Vacation and Scaled List

It is wonderfull to see everybody at home. I been travelling a lot and spending time with famliy matters. Weather here is wonderfull, though at the times I feel cold but normally in the range of 50 to 60 F.

Sneaking out to do some reading on "non-linear presentation techniques for saving screen real-estate and accessiblity". After doing some experimentation and some code I was able to create a simple list control for Windows.Forms and CF framework. Please refer my previous article about how to setup VS project and develop a CF Control.

List,

I am choosing simplest of all controls for demonstration purposes. Lets try to summarize on aspects of information presentation of a list.

• List for choices - Enumerating information items as list to present user with various choices available.
• List for selection - Allow user to select from the choices made.
• List for an overview - Allow user to see overview of choices presented.

Focus plus context

Limitation in the viewing space presents the problem that either the overview of all the data or zoomed view of interesting subspace can be shown with linear magnification factor. Non linear magnification suggested as a technique to distort the presentation space for benefit. [Leung and Apperley, 1994]. Various ways like fisheye view, perspective wall and hyperbolic tree view are few of them. Basic idea is to present information and interact with it using non-linear magnification factor space.

Not going into too much of detail of Focus+context and related non-linear magnification presentation techniques. Intead of describing the behaviour of this list control in words, let me try to show you what it looks like. Following is the link of macromedia demo of the list.

http://img146.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img146&image=scaledlist5rf.swf

For more information search at,
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs?cs=1&q=focus+context&submit=Citations&co=Citations&cm=50&cf=Any&ao=Citations&am=20&af=Any
Design,


Here, in this article, I will show an implementation of such focus plus context technique applied to a list.

References
Leung and Apperley, 1994 Y. K. Leung and M. D. Apperley (1994). A review and taxonomy of distortion-oriented presentation techniques. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 1(2):126-160.