Niagara is an informal zoomable organization tool for making sense of your thoughts for notes, presentations, or other documents. It is informal in the sense that it doesn't restrict you to lines, columns, or page boundaries. You can type and move objects where ever you want. It is "zoomable" in that you can interactively zoom out to see more objects at once. In most other programs, when you zoom out, the text gets small and unreadable. Niagara tries to keep the text readable as you zoom out using a technique we call Automatic Text Reduction.

Screenshots

This is Niagara being used to edit some notes on Niagara features and bugs. Here the view is zoomed in all the way and all text is visible. (Click on the image to see it at full resolution)


This is Niagara editing the same file but zoomed out to show all the notes in the workspace. Notice that some of the text in the objects is hidden to show some of the rarest key words. (Click on the image to see it at full resolution)

Publications

• Good, L. (2003). Zoomable User Interfaces for the Authoring and Delivery of Slide Presentations. Ph.D. Dissertation. PDF
• Zellweger, P., Mackinlay, J., Good, L., Stefik, M., and Baudisch, P. (2003). City Lights: Contextual Views in Minimal Space. Short Talk at CHI 2003, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. PDF
• Good, L., Bederson, B. B., Stefik, M., Baudisch, P. (2002). Automatic Text Reduction for Changing Size Constraints. Short Talk at CHI 2002, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. PDF