The Human-Computer Interaction Lab.University of Maryland, has released new versions of the Piccolo framework for Java and .NET and came up with a new web site.Piccolo (and its predecessor Jazz) are very cool graphics frameworks that allow you to make good use of zooming in your 2d application. The resulting applications are called ZUIs (zoomable user interfaces) or 2.5d applications.
E.g. Jef Raskin’s book “The Humane Interface” presents such an application of a hospital that uses semantic zooming (showing the appropriate level of detail at various zooming scales).
You might start with a map of the country, showing all hospitals. If you zoom in on a hospital at some scale you start to see the rooms. If you zoom further, at some scale you see the beds in the room. If you continue, you might see details of the patients.
If you are familiar with 3d programming, using powerful libraries like OpenGL or Java3D, you already know how useful concepts like coordinate transformations and scence graphs are to structure your graphics. Piccolo makes these concepts available for the 2d realm.
For a technical overview see here. To see what it does, download a release from here. and compile and run the examples.
News like this in the interesting data-vis realm is always appreciated (some of us do use this, honest!).
But I think the rest of the Namakians would be a little more than displeased.
This library seems very nice. Judging from the example programs it’s quite powerful, especially considering its relatively small size. I haven’t checked out the source code yet, though. The license is also nice (I’d prefer the Academic Free License, but “BSD style” isn’t too bad either). Unless the source code is a complete mess I’ll most likely use this library in at least one of my projects, so thanks for the link!
The Poseidon UML tool seems to use Piccolo.
Prof. Bederson posted some new links. A power point presentation
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/Piccolo.NET.ppt
and a newer paper:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/Toolkit_Design_2004.pdf
@shapeshifter:
I have all Dragonball manga.
I subscribed to that series of about 40-50 pocket books when it became published in Germany. As I was already 33 at that time, my book dealer always looked very strange, when I took the new issue home. 🙂
Dr. Slump is even funnier. Sandland was so so. Neko majin is just weird.