tecznotes

Ableton's Live music software has a great time navigation widget. It's a fairly standard interface for viewing slices of a sequenced composition, similar in spirit to Google Finance. They integrate zoom and pan into a single interface element, mapping vertical motion to zoom (up = zoom out, down = zoom in) and horizontal motion to pan left and right. The two don't occur together, so if you start moving horizontally you don't get to zoom until you make a sharp vertical motion. I suspect there's a cut-off at each 45 degree angle.

Anyway, here is a brief video showing how it works:

• Small, 2.6MB
• Actual size, 5.1MB

It's unfortunate that the mouse cursor has to disappear when dragging.