The Thumbar^TM

The Thumbar is a special visualization tool, combining the typical features of a scrollbar with a contextually rich thumbnail representation of the web page you currently have loaded in your browser. The animation on the left side of your screen shows the lens moving over a thumbnail image of a web page.

Here's how it works. The Thumbar creates a thumbnail of every web page you visit. Once the thumbnail has been created, a lens is available which shows you your current location in the document. You may reposition the document by grabbing the lens and scrolling the document either upwards or downwards. You may also simply point to a location in the Thumbar and the web browser will reposition itself to that location. When used in conjunction with the topics of interest, the Thumbar shows the locations of the relevant phrases through out the document by highlighting the thumbnail in a similar fashion to how the web page is highlighted. The colors of the highlighted phrases in the Thumbar correspond to the color of the topic they are associated with.