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Hacker News Comments on
Eagle Mode

oh417 · Youtube · 66 HN points · 3 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention oh417's video "Eagle Mode".
Youtube Summary
This is a video capture of using a software named Eagle Mode. It is a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with plugin applications like an advanced file manager, lots of file viewers, an audio and video player, some games, fractals, and more. It is free software that runs on Linux, Windows and others. You can downloaded it from http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Nov 24, 2022 · 18 points, 0 comments · submitted by ZeljkoS
I find this one particularly fascinating.

Eagle Mode (navigation through zooming) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA

Dec 30, 2018 · 48 points, 17 comments · submitted by ekianjo
math
I've been building something very similar to this ...but also quite different. The details (around usability) have proven very difficult to get right, but I'm really excited by how it's turning out. If you like the core idea as well and would be interested in taking part in a private beta, please send me an email (contact details in my profile). I expect it to be ready for others to try in maybe a few months.
flossball
Finally we can 'zoom and enhance' anything! It will be great for tv shows and movies.

Better productivity? Man my eyes die a bit each time I zoom in on EDAs. I can't imagine editing docs this way...

lioeters
I'm impressed. It's an intriguing paradigm for a navigation interface - and the implementation looks surprisingly fast. I wonder how it might work as a web browser..
dmos62
Web doesn't have a tree structure, so the idea might not transfer.
jasonjayr
Your browsing history does, though.

Imagine what kind of structure would be visualized after being lost in Wikipedia for a few hours. It'd be neat to see it clustered by time, and you can jump back and forth to different parts of your history graph.

lioeters
True, I suppose the web isn't structurally similar to a file system - at least until it gets to the website level. Maybe the navigator could show networks of nodes, grouped by themes/topics, with scaling proportional to popularity..

Interestingly, I just searched for "visualization of the world wide web", and most hits were articles from the 2000's - perhaps related to the image of "cyberspace", a term that's since fallen out of fashion.

lopatin
Web also doesn't have a linear structure, but the forward/back buttons work well enough.
Fnoord
This was first featured in Jurassic Park [1], from IRIX's FSV which is open source [2].

I'm wondering if the file permissions could be visualized better.

[1] https://mrlithium.blogspot.com/2017/07/fsv-filesystem-naviga...

[2] https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv

Aelius
I find the ZUI style navigation works particularly well for finding large files and folders- this requires weighing larger folders with a bigger size, rather than just representing each file in a static grid.

My favorite example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZvzW4eitdo

There's also baobab for Linux, but I find that less intuitive.

azinman2
ZUIs have been long tried, and long failed. It’s a fun concept but is terrible in practice. We as humans don’t enter rooms by scaling down to a door’s keyhole to then go inside... it has a giant cognitive dissonance as a metaphor and is difficult to process. It’s far better to keep things at the same scale and manipulate as such.
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I find this an interesting approach to the desktop metaphor, potentially one that can eliminate a lot of workflow issues related to the constrained screen space that I think has made spacial-oriented concepts a problematic.

I'm curious about the resource requirements and how it works with applications not in focus.

charlesdaniels
This reminds me a lot of fsn[1] (the file manager shown in Jurassic park in the classic "It's a UNIX system" scene). There is also a clone for more modern systems called fsv[2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

2 - http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

black-tea
I remember trying this back in the day. It was a lot of fun. I remember being surprised that it worked so well. Back then not everything on sourceforge worked...
afranchuk
Yeah, I remember trying it out too. I forget exactly how I stumbled upon it (serendipitously, it may have been StumbleUpon).

I also remember there being a good few little easter eggs and such scattered throughout it...

nayuki
The title needs (2011) on it.

This is similar to Microsoft's work in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKwTurQgiak

PavlovsCat
The video is older, but Eagle Mode 0.94.0 was released on the 23rd of December 2018.

http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/

Quick tip: you can zoom in on the toolbar, too (I assumed it was "made for 4k monitors" or something until I figured that out)

aasasd
Zoomable interface is an old concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

Jef Raskin was a proponent, and Aza continued his work. The Archy software implemented this along with other ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

Oct 05, 2013 · asdfs on Oberon (2009)
Eagle Mode (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA) uses the zoomable UI concept and takes it to an extreme.
X4
WOW, WOW, WOW!!!!! Thank you for posting this!!

I'm just emerging it: emerge -av x11-wm/eaglemode

itchitawa
That's how it should be! Pity it's probably actually a pain to use in real life :P
Jtsummers
That would be awesome to see on a modern tablet device. The gesture interface already exists and people are accustomed to it. It would be neat to see a demo of it at least.

Thinking about it, while not implemented for the whole experience, are there any apps that do this?

To some extent Safari on OS X does this now (since what version, I'm not sure). While you can zoom in and around a page, you can also zoom out when the page is at 100% and get a view of all the open tabs. iPad with its multitasking control is similar (swipe up with 4 fingers to see all tasks, tap on one to switch to it). A photo app would, as demonstrated, be an appropriate use, same with the calendar. Instead of having to hit buttons to move up the hierarchy allow the users to pinch-to-zoom instead.

Reminds me of EagleMode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA
hugs
Wow, I never heard of EagleMode before. I'm sad it's not more well known. That's the most complete ZUI for an OS I've seen.
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