Eidola Notation Gallery

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

Discussion

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You know, when you were talking about representation, my first thought is that this is the first language built for GibsonSpace. We need to live in a cyberpunk novel so that we can jack in and feel and taste and smell the differences between your objects. "Ah. A green peppermint sphere -- that's your problem. You should have used a red peppermint cube." A tame version of that would be to sort of take the symbols used in a flowchart and cube their complexity. Shape, dimension, and complexity would all carry meaning. All circles are submembers of this. Everything with rounded corners is related to that. Stuff like that. Do avoid encoding any essential meaning in color. Although I suppose it doesn't matter if there will be many different representations out there, as ubiquitous as Netscape skins.

In this vein, Tamas Nemeth writes:

Here are my two cents for the notation gallery. It is based on a very fascinating dream I had some time ago, but hey, you might find some useful ideas in it. After all, you asked for "fanciful interface ideas, even if they're completely off-the-wall or impossible to implement".

Believe it or not, I was coding in my dream using a new, interesting user interface. It was a cross between Hollywood special effects, Las Vegas casinos and stereotypical UFO visions. The whole app was represented by a 3D floating object, resembling a book or maybe an apple. It had a vertical axis with objects revolving around it. Some displayed 2D movies or images, others were like a storage cabinet with a dozen shelves or drawers. I could move those screens and rearrange the objects on the shelves and in the drawers. Finally, at the top, there were flashing lights that displayed warnings, status- and error messages. Of course, the whole UI spoke in English and understood English as well, besides overwhelming me with weird noises (trumpet, applause) and special effects (e.g. miniature fireworks upon successful compilation).