Sportsmanship: this is a concept that I associate with athletes and team competition, not new media or graphic design. But maybe that’s just what we need.

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Here’s a link to something called pad++, a “zoomable interface” that was put together sometime in the late 1990s. The gist: With infinite zooming power, one can have documents at different scales and browse amongst them.

Jef Raskin, the user interface specialist who did early work on the Macintosh UI (though apparently, not involved in the actual final product) is doing some work on his humane interface. There’s a demo of one concept from it, which bears resemblance to the Pad++ concept.

Hmm. I’m curious to see what this turns into. After a cursory stumble through the documentation and demos on the raskin project homepage, one can see that the concept is simple enough, but execution is what will really make the difference.

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