopic examination of data. It can display arbitrarily large, arbitrarily deep structures, in a fixed amount of space. It shows form, texture, density, depth, fan out, and complexity.

It was really great for that one use case: something the recipient could click through and continuously be surprised by the complexity of without having to know the tool. Click. Wow! It got bigger. Click. Woah! It got bigger and rotated!