Ben Bederman's DateLens. Responding to this week's column, Glen Vanderburg notes correctly that I should have credited Ben Bederson's pioneering work on fisheye distortion in GUIs. I checked, and Samuel Wan does cite Bederson on his blog. Glenn writes:
Ben has been working for over ten years now to increase the richness of our GUIs through the use of scale — in some cases zooming, and in other cases fisheye distortion. Check out the DateLens link on his page, and *be* *sure* to watch the demo video.
DateLens It's a whopping 45MB MPEG file, but I did watch it. To come full circle, you can also see a Flash demo of DateLens in action here. Or, as it turns out, you can actually use a free desktop version of DateLens — there's an add-in (written C# for the 1.1 .NET Framework) available here. I'm trying it out today. It's full of powerful ideas! I love how the grid grows and shrinks to accommodate arbitrary amounts of content, how search results are mapped onto the scroll bar, and how exactly-like and similar items are color-coded with a single click. … [Jon's Radio]