Imagine you are using a popular word processing program. The source of data is the document you are writing. The application provides a a main view of the document, and lets you edit the data. This main view is the Editor. There can be more than one Editor, for example to show two different documents, or show two different pages of the same document, but their purpose is the same: Editors show the "main view" of the data.

The Nifty applications have the same principal at heart. The application will load an assortment of data. The screen will contain one or more Editors to provide a view of the data. Figure 1. shows the Drag and Drop Display Editor developed for the MIDAS project.

Figure 1. The Drag and Drop Display, developed for the MIDAS project. This view shows two ortho-viewers with linked cursors.

As the Nifty platform expands, expect to find new Editors to handle different types of data, and to provide different ways of interacting with the data.