pyZui - anyone know about this?

[Donn]

On Wednesday 16 December 2009 07:03:19 David Roberts wrote:
> It involves scaling an image to various resolutions, and partitioning
> them into fixed-size tiles. It's roughly the same technique used by
> Google Maps/Earth.
Thanks. That gives me something to go on. Wikipedia didn't like my search 
terms.
 
> > ZUIs are useful for particular types of data - images & mapping
> > especially - but I'd hate to have to navigate my desktop using its
> > approach.
Ever since Corel Draw in the 90's zoomed into my life I have been in love with 
the idea of an endless canvas that makes me feel like a satellite on a bungee 
cord. I think it would fit the desktop very well.

Personally I see a merging of normal app windows and a zui: some kind of new 
window manager. 
If I planned it out it would look something like this:
Your apps all run as they do now*, but they live on this endless plain. 
Perhaps it can be divided up into 'zones' or 'galaxies' or something. I would 
have a 'hyperspace' or 'hyperlink' or 'jump' facility (like alt-tab, I guess) 
to make transits from one custom-defined area to another quick.

I would have a home position for the view -- like Inkscape does in terms of 
show all, zoom to selected, zoom to last, etc.

I would have rules about traversing. Things like file-managers need some kind 
of static display - like the bread crumbs and up, back, home etc.

Each app would only be active when 'locked-in', beyond that it's a bitmap of 
the last paint. You could drag apps around when you zoom out, and you can 
resize them at any time too.
(Just imagine OOCalc in a zui! Super/Capslock and mouse wheel for scroll/pan)

The other cool idea I had was to (handwavium here) graphically convey the 
notion of pipes and import/export between apps. Also between any nodes across 
the Universe of the zui. Perhaps a special 'node view' that overlays and shows 
all the conduits between them -- sharp where your mouse is, faded away from 
that so the whole thing is not too complex.
Imagine the flow from Inkscape to Gimp and back. Instead of File -> Export and 
then File -> Import, you connect pipes along the side of each app. 
Inkscape, [save selected as png (properties preset)] goes to Gimp [import to 
layers by names (a script perhaps)] Now as you work in Inkscape and hit a 
hotkey, all your selected vectors are sent to Gimp which reacts as if you were 
there and places the new pngs into layers. 
This can work both ways and between multiple programs. Mix-in Blender and 
Scribus and Lyx and some grep and a loop or two and some imagemagick...

Ah, I better stop. I can ramble on sometimes :)

*I have many issues with the endless variety of re-invented wheels afa gui 
toolkits go. This is another whole can of shai-Hulud...

I wrote some stuff about this a while back, if anyone wants to be put to sleep:
http://otherwise.relics.co.za/wiki/Particles/DreamDesignApp/
:)

\d

-- 
\/\/ave: donn.ingle at googlewave.com
home: http://otherwise.relics.co.za/
2D vector animation : https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/things/
Font manager : https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fontypython/