Recently, a GeekUp message rekindled my long-standing appreciation of all things zoomable. One of the problems with many zooming demos is just that, they’re only demos.
Like many visualisation examples, zooming works best when you it’s a tool rather than a media-type. You need to get your hands dirty, to fly around and play with your data rather than consuming someone else’s zooming media.
In the same way that reading a great book inspires you to write or seeing a fab painting makes you want to sketch or hearing a moving song starts you singing… In same way that writing bad poetry makes you appreciate the good stuff or painting an awful picture makes you visit galleries…
ZuiPrezi is wonderful! And not only is it interesting from a media consumption point of view, it’s a tool with which you can create your very own zoomable presentation or environment. I’m absolutely blown away by the potential of this….
A site for making timelines such as the History of Mongol Empire Timeline. Damn, I’d started creating one of these in the Google App Engine but haven’t received a full pass yet.
I think time as well as zooming are two of the richest un-tapped seams in interaction. Many have tinkered on the edges but always fluffed it. I quite like the zoom and pan interface over at Disruptive Research, but again, I feel they haven’t yet quite hit the nail on the head with regards to what zooming and panning affords.
One day, when the wind is in the right direction I will get a bite at the zoom and pan cherry. Lately I’ve been dabbling in Flex development, but don’t feel quite yet skilled enough to start throwing things around the screen….
I was just finding NetNewsWire struggling lately to display all my newsfeeds and thinking, blimey, there has to be a better, more swooshy and floaty way to do this… and here it is…
