Shi Tenno WebCollage

In short, it's the story of a project looking for a purpose.

Shi Tenno (after the Japanese guardians of the cardinal directions) was an experimental project to make a MapQuest-like interface using collections of bitmapped images on a virtual canvas (and I was dreaming in cartesian coordinates by the end of it). It worked to a certain extent -- it didn't do zooming or recentering, but it was very capable of automatically slicing, dicing and arranging images into a snug-fitting table.

Enter a program called WebCollage, written by Jamie Zawinski as a part of XScreenSaver (a screen saver for unix). It makes pop-art collages out of images it pulls from random search engine results. There's a web version you can look at which is nice, but it's a mesmerizing screensaver.

Rather than writing those images into a single large image, wouldn't it be neat to arrange parts of those images into a table? After tweaking the image sources, you could even have javascript rollovers for certain images. Animated gifs would add even more motion, as they could remain largely intact.

That's what the Shi Tenno WebCollage is going to be.