“July 4th marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of jazz great
Louis Armstrong, but this year a new kind of jazz will strike a
chord with internet designers when a new Java “Zooming” (Jazz for
short) interface lands on their desktops.”
“On July 4th the University of Maryland and an Open Source
community called “The Jazz Band” is releasing version 1.0 of a new
“Zooming User Interface” called Jazz. This user-interface
technology, developed over the last six years, is now creating new
opportunities for the most information intensive companies and
applications to gain wider acceptance. The Jazz interface,
developed by Ben Bederson, director of the Human Computer
Interaction Laboratory at Maryland, offers application designers a
robust platform for interaction with large information spaces.
Users and developers of all types are invited to download version
1.0 of this software from the Jazz homepage at
http:www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz.
“In the old days, the biggest computer companies sold hardware
that feasted on data – the more “big iron” mainframes, the better.
Today, some of the biggest software companies sell applications
that feast on information – the more the better. But old-fashioned
user interfaces have limited how many people have the expertise and
the patience to interact with “big information.” New interfaces
like Jazz escape from the 30-year-old WIMP straitjacket, moving
intuitive visual interaction beyond Windows, Icons, Menus, and
Pointing.”
“The “Jazz” platform is a Java-based zooming user interface
(ZUI) development toolkit. Applications implemented in Jazz can
easily zoom, pan, and transform graphical and text objects
organized into a scenegraph of hierarchical cameras, nodes and
objects. The views offer smooth, animated transitions
throughout an infinite plane of information. With Jazz’s close
integration with Java and Swing, all Jazz applications are platform
independent and run in any browser with a Java 2 Run-time Engine
(JRE). The Jazz platform is extremely flexible, with full
availability of the open source code and a stable, well-documented
scenegraph.”