PandaZUI

A ZUI (Zooming User Interface) framework for Panda3D. Requires Panda3D to be installed on your system.

Features

A ZUI (Zoomable User Interface) is "a graphical environment where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less." The idea is that your "desktop" is an infinite and infinitely scalable plane, onto which you place all the objects that the user interacts with. Users can pan the camera around and zoom it in and out, move the objects around, and generally do whatever you can imagine and then implement. I think the main reference for the idea has to be the "Zoom World" in Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface, but it was never implemented. With all these new devices with small screens the I think concept is having a bit of a revival. A few links on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface http://advogato.org/article/788.html http://rchi.raskincenter.org/index.php?title=ZUI_Specification

Some other implementations of this sort of thing include Piccolo, Clutter and Project Scene Graph.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/ http://clutter-project.org/ https://scenegraph.dev.java.net/

What does this code actually do? Let's see, we've got:

• A ZCanvas, an infinite and infinitely scalable plane with a viewport that can pan around and zoom in and out. It's implemented by transforming a node on Panda's 2D scene graph. Thanks to ynjh_jo for the code for the zoom transformation.

• Nodes that you can automatically zoom the camera to, e.g. by clicking on them

• Nodes can change state depending on what the camera is focused on

• Nodes that respond to mouse-over highlights

• Nodes that can be dragged and dropped onto other nodes

• Container nodes that implement layouts. Provided are horizontal and vertical line layouts and a grid layout, but the general Box and BoxList framework provided supports easily creating arbitrary layouts. Compound layouts (layouts within layouts) are also supported.

• DirectGUI compatibility, i.e. you can embed DirectGUI widgets into the zoom scene, and put them into layout containers.

It's all fairly generic, I think, so you could use it to implement lots of different interfaces. I'm using it to implement a little story writing prototype called 'Story Cards' which is also included in the download.

The code was originally posted to a thread on the Panda3D forums.

Instructions

zui/ contains the framework itself.

zui_tests/ contains unit tests for the code in zui/.

zui_demos/ contains unit demos for the code in zui/.

storymaps/ contains a demo application.

storymaps_demos/ contains unit demos for the code in storymaps/.

Code should be run from the top-level folder, e.g.:

python storymaps/story.py

or

python zui_demos/box_demo.py