Comments on: Content-aware scrolling

By: James John Malcolm

James John Malcolm — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:34:30 +0000

I think I might find this most confusing, as I’d want to know what parts of the document I’m missing.

I wonder if other people might be too curious, like me, for this technique to be of use.

By: pauldwaite

pauldwaite — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:18:25 +0000

Interesting, but I find the multi-column thing a bit of a red herring. Text is *printed* in multiple columns to give a readable line width, and to fit multiple stories onto a page of fixed dimensions.

On a computer screen, pages can have infinite dimensions, and there’s little reason to include the entire text of multiple stories on one viewable area. A readable line-width is easily achievable.

Seems like it’d be easier to just use PDFs for print, and convert them to a nicer computer format (e.g. HTML, like this very blog) for reading on computer.

By: josh

josh — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:32:28 +0000

pauldwaite brings up a good point, however I still think there are cases when a document is formatted to be printed but is read on-screen. Even though it’s true that web pages have infinite dimensions, and ideally we’d like to have one format for each, it’s still much easier to just create one document that works printed, or on-screen, so I think this method is an interesting way of addressing that.

But I think an even better use of this technology is to create non-linear scrolling paths. For instance you could have a single piece of work and include multiple paths through the same document depending on what you’re interested in seeing; all while using a single scrollbar.

By: Amar

Amar — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:45:37 +0000

josh: having different paths through a document is also where I see a lot of potential.
For example, similar to how they demonstrated moving between search results, you could have modes for traversing all section headings, or all the images in a document.

By: josh

josh — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:34:14 +0000

Amar:

Or even, imagine telling multiple stories within one piece (I hesitate to use the word ‘document’ because ot conjurs ideas of text-heavy manuscripts which is misleading). It’s really about creating an experience which the author can control by setting the flow without having to reorganize the information on the page (which, perhaps is designed optimally for printing, or some other purpose).

The author (or even the user) has the power to define teh experience based on whatever parameters are important to them for the given context.

By: Arjun Muralidharan

Arjun Muralidharan — Sat, 05 May 2007 10:36:53 +0000

It’s an intresting thought, but it will take some time getting used to. It’s quite a fundamental change. It would be great to be able to get an overview of a document like this - flying over all the headings and importnt areas is a good idea.

It’d be interesting to see if they implement paths of different intensitiy. Say I want to read a text quickly, so I choose a quick path which show me all relevant sections for my understanding.

Then you can choose paths that go into mroe detail of the text - much like what the summarize sevice in Mac OS X does.

By: Content-aware Scrolling at Localoaf - Information: It’s the Magic

Content-aware Scrolling at Localoaf - Information: It’s the Magic — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 05:13:31 +0000

[…] UIScape. Tags: reading, software, ui, […]

By: Sascha Brossmann

Sascha Brossmann — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:19:52 +0000

This concept seems interesting at first glance, but I can see at least one definitely non-trivial issue, namely “to identify the content of a document that’s relevant to a task”. Oops! The definition of “task” in my world still lies in the user’s domain, not in the author’s (and even less in the machine’s). So, how is the relevance going to be determined (if not by a specific search)? The problem here – which is anything but technical – is that what somebody else *intends* to be relevant does not need to be the least relevant to me. And I tend to consider this kind cognitive preformation quite problematic – the value of serendipity is not to be underestimated. Nonetheless, I recognise that there might be enough cases where my argument does not prevail.

Something else: Why stick to the scrolling paradigm? Scrolling is fine if you want a *continuity* of context, i. e. linear access. But as far as I understand we’re dealing with random access in this case. Why not use e.g. a combination of several “layers” and fade over between them, perhaps combined with zooming? Think of a map of the document (in a broader sense) with simultaneous contextually triggered magnification – you could still scroll through the magnified areas of this map and zoom in your area of interest. Mind you, I do not claim that this was encessarily a better solution. But I would like to point out that it seems important to me to take a step back and consider other possibilities outside the given metaphor of representation. Never forget that it is not a physical object that is dealt with but *data*. And data does not have any “natural” appearance but is more or less infinitely malleable.