21/4615 Using Harmony
Keith Andrews
Harmony is the Hyper-G client and authoring tool for UNIX platforms under XWindows and is the most fully featured of the Hyper-G authoring tools. In this chapter we concentrate on using Harmony for searching and browsing through information on a Hyper-G server, communicating with other users and browsing resources on the wider Web. Chapter 16 describes how to install and configure Harmony and Chapter 23 discusses how to use Harmony' s extensive authoring and annotation facilities.
Figure 15.1: The Harmony client and authoring tool for Hyper-G
Figure 15.1 shows Harmony as it is typically configured. On the left-hand side is the Harmony Session Manager, the main Harmony window, which is chiefly used for navigation. On the right-hand side is the Harmony Text Viewer, the window where text documents are displayed. Here we see an anonymous user, without any special access privileges, who has entered the main collection of the IICM Information Server in Graz.
Two broad principles govern the use of the mouse in Harmony. The left mouse button is the one most generally used for navigation: single-left-clicks select things, double-left-clicks actually do things. In the document viewers, the right mouse button is often used to mark regions of interest, for example to define link anchors.
The Hyper-G server facilitates three orthogonal means of organizing information so that it is easy to find: hierarchical structures, associative hyperlinks and sophisticated search mechanisms. The Harmony client provides fully featured interfaces to each of these facilities and goes one step further: tightly coupling them to give location feedback. In addition, Harmony provides backtracking facilities and a novel three-dimensional interface to the information space.
15.10 The Harmony Information Landscape
15.1 Browsing collections, clusters and documents