mike laurence

Lately I've been exploring both the gimmicky and functional sides of JS, both at my job and in my many assorted Rails projects. I've worked extensively with a commercial drag-and-drop tree library and hunted down countless other data browsing tools, but I've always turned up short of exactly what I needed - essentially, a lightweight tool that could peruse the kids of deep object relationships you get by performing good database normalization. Trees are useful, but they almost always focus on IDs and generally require you to conform to some irritating XML schema for data delivery.

As I continued to develop on my (relatively) new Mac, I found myself using the column view in finder almost exclusively - and suddenly it dawned on me that such a view could do equal justice to arbitrary data sets as it could to my file system. Thus, I began work on what I dubbed the Multi Viewer Trary; originally just a proof of concept, I've now decided that it could be quite useful, thus prompting its evolution into an Official Project.



There is still a laundry list of improvements to make before it's truly distribution-ready, but you're welcome to check it out, look at the code, and offer suggestions. I know what *I* want it to do, but I bet there are a whole bunch of similarly tree-hating (er, tree-view-adverse) fellows out there who are clamoring for some Mac-inspired interface goodness in their web applications.