People at Google must love being able to experiment with the medium. Webgraphics pointed to the new GoogleViewer that is appearing in the labs, which takes your search results and presents each hit (each external URL) in a viewing pane, so you can view each page within Google before going out to the search result page. It's similar to a slide show. I've seen something similar to this with a CMS' search system that shows previews of Office and PDF files, but didn't expect a search engine to do this web pages.

Just found this press release off of the xmlconference.org site. I thought it would be of interest to folks out there who do xml and IA...the release mentions front page and visio.

Microsoft XML Architect and Co-Creator of W3C's XML 1.0 Standard To Unveil XML Vision for "Office 11" at XML Conference & Exposition

Peter V. pointed to the IDCL browser, a Java application that offers an interface for browsing an ebook catalog. What's unique about the catalog is that it offers a type of zoomable interface for browing categories such as About (Subject), Genre, Setting, Characters, etc. Clicking one facet drills you deeper into that facet tree, that is to say, reveals the sub-facets/categories and/or reveals the items within that node in a tiny thumbnail results window at top that you can expand to review hits. Each term you pick -- terms are the end-points, the buttons that don't have further sub-division -- is added to your collection (on top of the worm graphic) to show that you've combined terms in your search. You can click on one of the terms in that area to remove it from your search. The results window shows how your search terms have narrowed your results.

You have to have the Java Virtual Machine plug in installed to use this application. To start browsing by facet, click "Find books in category".

Seems FacetMap works now with links to XML feeds rather than uploaded files. Updated iaslash FacetMap is up. Guess I should clean up and index some of those earlier blog entries. Maybe.

webgraphics is discussing the touchscreen interface used in the Georgia elections this week. The UI is simulated on the Georgia site for your clicking pleasure (or pain). James found a related on article on Wired, High-Tech Voting Gets Thumbs Up.

Norpath Elements Studio ships for Windows and Mac OS X. It's a platform for building interactive applications using a toolset and methodology that apparently maps closely to how many people do IA. I think it's a lot like drag-drop wireframing (?). Anyone demo this and have opinions?

Norpath Elements Studio is a new generation, multipurpose authoring application ideal for creating a wide range of interactive solutions including learning applications, web, rich-media presentations, kiosks, and simulations.

XFMLManager is a free authoring tool for hierarchical, faceted metadata. It is not yet available. We will also host the upcoming Hierarchical Faceted Metadata Authoring Experiment.

I just started using BitArt Consulting's Cocoa Gestures Beta. Really excellent and highly configurable. The tool allows you to use gestures in any Cocoa-based OS X application. It won't work for Carbon apps like IE or Office X. It does work wonderfully well in the apps I tested it against -- Chimera and Adium. Adding gestures is simple too. You select "Cocoa Gestures..." beneath an application menu (below preferences) and add gestures by selecting menu actions and defining your gesture with your mouse. Nice. Would be even nicer if it worked with Carbon apps, which are the bulk of what I use (Entourage, Word, Photoshop, BBedit).

I wonder how many people are actually aware of and use gestures. I would guess that the number is miniscule.

I came across PocketDraw on Mike Lee's site. It's a Pocket PC application for flow charting. It looks pretty excellent. I can recall a number of times when I've sketched flow charts on napkins and scraps of paper at lunch or on the subway. Would be nice to do this on a Palm Pilot (or Handspring as my case would be). Why hasn't anyone done this for Palm yet?

Phoenix is sweet. Like Chimera, it's a pared down Mozilla with little of the bloat. You can also use gestures (look in the preferences).

Thanks, webgraphics

I created an OmniGraffle palette for creating wireframes.

Didn't feel like coughing up the dough for ConceptDraw, although it looks to be quite powerful. Cost cutting seems to be the theme song around my office these days. OmniGraffle is affordably priced and is a servicable alternative for creating user flow diagrams and wire frames on Mac OS X.