Hacker News Reader

Comment by projektfu | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

I've often wondered if all they are missing is eye tracking and the ability auto tilling manager? I'd love to be able to press ctrl, look at three windows in my zoomed out view, and then release and have all 3 of them be distributed by a normal tiling window.

I agree that laying things out on an infinite 2d plane is surprisingly time consuming. We must be missing some affordance or something in how this should be?

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.

It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.

Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

> this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago

If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.

I always think of Johnny Mnemonic when I see such interfaces. One of the reasons I got into computers as kid. Hackers (1995) also had a great (Hollywood) computer interface that shares some similarities with it.

didnt know, it's on my watchlist now!

I am too lazy to do the work but in that time frame I considered that a zooming/hierarchical view would be a nice way to browse the web, with followed links appearing as new pages next to the current page. The web became too dynamic for that anyway.

OS/2 Warp's browser did that - it kept a tree of parent and child nodes (indented) as a history type of thing..

I think (work)spaces like macOS Spaces because they make access easier; with a single continuous space you have to work, whereas a workspace is a hotkey away. They make for nice demos and movie scenes though.

After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...

Figma is a good example of this UI paradigm done well, lots of users, and financial success.

>They mostly do not gain a lot of users.

Ever used a browser on iOS? Google Maps / Apple Maps? ZUIs are one of the main multi-touch user interface paradigms now.

I have used a browser on iOS, but I haven't seen a real ZUI there. Maybe one level like Mission Control. Maps is a different thing, there is just the map. There aren't a lot of things you are trying to organize in space, they have already been organized for you. You aren't going to be able to move your city closer to another, because it's more convenient. There's a difference between an object that is too big to see all at once, and a zooming UI for organization. Nor is it really revolutionary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com