Eidola Notation Gallery

Notation Gallery
Notations and Visualizations
User Interface Philosophy
User Interfaces of Note
Existing Visualizations of Programs
Possible Eidola Notations

Discussion

Eidola home
 

  Exhibits
Notations and Visualizations
How do humans represent and communicate abstract ideas? How does conceptual structure translate to visual structure? What are some good examples of things that represent information well?
User Interface Philosophy
What makes a good user interface? What's the right methodology for designing user interfaces? How do the answers to these questions differ for different kinds of software and audiences?
User Interfaces of Note
What are some examples of particularly excellent user interfaces? What clever features or creative new ideas from other software should Eidola consider? Are there other programs with good interfaces which work with structures found in Eidola (trees, graphs, logical flow, etc.)?
Existing Visualizations of Programs
How are existing design and development tools representing code? How do purely visual languages approach the problem? How do programmers visualize programs when not bound to any particular tool?
Possible Eidola Notations
What are some notations ideas we should implement for Eidola? How can we focus on high-level structure? Low-level? Design? Development? Each of the many dimensions of program structure? And how can we make an intuitive, efficient user interface for editing something so complex?
 
  Uncle Paul Wants You!
Yes, the gallery depends on creative folks such as you sending me your ideas! The sorts of things I'm looking for are:

  • Programs with user interface features you particularly like. Send: a screen shot and a brief description of the feature and why you like it.

  • Fanciful interface ideas, even if they're completely off-the-wall or impossible to implement. Send: sketches, screen shot mock-ups, concise descriptions.

  • Programming tools that present code in nice ways -- design tools, IDEs, code browsers, particularly nice syntax coloring...whatever. Send: screen shots, names of products, links to products' sites.

  • Philosophies of interface design. Send: treatises, links, book references.

  • Examples of particularly excellent graphic design or presentation of highly structured information. Send: scans/screen shots where possible, links to sites, references to books or articles.

In all these cases, it's by far the best to send a concrete image for people to look at. Descriptions and references are great, but in this case, a picture is far more effective. If you can't produce an actual image of the thing you're submitting in action, do a sketch by hand and scan it in. Even this will do wonders to help communicate your idea on the site.

I look forward to your submissions!

 
Copyright 2001 Paul Cantrell