He adds details or text on a new layer at the new scale, zooming and repeating for further layers and clicking to back out and view the composite image. A story can include dozens of such images and allows a viewer to zoom from one image or layer to another and back. CounterPoint and KidPad were built on Jazz , Bederson's free Java software development tool kit, which is set for a July 4 release. Ken Perlin, a professor at New York University, is credited with coming up with the original idea for ZUIs. But what hasn't been around is a tool kit that lets you easily do it for any application.
Jazz also features fish-eye menus.
In a fish-eye menu view, all items in a list are at least nominally visible. I hadn't even been considering the idea earlier. He spent the rest of the day writing the first version of the code. Each item in a 100-item list on an average screen would be in type about 4 pixels high, Bederson says. As the mouse pointer moves over a list, the dozen or so list entries centered under the pointer gradually grow to normal viewing size.