Zoomable User Interface
There’s an article over at TheFeature about zoomable user interfaces, or ZUI for short. Some of the concepts given there are interesting, such as the calendar view that leaves the context of the month view around the edges of the screen when zoomed in to day view. Some of the others it’s kinda hard to see how they’re much different than hierarchal organization. In particular, the image view app seems to be nothing more than thumbnailing. I can see the benefit of maintaining visual context when navigating. But it really is a tricky human mind issue that creates a significant difference between disjoint screens and the ZUI. There could be some great applications for the technology, on PDAs as well as cell phones.