Reading on the Big Screen

Big displays are worthwhile because they improve the ratio of visible content to “computer stuff”.

Here is a story from Issue 114 of Hub Magazine viewed in Tofu, a little app that displays text in a side-scrolling columnar format suitable for comfortable reading. The story is The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery, by Adam Christopher. Yes, we are all dog-men.

Two pages of a document can be displayed side-by-side at life size (in other words, the image of the typical page is eleven inches tall, just as it would be if printed). This is especially useful when reading documents whose layout would require scrolling back and forth to follow the flow of text on a smaller screen.

What am I reading? The paper which introduced the collective animal behavior model presented by Iain Couzin at a recent EvoS seminar:

Couzin, I. D., Krause, J., James, R., Ruxton, G. D., & Franks, N. R. (2002). Collective Memory and Spatial Sorting in Animal Groups. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 218(1), 1-11. (PDF)

I’d like to write my own implementation of the model (or some representative subset) in Processing. I spawn a lot of eventually-neglected side projects, of course, but right now this subject has my attention.

Posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010. Tags: mac.