Experimental GUI Eases Palmtop Browsing

museumpeace writes "Technology review (in exchange for a revealing cookie) has a short article describing a PDA browsing improvement from Microsoft/Asia research. The basic idea is to put the palm top user back in control of page layout by letting them zoom/shrink arbitrary regions of a page with a single stroke of their stylus. A more complete disclosure of the technique will be presented at Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004), in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 24 to 27."

Nasty.

[daxxar]

Sounds like just another way to give web-developers sleepless nights over compatability issues.
*finds his valium*

Why is that?

[PaulBu]

This seems to be on the presentation/rendering level, not on the actual website content level.

Sounds like mouse gestures, decent electronic (and other) CAD programs have had those for years. As in, draw an 'L' with middle button pressed in Mentor and it will zoom into the area defined by L's bounding box. Or draw Z/z to zoom in/out, etc...

OTOH, in the finest /. tradition I did not RTFA, and I can agree with the viepoint that MS can do an especially screwed-up implementation of a simple and nice idea.

Paul

Re:Nasty.

[Trepalium]

Since when have web developers ever cared about compatibility issues? How many really care if your screen is too small to view something that is 600px from the left side of your monitor or if 10px Arial is too small or 20px Times New Roman is too big for you? Pixel measurements in CSS or even elaborate table layouts is the worst thing that happened to HTML, IMO. With the possible exception of aligning something with an image and defining visible borders (not padding), using pixel measurements on a CSS is

interesting...

[GeoffKerr]

As an owner of a Palm Tungsten C, not being able to see the entire page at a time is more of a feature than a problem. To see the entire contents, you just drag the stylus or move the cursor buttons on the bottom of the PDA as if you are moving the page. It's slow to view an enitre page, but simple... you don't have to remember zoomin and zoomout commands on top of the commands for the PDA. Also, the screens are so small that, if you had to look at the entire page at one time, you wouldn't be able to see any of the text and would only see pictures. That doesn't sound all that appealing to me. To zoom in, you'd have to know what you are trying to read, but you can't do that without zooming in to see what the page is about. Catch 22. If this technology also brings about much higher resolution screens, maybe it will be worth the effort.

Stanford PCD Seminar Friday 12:30-2:00 Gates B01

[js7a]

I'm going [stanford.edu].

Not so new....

[aliWiz]

It looks like Jazz paradigm... http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/ [umd.edu]
M$ innovation as usual :)