Chapter 11. Zoom interface

Nikolay (unDEFER) Krivchenkov

2009-08-02

Among others Jef Raskin in his books tells about Zoom-interface idea.

Among modern applications of the most successful illustration of this idea is Google Earth interface. You can easily come nearer to any corner of our planet, or on the contrary keep away so that to be fit on the screen Earth entirely.

Concerning other applications according to Zoom idea any button of the interface should have a complete description which will be visible at enlargement.

As to using of this idea in practice in unDE, like interface Google Earth it will not be possible to fully implement it. Nevertheless any text in small scale has no especially recognised pattern that is why there will be not a smooth change of scale, but anyway possibility of increase the description details.

For example, at viewing of program code, scale reduction can lead to code collapsing to the list of functions, the further reduction can lead to collapsing to the project files list.

Programs messages output in the console should have possibility to increase or decrease details of messages.

Now the situation is in such a manner that the user before program start should choose level of debugging messages details. However when level of details appears insufficiently, it is necessary to restart the program. Even worse when details level sets at building of the program.

In unDE it will be possible to change level of message details of the program directly during execution. Messages will be always generated by the program for system in full volume. It too is a part of Zoom interface implementation.

The details which generation will strongly reduce program performance become an exception of such behaviour. In this case it is necessary to give a simple way for increase/decrease of these details including during program execution. And in the second there should be good means of a filtration of messages when there are a lot of them.

Besides this, the system automatically should keep time when the message has arisen, and a source (process) from which it has arrived.

SourceForge.net Logo