This week's trend in Web design is towards getting as much of a site's key info as possible onto one page while making that page as minimalist as possible (you can blame Google). This is all very well, but how do you maximise the page's information content? Well, a new chunk of open-source software is going to help a lot: it's called Jazz. If webmasters adopt it, hitting a Jazz-enabled link will let you "zoom" into it, bringing up heaps more info--and perhaps more nested links.

Jazz lets software engineers build zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) in the Java programming language. The software lets you zoom through hierarchical layers. For instance, you can quickly burrow through the layers of a map, moving from continents all the way down to tiny streets, with smooth animation and easy mouse control. Jazz was developed by Ben Bederson and his team at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), along with colleagues in the open-source community. You can now download version 1.0 of Jazz for free at www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz (but check that you have the latest release of Java and, as with all software, make sure your virus scanner is up to date). AutoBAHN, which aims to give thumbnail pictures of Web-browsing sessions, is one application that looks promising.

This will get you hooked: download for free a delightful Jazz application for children from http://www.kidpad.org/. KidPad is a story-writing tool for children that allows them to illustrate their work and develop narrative structures through the use of zooming, panning and spatial links.

HCIL has also developed the "fisheye menu", which lets users look through a long list of items, such as bookmarks (that normally would go beyond the bounds of a screen) without scrolling. Menu items get scrunched up together, but as the mouse pointer moves along the list, a few items become readable--like traversing the list with a reading lens. There's a demo at www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/fisheyemenu.