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http://www.jefraskin.com/

...the names of the design team, except Jef Raskin.

by Jef Raskin

http://www.jefraskin.com/forjef/jefweb-compiled/hu maneinterface/

It's a book that can help you look at interfaces in a different way, with some measures you can make, and some guidelines that an be helpful. Maybe going all the way is not feasible immediately, but it can gie some insight on the subject.

They didn't even get rid of the !@#$% caps lock. It's a cording keyboard any you can't expect the user to hold the shift key for caps? How about they add a shift lock for every shift key that they have on there? Jef Raskin has some good things to say about mode buttons like the caps lock.

...but let's remember that he opposed the use of GUIs

Whatever gave you that idea? According to his book and Jef's own website he was one of the early spokesmen of WYSIWYG. He even invented drag'n'drop - building on other's design ideas.

What he IS opposing is the way current GUIs use the mouse and modes - even alot of his own designs from the time when he was working for Apple.

Planes do NOT go 'up' because of low pressure above the wing. Otherwise, how would they fly upside down? An entertaining explanation is found at http://www.jefraskin.com/forjef2/jefweb-compiled/p ublished/coanda_effect.html

I contacted John Markoff when I saw the fine NYT article on the history of the Alto that has been discussed here by Lopez, Thain, and Horn. I've known Markoff for years, and he is one of the best and most knowledgeable writers about the personal computer era.

My comment to Markoff was that his wording would lead a reader to conclude that Jobs got the inspiration for the Lisa and Mac on a visit to PARC, came back after that, and created the computers. That is the standard mythology, and it's wrong. I hate to see it promulgated, and certainly the word "after" is simply incorrect.

More accurate would have been "In many ways, the Alto served as an inspiration in the development of Apple's Lisa and Macintosh computers, which in turn inspired the Windows operating system."

Markoff agreed, and said, "I'll save this and do it that way next time."

Aside from this one error, I share with Horn the opinion that the article was excellent and accurate.

I do consider the Alto and lots of other work at PARC to have helped inspire many aspects of the Macintosh. Other inspirations came from great pioneers such as Englebart, Shannon, and Sutherland. As Bruce Horn noted, much that was new and improved over what PARC had done was created at Apple. He contributed to some of it. I will forever be proud that I created the Mac project itself, changed the Lisa architecture to a bit-mapped display from its original hardware-character-generator design, and invented interface widgets which are now so universal that they are considered as natural as breathing.

As was pointed out by Lopez, I had already come to the concept of interface-first, graphics-based computing before PARC was even started (I published my thoughts in 1967, PARC began in 1972), so it is clear that not all the inspiration for the Mac originated with PARC. I participated in many discussions at PARC from 1973 to 1978, and a few of my ideas found their way into the work there. (Many of us from Stanford's AI lab, where I was a visiting scholar, were frequent visitors to PARC, and vice versa. I have rarely seen the AI lab credited with the contributions it made to PARC's thinking). Some precise and documented details of how the PARC interfaces differed from the Mac's are in available in an appendix to my book, "The Humane Interface" (Addison-Wesley 2000). An independent source and timeline for this period is in Linzmayer, Owen, "Apple Confidential". For those who want to see for themselves, Stanford University's History of Technology project has a website with many original Mac documents, some from before the infamous visit, and more information appears on my site, www.jefraskin.com, including reprints of early Mac and Apple documents.

I thank Mr. Lopez and Mr. Thain for sticking up for me, and I must chide Mr. Horn for crediting me with "helping to bring the vision of the graphical user interface back [from PARC] to Apple." As noted above, and as he should know by now (I have long since informed him), the chronology proves that I had the vision before there was a PARC.

It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit. For one thing the usual account (as in Levy's book, "Insanely Great" and others) denigrates the original and creative work done by all the Apple employees that put their hearts into the Mac.

David Gerlernter also has some ideas about changing the UI based on timelines and visual representation.

As far as your wish about things staying open between powerdown and booting again - I'm not sure whether or not Apple's new user switching persists during shut down, but I think it may (have to go back and read up).

Finally, if you're looking for way-new interfaces, nooface blogs new and upcoming UI projects.

"what does this say?"

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Finally someone gets it....

Flight is caused by air being pushed down and the airplane goes in the opposite direction - up. This is the Coanda effect - and it is also the reason sailboats sail. As a long time sailor I know from experience.

This website has it all in full.

http://www.jefraskin.com/forjef2/jefweb-compiled/p ublished/coanda_effect.html

This notes the following: -

While Bernoulli's equations are correct, their proper application to aerodynamic lift proceeds quite differently than the common explanation.

That said - it should be noted that this submarine DOES fly like an airplane - by using plane to deflect the water like a wing. Given than water is incompressible the Bernoulli effect can not apply.

Cool machine - I want one.

Jef Raskin, in his book "The Humane Interface" provides an answer to the username/password problem.

Firstly, no username. People know their own name better than any other word. Trying to give them another one is an exercise in futility. Usernames are frequently very easily guessable, and if all the system's passwords are unique, unnecessary.

Passwords should be system assigned, firstly to ensure uniqueness, and secondly to make damn sure that they are from an appropriately large set of possibilities. This particular set, which is quite easy for people to remember but incredibly large is the combination of 3 randomly selected nouns. For example BeachballTruckWaterpipe

The set of possiblities is vast. almost certainly larger than the set of all 8 character alpha-numeric strings, for example. It's not hard for a person to memorise something like this, so they won't have to write it down.

even people who have spent their life trying to design the best user interfaces have made mistakes too. take a look at jef raskin's (designer of the mac interface) canon cat as an example. :)

Jef Raskin (of MacIntosh and "The Humane Interface" fame) wrote a detailed essay about this. He seems to be a model airplane enthusiast.

As a professional in the field, I feel qualified to say that everything that comes from the Mouth of Raskin should be consumed with a liberal serving of NaCl. The field of HCI moves as fast (some would even say faster) than the technology it works with. Anyone whose major claims to fame are the original Macintosh (~18 years old) and the Canon Cat (~15 years old) is only showing his distance from the bleeding edge.

During the summer of 2001 I was unfortunate enough to attend a Humane Interface workshop led by Mr. Raskin. The day long session served only to show how out of touch he truly has become, acting more as a soapbox for venting about his importance to the HCI world than as a platform for teaching. He frequently contradicted his own book (a copy was provided for each table), strayed from his own agenda which he had liberally changed from the published one, and told un-interesting stories about his major innovations from fifteen years ago. The only worthwhile part of the day was to hear the one-mouse-button justification from the mouth of the man who originally created it. A significant number of attendees (myself included) asked for and were granted a full refund of the CDN$150 fee due to the poor quality of the session.

As a professional in the field, I feel qualified to say that everything that comes from the Mouth of Raskin should be consumed with a liberal serving of NaCl. The field of HCI moves as fast (some would even say faster) than the technology it works with. Anyone whose major claims to fame are the original Macintosh (~18 years old) and the Canon Cat (~15 years old) is only showing his distance from the bleeding edge.

During the summer of 2001 I was unfortunate enough to attend a Humane Interface workshop led by Mr. Raskin. The day long session served only to show how out of touch he truly has become, acting more as a soapbox for venting about his importance to the HCI world than as a platform for teaching. He frequently contradicted his own book (a copy was provided for each table), strayed from his own agenda which he had liberally changed from the published one, and told un-interesting stories about his major innovations from fifteen years ago. The only worthwhile part of the day was to hear the one-mouse-button justification from the mouth of the man who originally created it. A significant number of attendees (myself included) asked for and were granted a full refund of the CDN$150 fee due to the poor quality of the session.

I agree with the comments about not making it "cultural;" let the kids figure out how to ask what life's like for the other kids, if they want- don't force it on them, or you'll only reinforce stereotypes.

More importantly, in designing the overall setup for the PDA (or whatever the heck you're using), please do some real UI (interaction) research. With only 2 days, you'll want a *very* consistent system that'll be easy for everyone to acquire.

Kids acclimate faster than adults, so don't sweat too much familiarity- just keep it simple and consistent enough that it needs little introduction.

Jef Raskin's book would be a good place to start- many of the concepts feel "weird" to a geek, as the go against the grain of our familiarity, but they've been lab-tested on the uninitiated. Still, Raskin *is* a believer in training-before-use (one of the reasons I like him), so a guy like Tog might have more to say about rapidly-acquirable designs. I don't think kids have that much trouble with acquisition, though- plenty of them could pick up the Apple II or C64 in its day, and you'll lose a lot from over-cutifying the project. (Still, you do need to cater equally to female modes of interaction, something that hasn't been done in the past, and I'm not sure what the current opinion is there- girls are said to be more/less visual or verbal than boys..?)

In fact, that last point might be an interesting point of research- divvy up each national group into a few sets, and try, say, 4-5 different interaction models, pooling the results to see what the best 'internationalized' design might be..

I don't buy the argument that Linux has come a very long way in a short amount of time. Well, I am impressed by development speed, but frankly I am a bit distressed by the apparent lack of originality in the Open Source community.

KDE and Gnome are based on the same ideas as Windows and MacOS. Ideas that took a long time to develop - coding them is, apparently, much easier. The same metaphors, the same look-and-feel. User interface design has come a very long way since 1984, but there is an overwhelming paucity of applications.

The arguments for Gnome and KDE are that people want to use metaphors that are familiar, and that's true, but this argument is misunderstood. The metaphors don't need to be familiar from other desktop user interfaces, they can be familiar from any aspect of the user's life!

As an example, in The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin describes a topological user interface where documents and applications are arranged topologically as "cities" and "villages" on a desktop. The user can surf the desktop looking for the right "pile" or "town", zoom in to view details, zoom out to get an overview. This desktop uses recent insights from the behavioral sciences (to be honest to both Raskin and myself, Raskin uses cognitive metaphors, but I am not a cognitive psychologist). This is just one example.

I have earlier defended Alan Cooper's right to his patent on one-click shopping, arguing that even if it is easy to implement, it must have been incredibly difficult to invent or even have somebody code. The same thing shows up, I believe, in Linux - good, new ideas are hard to come by! I was very disappointed by Eazel and Nautilus, for one thing - it was hailed as something new and exciting, but in reality this was just the same old story - twenty year old ideas, just a bit better-looking than the competition.

In order for MacOS X to "win", it's got to beat the Intel platform, which it won't. So Linux still has the chance to win on the most popular platform. But frankly, when I buy my next computer, I'd rather have Mac with OS X than a PC with Linux, unless Linux can be made to come with something that's obviously better than the current metaphor. I can't see how Linux can win the desktops unless the Linux GUI designers make some truly radical moves.

I see a lot of competence on coding there, but it seems that the Open Source community does not appreciate how difficult and competence-demanding it is to innovate in human interface design. Those who have the competence too often are in no position to contribute for free, spending all their time raising families and working. As sort of a piece of advice to Open Source GUI designers, I suggest you drop your coding for a while and read

• Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things
• Ben Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface
• Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum
• Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface

If you are familiar with these books and can recommend others in a similar vein, please do tell me!

Re: text only interfaces - you should read Raskin's book. He describes the interface and the experiments they performed using it. It was quite eye opening for me. BTW, why do you think that Emacs still has such a large following - after all it's just a text interface. Check Raskin's pages out.

...richie

P.S. My notebooks are just piled up on my desk in time order (most recent on top). :-)

Maybe you just want to read Jef Raskin's "the humane interface"?

In 1969, Raskin wrote a paper called "The Quick Draw Graphics System," or something like that. His argument was that processing power should be devoted to aiding the user, by drawing graphics to present an interface.

That was pretty unthinkable at the time. Parc hadn't been founded yet, and for those who don't know, it was Raskin who started the Macintosh project at Apple, before they ever went to Xerox.

Historians take a look at the past from primary documents. News reporters don't, and there are a lot of false truths out there, like "Xerox invented the GUI, and Apple took it and popularized it." Don't believe it's true unless if you hear it from the horse's mouth.

He helped change the course of computing. He doesn't feel Apple's doing that anymore (and they're not, they're just helping it evolve).

Still, I think he wants Apple to do too much too fast. Apple could have made landmark changes with Mac OS X's interface, but who would have wanted to use it? If it can't run Office, people won't buy it.

At this point, Apple's best off bringing change in bits and pieces, because Mac OS users are already freaking out with the changes in OS X.

...Steve Jobs would have to be forced to kiss a bronzed casting of Jef Raskin's arse every morning before he sat down to work at Apple.

I'm sure Jobs has by this point convinced himself that Macintosh was ultimately his baby, conveniently forgetting that his REAL baby (figuratively, and I guess literally) was LISA- the $10,000, 50lb. landfill-fodder version of Raskin's stripped down, lighter-weight and affordable Macintosh.

Forgetting that Raskin was the one who convinced him, post PARC visit, that the Graphical User Interface was the key to making computers easy for the layperson to use.

Of all the faces deserving to be celebrated in Apple's "Think Different" campaign of a couple years back, Raskin should've been tops. (Jobs' idea of thinking different is paying himself $1 in annual salary while taking hundreds of millions in stock options and a $90M GulfStream Jet as compensation... Trés different!) If Raskin hadn't convinced Jobs to "Think Different" about Apple's computers, Bill Gates' would have ended up dictating the future of computing, interfaces, and standards...

(wait a minute...)



Screw that. While it would be tempting to end this post with a sardonic quip, I just can't let myself.

It kills me every bloody time I have to see Steve Jobs in the lotus position, levitating across the covers of Fortune or Forbes, letting reporters and historians heap-big-praise on his vain, lucky ass as they mismember history and misinform the population at large about the history of computing. Surely when Jobs dies, those in charge of his estate will have hundreds of millions of dollars they can appropriate to the ongoing perpetuation of false history- while Raskin will end up downgraded, trivialized and ultimately consigned to Tesla's fate of historical irrelevance.

It has to be this way of course, because that is the way that things work- history is written by the winners...

But The Truth Is Out There. Read it.

Perhaps the most important point is that most of what we do with computers are basically text-based applications.

GUI interfaces are becoming VERY, VERY "cognitively intensive

If people weren't good at finding tiny things in long lists, the Wall Street Journal would have gone out of business years ago. Would you rather have the stocks listed fifteen to a page, each page decorated like a modern GUI screen

Here's the kind of idea that would break Gnome, or KDE away from the GUI pack (again, from JR's site):

So we stored an image of the screen on disk so that when you turned on the Cat, that image promptly came up, which took less than a second. I knew from published experimental results that a person typically takes at least eight seconds to re-engage their thinking when coming into a new environment (e.g. moving from talking to a co-worker to using their computer). People stare at the screen for a few seconds, oblivious to time passing, regaining context. By the time they started working, the Cat screen was real (the only visual change was that the cursor started blinking).

In case they started typing before the screen was ready, we captured the keystrokes which all popped into the cursor location at once when the screen went live. In practice (and we did a lot of user observation to find this out) this almost never happened. When it did it did not unduly upset users. In any case, it was a LOT better than having to wait a minute or two as with PCs and Macs.

It would be possible, on today's computers, to quickly load a small routine to capture and display keystrokes so that you could sort-of get started or at least capture an idea while the rest of the system drifted in. Then you could paste what you've done where it belongs. But nobody seems to care. More's the pity.

I heartily recommend this book. Jef Raskin is a highly misunderstood HCI expert. I say that because about 6 months ago he got a lot of flames for criticizing Apple for continuing to make the mistakes which he preaches against inherent in the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface. Raskin himself replied and tried to explain some things. He said that to understand him you had to read his book.
I bought the book soon after that, and as I read it, I was blown away. Sometimes when you read a book, it just gets into your head and it's all you can think about. That's how it was for me.
Unfortunately, although it describes many of the principles by which a Humane interface should be designed, there is not a design for a specific kind of interface. Perhaps it's because there is no one single right way to make an interface, but there are many wrong ways. Software producers continue to make the same mistakes about what they think is user-friendly (yes, including GNOME and KDE by following the WIMP example), but Raskin shows that many of the usual assumptions are wrong (pretty much everything we currently understand about user interfaces, e.g. "icons are user friendly").
After reading it, I felt that if I followed the principles of the book, I too could design a radically different yet vastly improved system for beginners and experts alike. I emailed Raskin with my thoughts. The response to the possibility that I could program such a thing was (paraphrased) "You will need a spec, which I am still working on."
I suppose I am still interested in making an interface with the principles outlined in the book, but I think it would require as much work as a GNOME or KDE project (including applications), perhaps even an entire new operating system, depending on how far you wanted to take it.

Jef Raskin's homepage is here. Be sure to check out the summary of The Humane Interface at least, if you aren't going to read the book.

I heartily recommend this book. Jef Raskin is a highly misunderstood HCI expert. I say that because about 6 months ago he got a lot of flames for criticizing Apple for continuing to make the mistakes which he preaches against inherent in the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface. Raskin himself replied and tried to explain some things. He said that to understand him you had to read his book.
I bought the book soon after that, and as I read it, I was blown away. Sometimes when you read a book, it just gets into your head and it's all you can think about. That's how it was for me.
Unfortunately, although it describes many of the principles by which a Humane interface should be designed, there is not a design for a specific kind of interface. Perhaps it's because there is no one single right way to make an interface, but there are many wrong ways. Software producers continue to make the same mistakes about what they think is user-friendly (yes, including GNOME and KDE by following the WIMP example), but Raskin shows that many of the usual assumptions are wrong (pretty much everything we currently understand about user interfaces, e.g. "icons are user friendly").
After reading it, I felt that if I followed the principles of the book, I too could design a radically different yet vastly improved system for beginners and experts alike. I emailed Raskin with my thoughts. The response to the possibility that I could program such a thing was (paraphrased) "You will need a spec, which I am still working on."
I suppose I am still interested in making an interface with the principles outlined in the book, but I think it would require as much work as a GNOME or KDE project (including applications), perhaps even an entire new operating system, depending on how far you wanted to take it.

Jef Raskin's homepage is here. Be sure to check out the summary of The Humane Interface at least, if you aren't going to read the book.

apologies. It's Jef Raskin www.jefraskin.com, not with double-f!!
--

Fascinating read.. correct link is here too btw (one above had a space in it, that I didn't notice immediately).

It certainly is a reminder of the holes in the world's defense systems. Once you think you've handled a particular threat, another one you never even thought of comes to be your biggest problem.

--
Delphis

It is even not sure who invented the Macintosh, perhaps it was Jef Raskin perhaps some others (even Jobs) had a good idea or two during its development too.

It's amazing that with all the people involved in these inventions still alive today, nobody quite agrees on who invented what.

Jef Raskin is certainly not amused. While I can't judge if he was the true father of the mac, his saying that the truth was far less sexy than the common myth (he a former professor in contrast to some dropped out students) seems reasonable to me. Raskin had the necessary background, and it is more probable to me that the mac was no accident but the result of a longer line of thought.

It's another matter trying to figure out who invented the first computer.

Sure, Konrad Zuse together with his Plankalkül language.

By the way - that teacher has to tell, that one of the first higher languages, COBOL, was invented by a woman, Admiral Grace Hopper.

Hi. Every since that article that was put up a couple days ago about Jef Raskin's ideas put forth about user interfaces, I've been fascinated with the notion of creating a new kind of user interface. I picked up the book "The Humane Interface" by Raskin, and it reall "blew my mind" so to speak. I'm surprised that noone on advogato or slashdot has mentioned his amazing work. I think a lot of what he has to say can apply to these questions.

If everything he suggests is implemented, the system would not be any operating system that we know of. I've been thinking it would be cool to start a project that would probably be a competitor to gnome and kde, because it could be that they are going down the wrong track by copying the windows/mac style interface. In fact, I would say those interfaces are a disaster. (Read the book, you will see what I mean.)

The question then becomes, do I try to make it mix in with unix so that you can run it as a GUI for unix, or should it be its own environment altogether (with Raskin, there is no such thing as a file. In unix, "everything is a file.") If so, should I build it to run on top of unix or should I just start with some microkernel and ditch unix altogether. If I used unix, should I code it for x, berline, or a generic frame buffer? What language should I use (i'm leaning towards C++), and if I embed a language in the environment, what language should I use (perhaps python, or perhaps "any language" would be better (like scripts in unix can be)).

Then there are all the design decisions for the system itself. After all I'm "not a user interface expert" as Raskin would point out to me I'm sure. :)

I would love to talk to anyone who has read Raskin and knows what I'm talking about. :)

There's a summary of the book here, but it doesn't do the book justice IMHO. (The book has more time to explain what it means. (If you read it and think "huh?"))
http://www.jefraskin.com/summary_of_thi.html

I was looking at sourceforge and doing searches on the web. I can't find anyone doing any work on this concept...

I've read Raskin's latest book - The Humane Interface. He's very idealistic. For example, the user interface of which he seems most proud is for a product called the Cannon Cat, which applies many of the principles to which the osOpinion piece alludes. But I bet you've never heard of the Cannon Cat and certainly no one other than Raskin himself has cited it recently as the epitome of consumer-grade user interface design.

Much of what Raskin has to say is intriguing - even practical, but for the work-a-day UI designer a lot of it is equally useless. For example, he talks about adding "Jump" and other specialized keys to the standard keyboard and throwing out file systems in favor of one really big file in which documents are delimited by special document characters (similar to the way that lines in text files are delimited by \n). Visionary and provocative stuff, but pretty much without value if your goal is to allow someone to read and compose email messages comfortably on a web page or a cell phone.

Raskin has clearly worked ahead of his time (and the Cannon Cat is actually a good, albeit historical, demonstration of the man working his magic), but he's too willing to ignore the inertia that applies to society, economics and technology. He's a great what-if thinker (e.g., What if Apple could afford to make its applications completely incompatible with the rest of the coomputing world?); if you read his website, it's even clear that he's a great how-to guy. Unfortunately, I'd take any "throwback" comments with a grain of salt.

Basically he is saying that we need console type systems that come pre-configured and are controlled by the company that sold you the thing.

No, he's not really saying that at all. Raskin goes into quite a bit of detail about his vision in his book, The Humane Interface , and it doesn't involve most of the things people are attributing to him in this thread. It's not about locking people into one application provider, or even eliminating menus, or not having what I would call an OS (controlling devices, managing resources, etc.) It just doesn't look like what we often think of as an OS. There's a summary of the book on the site. Read it, then shoot your mouth off.

I'm not sure I agree with him entirely, but the book is interesting reading and does bear some thought, and it's clear he's no "bozo".

Basically he is saying that we need console type systems that come pre-configured and are controlled by the company that sold you the thing.

No, he's not really saying that at all. Raskin goes into quite a bit of detail about his vision in his book, The Humane Interface , and it doesn't involve most of the things people are attributing to him in this thread. It's not about locking people into one application provider, or even eliminating menus, or not having what I would call an OS (controlling devices, managing resources, etc.) It just doesn't look like what we often think of as an OS. There's a summary of the book on the site. Read it, then shoot your mouth off.

I'm not sure I agree with him entirely, but the book is interesting reading and does bear some thought, and it's clear he's no "bozo".

.... to get this stuff from the source (more or less), instead of from some rambling osOpinions editorial. ;-)

jefraskin.com

http://www.jefraski n.com/widgets_of_the_week.html#anchor2011498

In The Humane Interface, he notes not only the reasons, but notes an oversight on his part which would have made a multi-button mouse reasonable.

Jef Raskin's account of his dealings with you indicate the latter.

Some of the subjects will ring like a bell to a lot of geeks around here. The way he lays it out is very lego-like (block by block). One of the best parts is the exploration of measuring the acutal ''efficiency'' of an interface -- finally you can say to the ''designer'' that there is more to UI design than ''personal taste'', rather you can determine the actual ''information efficiency'' of an UI. Works great in meetings and makes you seem like a rocket scientist!

Check it out:
http://www.jefraskin.com/
Summary of The Humane Interface Part I: PROBLEMS WITH THE GUIs WE HAVE Part II: WHAT INTERFACES SHOULD HAVE

TOC Highlights: Chapter Two: Cognetics and the Locus of Attention
2-1 Ergonomics and Cognetics: What We Can and Cannot Do
2-2 Cognitive Conscious and Cognitive Unconscious
2-3 Locus of Attention
2-3-1 Formation of Habits
2-3-2 Execution of Simultaneous Tasks
2-3-3 Singularity of the Locus of Attention
2-3-4 Origins of the Locus of Attention
2-3-5 Exploitation of the Single Locus of Attention
2-3-6 Resumption of Interrupted Work


Chapter Four: Quantification
4-1 Quantitative Analyses of Interfaces
4-2 GOMS Keystroke-Level Model
4-2-1 Interface Timings
4-2-2 GOMS Calculations
4-2-3 GOMS Calculation Examples
4-3 Measurement of Interface Efficiency
4-3-1 Efficiency of Hal's Interfaces
4-3-2 Other Solutions for Hal's Interface
4-4 Fitts' Law and Hick's Law
4-4-1 Fitts' Law
4-4-2 Hick's Law

The first is Lifestreams, a file management concept created by David Gelernter, one of the Unabomber's better known victims. Lifestreams abandons hierarchical file systems entirely (from the user's perspective, anyway) in favor of a timeline, robust search capabilities, and saved searches. For more info on Lifestreams (and some of the weird commercial products that have arisen from it), check Gelernter's company Mirror Worlds. Current GUIs have taken baby steps toward this concept - you can save Sherlock searches in MacOS and use them the same way you would a folder, and BeOS has powerful queries. But neither system has had the guts to encourage users to rely on them.

The second is a system created by Jef Raskin, one of the principal inventors of the Macintosh. Raskin's system essentially had no file system interface. You turned it on by beginning to type a sentence; booting was instant, and your sentence appeared on screen, from the very first keystroke. If you needed some graphics, you went and got a graphics tool and started drawing on screen. If you neede to work on some old file, you had the system search for it. In ways, it was a lot lke Apple's aborted OpenDoc paradigm, but made more effective by building a computer around it from first principles, rather than shoehorning it into an existing PC system. Raskin's system eventually became the Canon Cat, an emasculated commercial failure that Canon bundled with a daisy wheel printer and sold as a secretarial aid. I looked around for nice links on the Cat but didn't find much; you can always try Jef Raskin's site.

Xerox was paid by Apple in the form of stock options for what Apple gained by visiting their office.

Here's an account by Jef Raskin, one of the original Mac developers (much of the Mac's concepts came from his research from much earlier).

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)