New 'Jazz' User Interface Released on July 4th

The University of Maryland and an Open Source community called 'The Jazz Band' is releasing version 1.0 of a new 'Zooming User Interface' called Jazz on July 4th. The Jazz interface, developed by Ben Bederson, director of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at Maryland, offers application designers a robust platform for interaction with large information spaces. Users and developers of all types are invited to download version 1.0 of this software from the Jazz homepage at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz. The Jazz platform is extremely flexible, with full availability of the open source code and a stable, well-documented scenegraph. Information intensive applications such as data mining or CAD (computer-aided design), can use 'Jazzy' viewers to let end-users explore their deep information spaces.

Web-based applications such as network management or B2B marketplaces can provide seamless drill-down and navigation across many categories of data. Jazz has also been engineered as an interface 'platform' that existing applications can build upon, and is as agnostic about operating systems as its parent language, Java. The open source approach closer to the user than ever before, Jazz is actively recruiting coders, users, and evangelists. Even in early pre-release form, Jazz has already attracted attention from software companies, ranging from the most innovative start-ups, to fast-growing media companies preparing for IPOs, to the largest players in the industry.