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Author Topic: Miller Columns / Cascading Lists control  (Read 1328 times)

jouborg

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Miller Columns / Cascading Lists control
« on: December 26, 2020, 08:38:42 pm »
Has anyone implemented a component for showing data (trees) in Miller Columns?

It is common in mobile apps (though, there you typically only see one "column/level" at a time) and historically in some file browsers (like on macOS) or in Smalltalk.

FWIW, I became a fan of this visualization technique after reading the papers: Applying mSpace interfaces to the Semantic Web (though I don't do anything "semantic web" related),  The Evolving mSpace Platform, and A Comparison of Hyperstructures: Zzstructures, mSpaces, and Polyarchies.
The authors of these papers also created a (now-defunct) demo at https://mspace.fm but you can see screenshots of the UI in the aforementioned papers.

Googling, I could find one commercial solution that is Delphi/Pascal compatible but it doesn't work for me ($$, Windows).

I can cobble something together for my use case but thought I'd first check in case someone has already done the work.
« Last Edit: December 26, 2020, 08:44:28 pm by jouborg »

MarkMLl

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Re: Miller Columns / Cascading Lists control
« Reply #1 on: December 26, 2020, 08:49:45 pm »
The visual appearance reminded me immediately of Smalltalk... where it is, of course, much more than a /file/ browser.

MarkMLl
MT+86 & Turbo Pascal v1 on CCP/M-86, multitasking with LAN & graphics in 128Kb.
Pet hate: people who boast about the size and sophistication of their computer.
GitHub repositories: https://github.com/MarkMLl?tab=repositories

marcov

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Re: Miller Columns / Cascading Lists control
« Reply #2 on: December 26, 2020, 11:08:44 pm »
Me from Windowmaker, but that is of course a NextStep derivate.  To be honest, I didn't find them very useful, but maybe they were too primitive.

MarkMLl

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Re: Miller Columns / Cascading Lists control
« Reply #3 on: February 09, 2021, 08:36:39 pm »
The visual appearance reminded me immediately of Smalltalk... where it is, of course, much more than a /file/ browser.

As an aside, I've just come across https://github.com/PierceNg/pharo-vm-embedded-pascal for embedding a Smalltalk implementation in a Pascal program. I've not yet attempted to investigate to what extent the languages can interact.

MarkMLl
MT+86 & Turbo Pascal v1 on CCP/M-86, multitasking with LAN & graphics in 128Kb.
Pet hate: people who boast about the size and sophistication of their computer.
GitHub repositories: https://github.com/MarkMLl?tab=repositories

winni

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Re: Miller Columns / Cascading Lists control
« Reply #4 on: February 09, 2021, 11:06:29 pm »
Hi!

AFAIR there was an implementation in Delphi 1.

They abolished a lot of "toy" stuff in Delphi 2 like the
"speedometer gauge" and perhaps also the Miller Columns.

Winni
« Last Edit: February 09, 2021, 11:11:46 pm by winni »

 

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