There’s some features of new Intellipad editor from Microsoft that demonstrate custom made widgets and effects of hardware rendering, it may be interesting for Jon. First, menu bar - it’s custom-made, looks pretty and utilize less space vertically then standard one. Then, windows splitting scheme - you can split any window horizontally or vertically, creating arbitrary complex layout. There’s no way to save and then restore this layout, but surely it can and will be implemented. Second, smooth fonts resizing. I found it rather useful, and not just cool feature. If you can quickly adjust level of detail (lod) for text, you navigate faster. You can diminish text (lower left window) and have something like Sublime’ s minimap.
My thought: and one will navigate even faster, if combine this lod effect of font scaling with changing lod for document structure - something like folding, but more flexible, with several levels of detail. Like Google Earth for text document… Take HTML document, for example. From birs’d eye point of view we’ll see only (body) and (html) areas, without detail. Approaching closer to (body), we’ll see
tags , then , some
- and their contents… This is not far from zooming user interface. Maybe this could be useful. Just a thought…