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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Hint: it's a dead end people! Been around forever as an idea, lots of academic studies and some industry apps. Doesn't really work and has never taken off despite many attempts. Many reasons for this, including the real world doesn't include zoom at multiple orders of magnitude, going in all planes is harder than a linear list for people to scan, semantics in 2D isn't something that's easy to grasp cognitively unless you specifically arranged things that way (which isn't the case for this kind of software, and even then you can lose what's happening / adjusting everything to account for something new isn't well supported), and not many use cases where this is broadly useful (especially compared to other tried-and-true approaches).

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Windowing systems have this zoomout mode for application selection these days and smart phone web browsers have a similar thing for tabs.

Many modern text editors have a zoomed out view of the code that you can use to scroll around it.

There's photo browsers with thumbnail views. As you zoom in to each photo, more information is exposed.

Then there's video and audio editing software with complex zoomable timelines.

They're kind of everywhere to be honest, just a bit hidden.

I'd say that directory organization of filesystems is an example of it too.

On an Iphone 15 Pro Max there is a minicam view when you're zoomed in 15x. It's really nice to have

Hint: it's a dead end people! Been around forever as an idea, lots of academic studies and some industry apps.

Is it, though? For one thing, many feel that projects like Dataland led directly to the modern Windowed User Interface. One can think of opening windows as a kind of limited zooming with very specific affordances. The iOS UI is cited in the Wikipedia article on ZUI as being another example.

Basically, any UI in which one can "drill down" into greater detail or smaller/more specific contexts is effectively a kind of zooming. The problem, is losing the connection to the larger context.

Another thing to consider: At the time many of these things were tried out, there wasn't enough capability in the CPU and UI to render complex data fast enough. In fact, I was involved with a round-trip UML DB to UI product dating from the 1990's, which looked great in demos. However, it became dog slow when actually given someone's company database. This was a problem which dogged many projects with innovative UI ideas. (A problem which many CAD software apps deal with, and which seem to have been solved to some degree.)

semantics in 2D isn't something that's easy to grasp cognitively unless you specifically arranged things that way

Do you have specific examples?

I was hoping that this was going to be about zooming contexts rather than renderings. It would be much effective to me if I could zoom in/out of contexts like on a distributed system diagram, and zooming in and in, until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change, and have those changes immediately effective, like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image.

like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image

Funny, but in my comment above, I'm referencing a Smalltalk program!

Smalltalk environments are actually full of things that are functionally just about a REPL.

until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change

There are a variety of query languages for code repos. VisualWorks Smalltalk had two versions of this. One was based on the RefactoringBrowser code. There was another one that was a VisualWorks library. These could be used to pop up a very specific browser. For example, you could have a browser that just showed all of the implementers of a certain method X and referenced instance variable Y and called a method Z.

I wish "modern" IDEs could support something like that. This would actually be very useful for providing context to LLMs.

Aren't maps a successful use case for them tho?

Google Maps and Waze and friends being universally useful these days?

It works with maps since they are fundamentally spatial, every country has its fixed position on the globe which doesn't change. With most other data there is no intuitive way to map the data into a 2D space and it gets even worse when that data frequently changes, completely changing whatever layout scheme you might have come up with.

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.

The complex "application is like moving to a new city" metaphor is something I found inspiring UX/UI design and how to make the user feel "located in a new environment". Not that it should use this technique tho, but having it as a tool subject to that. Nature molded us to adapt to new terrain, so if we reduce the application-locate-yourself-in-a-new-terrain-mapping-mismatch then we find a source of optimization of ergonomy for UXs/UIs design.

i don't know, miro and figma seem to be pretty popular applications using a ZUI

Figma is popular in spite of this. It's my number one frustration. Actually being able to link someone to a specific view is nigh impossible to do consistently.

Can't you link them to a specific frame? I used to use that feature all the time. Did they remove it?

https://forum.figma.com/t/link-to-selected-frame-should-be-r...

>Hint: it's a dead end people! Been around forever as an idea, lots of academic studies and some industry apps.

Indeed. For a concrete example see Ted Nelson's "Zigzag" UI concept:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc

tl;dr: a lot of good and interesting ideas that should never actually be implemented.

Why not? That was quite an interesting presentation.

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