Zooming user interface

A Scalable User Interface ( ZUI or short for " zoomable user interface " ) comes from the IT sector and describes a Graphical User Interface ( GUI) with the additional possibility of individual elements or the entire surface to zoom. A ZUI can assume different degrees of scaling, which are controlled by the user. A ZUI requires an additional input from the user to control zoom and pan.

The ZUI is seen as more intuitive and more flexible alternative to the classic GUI. The effort for the development of ZUIs is higher, which is why currently more work is put into the development of conventional GUIs.

The requirements of a user interface are regulated according to the international standard ISO 9241 - 10ff.

Definition

User interfaces that meet one of the following points are considered ZUI.

  • Controls are on a work surface that can be zoomed and panned horizontally and vertically (English Pan).
  • At least one element contains scalable components.

Synonyms

The correct name for ZUIs is scalable graphical user interface or GUI Scalable, for reasons of simplicity, but " graphically " omitted the phrase. Other names for ZUIs are Scalable user interface in English, the terms Zoomable User Interface, Zooming User Interface and Multiscale Interface are common.

History

The history of ZUIs builds on the history of GUIs. Ivan Sutherland developed in 1963 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sketchpad, which today is considered the first GUI and had a zoom function. The so-called Fisheye Zooming was defined in 1981 by George W. Furnas, and is often used in ZUIs. Developed in 1991 David Fox and Ken Perlin pad at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Pad is considered the first ZUI. With pad and the further Pad multimedia data can be displayed on a two dimensional plane. Pad already used the Semantic scaling ( see below). At the Human Computer Interaction Lab ( HCIL ) pad was continued by the project Jazz and ported to Java. The recent ZUI Library of HCIL is Piccolo, which significantly simplified the programming of ZUIs compared to jazz. Piccolo is available for Java and C # open source library.

ZUI elements

ZUIs have usually over primitive elements that can be used for the compilation of controls. Depending on the programming library these elements as in a GUI library can provide you with event handlers for mouse and keyboard input, and be animated and transformed.

  • Pathways: These can represent simple edges, filled rectangles, polygons to Bezier curves.
  • Text
  • Bitmap

In a ZUI depending on programming library elements of GUIs can be used. The Piccolo toolkit provides examples of wrapper in C # for controls the GDI graphics interface.

  • Button
  • Checkbox
  • Radio button

See also: GUI elements

Semantic scaling

The Semantic Scale (English semantic zooming ) is a technique of ZUIs to represent objects depending on the degree of scaling in different levels of detail. This gives a good overall view of the information, on closer inspection, an object is, however, very detailed, ie Information is a visible or hidden depending on scaling. Programmers use this opportunity to improve the performance of their programs to improve and to provide a better overview.

List of ZUI libraries

Many ZUI programming libraries are increasingly relying on the graph, is made possible by a structured view in flow charts.

  • Piccolo Toolkit - A Structured 2D Graphics Framework - Programming library for Java and C #. Piccolo is available under the BSD license.
  • Jazz Toolkit of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Jazz is a predecessor of the Piccolo toolkit implemented in Java. The development has been set, but the sources are still under accessible.
  • ZVTM - Zoomable Visual Transformation Machine
  • Zomit - Java ZUI - Library
C Sharp (programming language) Graphics Device Interface Flow diagram BSD licenses
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