We are exploring techniques for automatically identifying the proper balance. History-based shadowing shows previous states of textual information in the shadow of the current state. For example, the image at the right shows a ticker widget displaying scores of baseball games. The shadow of the Cubs-Marlins score is seen the previous score of the game. The shadow can persist indefinitely or it can disappear after a programmer-specified amount of time or number of iterations.
Automatic markups highlight a piece of information that has recently changed.
The highlights can be in the form of bold, italic, or colored text. In the display at the right, changed scores are shown in bold text for one iteration before reverting back to their original form. The Agentk toolkit has been used on Windows 95 and 98, but some of the programs have not been tested and some are known not to have full functionality. Agentk is implemented purely in Tcl and Tk, and as such the ticker and roll animations often run slowly on slow machines. 8.0.3 or later.