About Eagle Mode

Eagle Mode is a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with file manager, file viewers, games, and more.

This project is about a futuristic style of human-computer interaction, where the user can visit almost everything simply by zooming in. It features a portable C++ programming interface for developing such ZUIs, and it features the Eagle Mode application, which provides a virtual cosmos with plugin applications.

The most important one is the professional file manager with its rich, scriptable command set. It integrates file viewers for most of the common file types, as well as an audio/video player. Furthermore, the virtual cosmos contains a chess game, a netwalk game, a 3D mines game, a multi-function clock, a stock watchlist, some fractals, and a Linux kernel configurator in form of a kernel patch.

An autoplay function allows to show or play things one ofter the other (e.g. slideshow of picture files or document pages, playing of multiple audio or video files).

The core of Eagle Mode supports fast anti-aliased graphics, virtually unlimited depth of zooming, extensive mouse and keyboard control, animated navigation with kinetic effects (inertia, friction, and magnetism), popup-zoomed control views, editable bookmarks, in-place help texts, and working with multiple windows.

Eagle Mode is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

Latest version is 0.96.2

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How useful is it?

Eagle Mode is surely at least a nice ZUI demo and fun application. But it can be more. For me, the developer, it is naturally the most efficient file manager in the world. Some users also reported great satisfaction. If you want to find out whether Eagle Mode could improve your life too, then be aware that the user interface is quite different and may be hard to learn by try and error. Better read the user documentation and the in-button help texts. Also, you may have to practice all the mouse functions for some time, before getting fast.

How stable and safe is it?

Each new release is well tested, and it is verified by a careful review of every new source code line. Some certain external libraries are only accessed through multiprocessing in a way that the stability of Eagle Mode as a whole does not depend on the stability of those libraries. None of the file manager command buttons changes the file system without popping up a window that asks something, but there is no undo function and no trash can. Archive files are not unpacked if they seem to contain absolute or up-going paths.

Why does it still have a 0.x version number?

I think, the plugin applications largely have 1.x state. It is the application programming interface (C++ API), which still requires some final work before Eagle Mode may be versioned 1.0. This should not keep anyone from already using the API, because serious source incompatibilities are really not to be expected.

You want an industrial innovation?

The Eagle Mode C++ API could be used to develop human machine interfaces (HMIs), or control stations, or similar industrial applications, as zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs). If it is well done, a ZUI in that area could be very intuitive and logical to use, and it could surely improve and accelerate the work significantly (read here why). Besides, the API would allow to make the product pretty well-structured, efficient and portable. If any company likes to take that chance, I may be able to help - contact me.

Some positive feedback from users

"Great project. Rather useful and cute."

"Man, after only five seconds of use, Eagle Mode has grown on me. Really. It's brilliant, works extremely well, and looks nicer than I expected too."

"Wow, this is really awesome man. It's a brilliant idea. In fact this is probably the coolest program I've ever used."

"It's a really nice project! Congratulation for the idea and the implementation, it's very well done."

"I was expecting an eye-candy dominated resource hog, so the sleek design and efficient implementation were a pleasant surprise. Good work!"

"Only say that is a great thing this ZUI.. I need to familiarize a little with it but I've found a very very exciting and creative way to work with files."

"I'm using eaglemode to re-organise a large archive of files. It's awesome being able to fly over a directory of files and see at a glance if there's anything there worth keeping, instead of the bazillions of mouse-clicks I'd have to do in nautilus or konqueror to achieve the same thing."

"You know what? I quit Eagle Mode and went to navigate to the build dir using Finder and the shortcuts in my dock, as I'm used to doing. I gave up and started Eagle Mode to do it instead, because it's just so much quicker and easier. I've been thinking Finder was a leap ahead of the command line I used for 13 years, especially so because Finder lets you drag and drop files & folders to file selectors or even to the terminal (it pastes the full file path), but Eagle Mode is another leap ahead again." (Finder is the file manager of Apple Mac OS-X)

Most of these statements are from the forums, where you could add your own feedback too.