Every day, the collection of pages rendered by feedabot grows larger. In fact, there are approximately 250,000 pages in the feedabot archive as of a few days ago. Using the current web-based interface to navigate through this collection (one mouse click loads six new images), it would take approximately 35 hours of nonstop clicking to view all of those pages. A choice of layout similar to the Tumblr Mosaic Viewer would certainly help matters, but only slightly. It was only a matter of time before coming to the realization that there must be a better way to navigate (and further explore) such a large collection of web pages.

At this point, we must leave the browser and head back to the desktop. Even with rich media technologies such as Flash, the browser really isn’t the best place to experiment with interfaces for quickly navigating large data sets. The desktop viewer for the feedabot archive, tentatively called the ‘feedabot viewer’, was designed to be clean, fun, and aesthetically pleasing.

Interaction with the viewer is purely mouse-based, containing no popup menus or dialog boxes. A day’s worth of feedabot-rendered pages is loaded with a flick of the horizontal scroll wheel. Navigation through the resulting set occurs through the use of the vertical scroll wheel, and the mouse cursor position is used to reveal the tweet that contained the link of the rendered page. At this point, the user may ‘select’ the page with a mouse click to extract the image resources from the page itself. The resulting images are placed on a layer in front of the view, with navigation possible through the use of the horizontal scroll wheel. When the mouse cursor position moves beyond the currently selected page, these images disappear. One can only hope that navigating the web will be this pleasant in the future.

A few more images of the viewer in action can be found on my blog, and in this Flickr set.