ZDesktop

ZDesktop is a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) concept developed in collaboration with STMicroelectronics and presented as my B.Sc. thesis in September 2008.

The idea is straightforward: instead of browsing your file system through nested windows or a tree, ZDesktop maps your hard drive onto an infinite canvas — like Google Maps, but for files and directories. Navigation is purely spatial:

• Pan — scroll around to explore what’s nearby;
• Zoom in — enter a directory and inspect its contents up close;
• Zoom out — step back to see the parent container and its siblings.

ZDesktop is written in Java and built on the Piccolo toolkit from the University of Maryland’s Human–Computer Interaction Lab.

Source code is available in the ZDesktop repository on GitHub.

Note: This is an archived academic project from 2008. The external project site and the Piccolo toolkit homepage are no longer actively maintained.