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What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

norbertkozsir.com

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Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#11

Post by projektfu »

trgn wrote: post #9
projektfu wrote: post #3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab. It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess. Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

I am too lazy to do the work but in that time frame I considered that a zooming/hierarchical view would be a nice way to browse the web, with followed links appearing as new pages next to the current page. The web became too dynamic for that anyway.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#13

Post by stronglikedan »

trgn wrote: post #9
projektfu wrote: post #3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab. It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess. Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

> this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago

If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#14

Post by ge96 »

amelius wrote: post #12

What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions? Answer: you get a mess. That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work. But happy to be proven wrong of course.

What if... imagine stacked skewed windows and you scrolled through them like a rolladex

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#15

Post by trgn »

stronglikedan wrote: post #13
trgn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab. It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess. Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

> this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.

didnt know, it's on my watchlist now!

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#16

Post by thaumasiotes »

amelius wrote: post #12

What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions? Answer: you get a mess. That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work. But happy to be proven wrong of course.

> What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions?

> Answer: you get a mess.

> That's why browsers weren't built like that

But people frequently go out of their way to put their tabs into two dimensions.

There are tab trees: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabtree/afejdkkhibi...

There are tab groups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

There are tab containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

It seems pretty clear that people want their tabs to be organized in multiple dimensions.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#17

Post by Zircom »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #16
amelius wrote: post #12

What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions? Answer: you get a mess. That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work. But happy to be proven wrong of course.

> What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions? > Answer: you get a mess. > That's why browsers weren't built like that But people frequently go out of their way to put their tabs into two dimensions. There are tab trees: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabtree/afejdkkhibi... There are tab groups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups There are tab containers: https://addons.mozi…

FYI those Firefox containers have little to nothing to do with organizing tabs spatially, it just lets you have different 'profiles' to open tabs in that can all have separate cookies and so lets you be logged into different accounts on the same website for one example/use case.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#19

Post by jexe »

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)

We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.

It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#20

Post by fragmede »

jexe wrote: post #19

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm) We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you woul…

> It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did

I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?

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