The application was initially developed to provide a tool for debugging and testing the Catalog implementation. It also provides a testbed for rapidly implementing and evaluating new ideas before implementation in the public viewer.
MapView supports the idea of configurable skins and startup contexts. Sample skins can be downloaded from here. You will have to right-click these and use the "Save As..." option to save to your local file system. Use the "Skin-Open Skin" pulldown menu to load the saved skin. Sample context documents may be downloaded from here. Use the "File-Open Map" pulldown menu option to load these context documents.