Zooming User Interface (ZUI)

I first read about Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs) in "Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center". The idea appealed to me so much, it made me realize how bored and disappointed I was with current interfaces. Recently, Jef Raskin, the "creator" of the Apple Macintosh published a new book: "The Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems" in which he champions (among other things) zooming interfaces. There is a summary of the book available, written by its author.

In addition to calling for "an improved navigation method, as applicable to finding your way around within a picture or memo as within a collection of images, documents, or networks", Raskin slags "adaptive" menus (such as those found in the latest versions of Microsoft Office) and proposes ideas strangely reminiscent of OpenDoc (although Steve Jobs is a personal hero, I've never really forgiven him for killing OpenDoc). As for the "humane" aspect of interface design, he claims "major improvements in interface design are both profitable and moral" and that one "can do good and yet do well by rethinking interface design".

If you want to find out more about Zooming User Interfaces, or if you're a programmer and want to play with a ZUI toolkit, check out the Jazz project at the University of Maryland.

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Spectacular Vibrations

Since low-frequency vibrations are a big contributor to my own private hell (thus the name of this site), I went looking for some pictures and videos of the spectacular collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Some people may remember seeing dramatic film-clips in high-school or university of the wind-induced vibrations that literally tore this bridge apart. If you missed it, or if you'd like to see it again, check out this Carlton University site dedicated to the 1940 disaster.

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The DEA's Opium Files

This one was just too funny to resist: allegedly courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice and the DEA, everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) on the subject of Poppy Cultivation, Morphine and Heroin Manufacture.

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Technophilia and Its Discontents

Female software engineers are so rare, that when Ellen Ullman's autobiographical Close to the Machine : Technophilia and Its Discontents came out in 1997 I bought three copies and forced some of my friends to read the book.

To my delight, I recently found a two-part article by Ullman in Salon about "The dumbing-down of programming". In Part 1, "Rebelling against microsoft, "my computer" and easy-to-use wizards, an engineer rediscovers the joys of difficult computing." she writes: "Not content with infantilizing the end user, the purveyors of point-and-click seem determined to infantilize the programmer as well." In Part 2, "Returning to the source. Once knowledge disappears into code, how do we retrieve it?" she describes programming "as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting."

Excerpts from Close to the Machine can also be found on Salon (Excerpt 1, Excerpt2).

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