The Slow Arrow of Beauty

Description

The Slow Arrow of Beauty opposes the usual experience of browsing the Internet page-by-page. Instead, it presents the Internet as a seething, ever-changing flux of information.

The Slow Arrow of Beauty is a Java applet which scours the Internet for *related* textual content, and presents the information in several simultaneous cascades. These cascades continually evolve through two mechanisms: firstly through the applet's own growth algorithms and secondly through user input. On its own, the applet analyzes the content as it siphons it, using various algorithms to intelligently seek related content. On top of that, the user can prod the applet into new pockets and eddies by encouraging or discouraging the Slow Arrow vectors.

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Screenshots

Download

Binary

To run the program, you must be able to execute Java applications on your machine, which means you must have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. If you don't have it, get it from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/jre/ >>. (Note to Mac users: unfortunately, this link only provides the JRE for Windows and Unix machines. You are in luck if you are running Mac OS X, which already provides the ability to run Java applications.) Then, download the following jar file containing the Java classes and supporting files.

\/ SlowArrow.jar (87KB)

At the command prompt, navigate to the directory where you downloaded SlowArrow.jar and type

java -jar SlowArrow.jar

Source

The Slow Arrow of Beauty was programmed in Java, and compiled using the IBM's JDK 1.3, though it uses the JDK 1.1 API so should compile on older JDK's. The code is distributed under the GNU General Public License >>, meaning you can freely use it and modify it, as long as you also distribute the resulting product under the same license. Note: the code contains some comments, but is otherwise undocumented. However, feel free to email me with questions and comments.

\/SlowArrow-2.2-src.jar (67KB)
\/SlowArrow-2.2-src.tar.gz (56KB)
\/SlowArrow-2.2-src.zip (67KB)

Graphs >>

Visualization of the Slow Arrow behavior.