Supporting Information Awareness Using Animated Widgets

This paper describes a Tcl/Tk widget set extension that supports three animated behaviors: fading, tickering, and rolling. This extension is targeted for use in information awareness applications that monitor and communicate constantly changing information. Described is the programming interface for the widgets as well as the design decisions made in creating them and programs that use them. Introduced in the description are two new techniques called automatic markups and history-based shadowing, highlighting techniques used to identify and communicate the nature of the changes.