Viva la Navilucion!

Or...maybe not.


this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces

This is the statement made by the development “team”, a.k.a. Jef Raskin, at the THE ZUI project.  Yes, the Zooming User Interface.

I’m so glad that he has come up with a non-time-wasting, intuitive, easy-to-implement, and browser-universal solution to all of our navigation problems.  Go fix a cup of coffee, some Pop Tarts, and play a few holes of Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour as you download the “simple” 8mb flash demo

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Comments

They don’t even put in a simple “Loading...” graphic/text???  Oh, I hate this already.

<goes back to waiting for the 8MB to load>

I’m reminded of Samir Nayeenanajar’s quote in Office Space:

Yes, this is horrible, this idea!

I think that interface may be even worse than “mystery meat” navigation.

Yeah.  It hinges on the point of making your entire site as a single, static, huge image, for one.  Yay!  I can read it all and take screen captures to print!

Good luck selecting any text or saving any image to your desktop.

I understand that he’s proposing for all of those things to be possible, and to not do this via an 8mb flash...but my question is, if this guy is anything but a crackpot--why would he even want to show it like this?

Side note: this is the guy that “invented” the human interface guidelines at Apple--which apply directly to OS 9, but only in attitude and approach on OS X.  He hasn’t been with Apple for centuries, for good reason.  He also supposedly invented the method of “click and drag” selection.

I’d also say that he is probably responsible for a lot of the kludge that is in modern OS’s.  I downloaded his “super human friendly” interface that he’s created for Mac OS 9.  It’s basically a really annoying and flashy version of hotkeys ala Wordperfect for DOS.  “Faster than a mouse!” he says.  The hotkeys are long strings of unfriendly keypresses that require an intimate knowledge of your document before you can even use it.  I.e., you position the cursor by advancing to the next keyphrase Shift-Space-">"-R-E-P.  This guy has totally used all of his braincells up on programming for the Xerox SPARC processor on Gen 1 Macintoshes.

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