This homework will familiarize you the panning/zooming information visualization model embodied by the Pad++ and Jazz systems. The goal of the assignment is to have you utilize and build an information display in this paradigm, thereby assisting you to better understand its capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

The assignment has three parts:

1. Gain familiarity
Either download for your PC or use the Sun workstations to run the HiNote demonstration application that comes with the Jazz system. Walk through the tutorial and learn about the application, its interfaces and its capabilities.

2. Design a timeline-based information space on some particular topic.
Utilize the HiNote application to design an information space that consists of a timeline (from afar) and that has some details for specific dates. Your information space should include both text and graphical images. I'm not looking for anything incredibly extensive here---just enough to give you a feel for working in this paradigm. What does it allow you to do that you would not be able to otherwise? How would the user/viewer of your space navigate around and learn from it?

3. Write a report on your experiences
Write a 1-2 page report that crititques the zooming paradigm for information spaces. Discuss what it was like working with the jazz tool. What was easy and what was challenging? What did you like and dislike? Were there capabilities that you would like to have added to the system? Try not to focus on the this particular UI or piece of software. Focus more on the spirit of the paradigm. Include a picture or two of the timeline information space that you create to help explain things. Turn in one hardcopy of your report.

Working with jazz and HiNote: If you have a Windows PC, you can download jazz from www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz. You probably want to download the Jazz-1.2 compiled source. You will also need to have java on your machine, if you do not already. Actually, you just need the Java 2 runtime environment which can be loaded from www.javasoft.com/j2se. If you want all of Java, go to java.sun.com.

If you do not have a PC or just don't want to deal with these downloads, you can run HiNote on our Sun workstations. The files live in /usr/local/public/share/jazz/jazz-1.2. To run HiNote, change to the build subdirectory and run java -jar hinote.jar. You can run the tutorial by opening the file ../demo/hinote/resources/using.jazz. Note that you will not be able to save your timeline file in these directories as you don't own them. Save it in your home directory or somewhere else that you own.

If this is all way too confusing for you and you aren't a CS weenie, talk to James and he will help you get set up. Please don't wait until shortly before the assignment is due, however.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Ben Bederson at the University of Maryland for assisting with Jazz.