ZDesktop is a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) concept made in collaboration with STMicroelectronics. It’s really simple: it represents the contents of your hard drive (files and directories) in a spatial navigation (similar to Google Maps), where you can:
- pan (see what’s around);
- zoom-in (enter a directory and see what’s inside it, viewing the container in a more detailed way);
- zoom-out (exit a directory and view a less detailed way of the current container, but now you can see the neighbor containers).
ZDesktop is written in Java, depends on the Piccolo toolkit from UMD and it has been presented as my B.Sc. thesis in September 2008.
Wanna try it? On the ZDesktop project site you can download it!
Want to see what’s under the hood? Take a look at the ZDesktop git repo on GitHub.