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Comparing this to "Launchy" is pretty silly. Recognize this for what it is, the first steps of a new wave of Interface Design brought about by Interface Engineering.
Ubiquity's pedigree is MUCH older, going all the way back to the Canon Cat and the late Jef Raskin's idea of The Humane Interface, this being a subset closer related to The Humane Editor and Aza Raskin's Enso.
The Humane Interface is, in fact, an entire rethinking of human computer interaction, restructured around what Cognitive Science has to say about human mental capabilities instead of a strange, cobbled together desktop metaphor and separate applications.

As I'm reading the descriptions and seeing it on YouTube, I'm thinking I've SEEN something like this before.
And I finally remembered; Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface".
Zooming demo from several years ago that runs in Flash here.

Quite similar, IMHO. Hmm?

the Lisa (with its "borrowed" GUI design courtesy of Xerox labs)

No.

Apple licensed some concepts from Xerox and greatly developed others. Jef Raskin was an Apple employee who, more than just about anyone, developed the GUI concept from the ground up.

Have you ever seen a Xerox GUI in action? It's not pretty and it's barely usable. Apple brought a lot to that metaphor but they'd already done a lot of work on the Mac and GUI. For some reason people like yourself either don't know that or forget it, preferring to believe that the Mac GUI sprang fully formed in Xerox and was cruelly stolen by Apple. It's a lie, often repeated but that doesn't make it any less a lie.

Read and learn

It's interesting that you bring that first link up. The second link, Coanda Effect: Understanding Why Wings Work, is from no less than Jef Raskin, the father of the Mac. It contains a fallacious argument on why the Bernoulli effect can't explain the lift generated by a wing, which he claims he first derived as a child. It contains some child-like assumptions, the most grievous being the assumption that the ratio of the chord lengths (distance over the wing versus under the wing) is the same ratio as the speed of the air over the wing versus under. This implies that two air molecules that separate at the front of the wing, one going over and one going under, will meet at the back edge of the wing, as if joined by some invisible rubber band. In reality the ratio of the speeds is larger than the ratio of the chords, and the top molecule reaches the back long before the bottom one does. This link to a different page on the same website as the first Coanda fallacy link, shows the airflow using smoke pulses and does a great job of describing what is going on.

Jef Raskin, creator of Macintosh and Canon Cat (the latter embodied his instant-on ideal), also complained about the time it takes a computer to start up.

Startup times have not changed in several decades. Here are some data points I collected a while ago:

AST boasts that "on a 4.77 MHz 8088 [MINIX] booted in maybe 5 seconds".

Data point. AMD K6-2/500 (bogomips : 989.18), 256MB, Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.6.5-gentoo-r1 boots in 39 seconds[1] (/etc/runlevels/default/ = apache domainname local mysql named net.eth0 netmount squid sshd syslog-ng vixie-cron)

Data point. G4/dual 1.25GHz, 768MB, MacOS 10.2.6: 33 seconds[2]

Data point. G4/350, 576MB, MacOS 10.3.3: 32.5 seconds[2]

Data point. P4 Celeron 2.4GHz (bogomips : 4734.97), 512MB, Gentoo 2004.1, kernel 2.6.5: 27.5 seconds[1] (/etc/runlevels/default/ = domainname local mysql named net.eth0 netmount sshd syslog-ng vixie-cron).

Data point. NeXTstation Turbo 68040 33MHz: 55.5 seconds[3]

1. from confirming Grub screen to login
2. from Apple logo to login
3. from NEXTSTEP boot to login

Gah. No way to do footnote references in mod_virgule? entities don't work, <sup> doesn't work...

Yes indeed. Have you seen this example of something that looks like it should be easy to "translate" but isn't.

Any idea what the answer is? Is it a hoax/joke? I spent a whole afternoon on it once... and got nowhere :-(

It actually reminds me a lot of Raskin's ZoomWorld. "Pile-of-Crap" isn't so good, but having a zoom in interfance for storing data and applications is actually super intuitive and useful.

Drool... Somebody tell the Raskin Center about this -- there's finally a screen that will make Archy work. If only they dropped the 'infinite undo' requirement, they might actually manage to use this screen to release something more than a CLI proof-of-concept plus a flash demo.

When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?

Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this). The time 'saved' by keeping your hands on the home row is more than wasted by the time that it takes to recall a key-combination. It doesn't seem that way because you are actively thinking about the command, so your time sense is focused on the activity, whereas the time spent mousing around is more or less 'blank time', since the hand-eye coordination needed to match the pointer to the pointed item is more or less 'handled in hardware' once the decision of which command to use is made.

Naturally, there are several cases where keyboard commands are faster than menus, however. One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos. Another is in the case of an expert user entering a complex, multi-operation command line, versus having to gesture the same actions; however, a case such as that is generally complex enough that the real optimal solution is to create a script of the command, even for a single use instance (some systems, such as Oberon, facilitate this by allowing you to invoke any arbitrary selected text as a script - indeed, in Oberon a menu item is nothing more than a section of text that is pinned to a given location and 'pre-selected' so that it activates on a single click). Third, multi-level menus require the user to select and target successive items, which is the same cause of slow-down in keystroke commands. Fourth, there are many cases of poorly considered 'graphical' tools that require multiple passes to home in on the target (Raskin's example of a 'visual thermometer' that requires you to adjust the height of the 'mercury' column versus simply entering the degrees into a textbox, comes to mind). Finally, 'adaptive' menus are invariably worse than keystrokes, because the changes disrupt the pattern of actions. In each of these last three cases, the reason the mouse is slower is because the layout of the UI stymies the ability of the user to habituate to them, making it a matter of design rather than a flaw with pointing devices themselves.

Ironically enough, given all the 'quick bars' around in certain systems, the worst response time in most cases is for using icons. The problem is that you have to associate the icon with not only the image it represents, but also the action it causes, and the connection between them is not always as obvious to a user as it was to the developers. The difficulty increases rapidly with the number if icons on the screen, especially if there are two or more similar icon images that need to be differentiated. Many design theorists today argue that icons should only be used sparingly, and only to represent specific physical devices (i.e., a disk drive).

What we really need are more designers who understand usability analysis, and actually use it to determine how much effort a given design takes to use.


Usability in Website and Software Design
AskTog Interaction Design Section
The Raskin Center for User Interface Design
Human-Computer Interface Institute at CMU
Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
Bibliography of Human-Computer Interface Studies
Usability Tips and Tricks
Overiview of GOMS Analysis
Us

Go to the person who is most likely the creator of the whole idea of UI testing and design. Jeff Raskin. All others came after him. His writings, ideas etc are still maintained by his family on his home page.

http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/

Including his work on the Humane Interface.

Another cause for inaccuracy is the deliberate misleading of reporters, coupled with some reporters' tendency to believe an apparently sincere and/or famous source. Levy's book gives prominent thanks to Apple's PR department, which learned the history of the Mac from Steve Jobs, whose well-deserved sobriquet at Apple (and later at NeXT) was "reality distortion field." Many times I had seen him baldly tell a lie to suppliers, reporters, employees, investors, and to me; Stross's book provides many examples of this. When caught, Jobs's tactic was to apologize profusely and appear contrite; then he'd do it again. His charm and apparent sincerity took in nearly everybody he dealt with, even after they'd been burnt a few times. For those who didn't know him he seemed utterly credible. In his defense it should be pointed out that some reality distortion is necessary when you are pioneering: when I am conveying my vision of the future I create a non-existent world in the minds of listeners and try to convince them that it is desirable and even inevitable. I'm pretty good at this, but Jobs is a master, unconstrained by "maybe" and "probably." His attractive creation-myth--swallowed whole by susceptible reporters--wherein Apple's computers were invented exclusively by college drop-outs and intuitive engineers flying by the seats of their pants became legend. To hear him tell it, the Macintosh had practically been born, homespun, in Abe Lincoln's log cabin. That it had been spawned by an ex-professor and computer-center director with an advanced degree in computer science would have blown the myth away. A good story will often beat out the dull facts into print.

Raskin had worked with user interface design as a professor for a decade before he started work with Apple. Xerox and Raskin pretty much drew from the same sources while both of them obviously had ideas on their own (Raskin didn't like the mouse, for instance, prefering his own LEAP model). The main idea behind the trip to Xerox was not to be inspired by Xerox, but for Jobs to see in practice what Raskin had been talking about. Read more here: Holes in the histories

I think that any current application in croquet has to use that portal type structure. No current applications are designed to work in a 3d environment, but what happens when they start designing in a 3d environment. I can imagine slashdot where you can read the homepage and look over the edge of it to see the further pages inside of it.

The only way that I can describe it is like this: Instead of blindly cliking on a link on a website, with a 3d interface you should be able to see where that link goes to first before you click on it. It is like walking down a hall and being able to pear into rooms before you enter them.

I think the 3d environment is going to be a great way to organize information, and is going to be more usefull for navigating that informaiton.

Also imagine getting videos where they come in 3d, just like princess leah being projected by r2d2.

Also the idea of sharing a space with your friends/co workers where you can both work on the same project is just amaizing.

Then with the invention of the holographic monitor it would be even more amaizing. BAH!!!! I can't wait!!!

-Derek

This is the same sensationalist troll who coined "Open Sores" back in June 1999 to mock FLOSS, and called Stallman a communist, and Torvalds Lenin.

Mr. Metcalfe, if we wanted to read intelligent rants on how Everything is Wrong, I think we can pick from several better sources than you, and might learn something from it instead of suffering through your screeds...

• JWZ http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html
• Richard Gabriel http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
• Rob Pike (pdf) http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/utah2000.pdf
• Jef Raskin http://jef.raskincenter.org/humane_interface/summa ry_of_thi.html
• ... (others?)

I would like to contribute this link to your history, that one day search engines might pick it up: Pompous Windbag

It's called Archy, a humane computing environment. It's just in Alpha now, but eventually the Raskin Center will have the basics in, and if it gains momentum, it will become the next kind of OS. As it is, it's the best development platform to work on, ever, and it's being built from scratch. Thing is, it's small (can run on very old hardware) and infinitely expandable. It ditches the shitty mazes (menus) and the windows that love hiding information from you... Archy shows the user's content all at once on an infinite plane. The ZUI provides navigation. Check out their site for more info, and read this crash-course post I wrote to get a better idea of what it is and will be (answer FAQs as well).

It's called Archy, a humane computing environment. It's just in Alpha now, but eventually the Raskin Center will have the basics in, and if it gains momentum, it will become the next kind of OS. As it is, it's the best development platform to work on, ever, and it's being built from scratch. Thing is, it's small (can run on very old hardware) and infinitely expandable. It ditches the shitty mazes (menus) and the windows that love hiding information from you... Archy shows the user's content all at once on an infinite plane. The ZUI provides navigation. Check out their site for more info, and read this crash-course post I wrote to get a better idea of what it is and will be (answer FAQs as well).

It's called Archy, a humane computing environment. It's just in Alpha now, but eventually the Raskin Center will have the basics in, and if it gains momentum, it will become the next kind of OS. As it is, it's the best development platform to work on, ever, and it's being built from scratch. Thing is, it's small (can run on very old hardware) and infinitely expandable. It ditches the shitty mazes (menus) and the windows that love hiding information from you... Archy shows the user's content all at once on an infinite plane. The ZUI provides navigation. Check out their site for more info, and read this crash-course post I wrote to get a better idea of what it is and will be (answer FAQs as well).

I don't wanna expand on the Mac or Windows fanboy stuff, mainly because I agree.
I'd like to comment on the topic: to me GUI innovation relates to how this fits into your cognitive space. On that note, I'll say that I find Ion a GUI that fits right in the UNIXspace. Being unprejudiced, it mixes freely between CLI and GUI. You can switch between shell and graphical applications without having to resort to mouse clicks (and if you use a keyboard, contrary to some misconceptions, you still are using your hands).
A discussion here yesterday brought up the issue of the Archy interface, a creation of Jeff Raskins ("The Humane Interface"). I found Ion to resemble Archy to a point. Archy, however, admits some tribute to Emacs. Hardcore unix people know how to fly on Emacs (Vi was developed to work on a 300 baud modem by Bill Joy - people don't get this basic simple fact to this day).
The CLI doesn't go away in UNIXspace, because it is a fundamental part of our mind: the little pieces of language that fit together with orthogonality. The algebra of it: Unixspeak. Like any foreign language, you might hate it or love it (eventually, those that hate typing will learn to love once you get to the point of using voice recognition: "cat that file and grep it for July"). Let's see Windows do that [grin].
GUIs also have their mental space. But no GUI can plan ahead or be as compact as a means of expression as languages. Loop a click-action 100 times. Design a language to describe a 30-step complex GUI-clicking instruction. This will be a language. A GUI has widgets. Widgets constitute a very, very small vocabulary. What are the nouns, verbs and adjectives of widgets?
So, I guess I'm saying I'm not at all impressed. Even if you say it's very innovative. To me, this bias towards metaphors that seek to emulate physical situations (like the "archives" and "folders", or "My Computer") are nothing but lack of imagination. Sure, cool computer graphics. But I use my computer to work, it's a machine to augment thought, not a toy.

An interface I feel just fits in the Unixspace is Ion. Because, as you said, the interface must deal with how we work/think/opperate. And how do we work on Unix? We do use CLI.

For you it just fits becuase you are habituated to the CLI. Ion is like fluxbox, something for people who constantly use the terminal. Archy uses command line interfaces to a great extent, but it is not a window manager designed to make the current interface paradims easier to use. I could crtique the rest of that paragraph but you obviously don't grasp the concept of GUI's and what they are doing.

I remember, a long time ago reading/looking at Archy, but it's Windows-only.

Archy is written in Python. Its more portable than Java. The only reason their isn't a Linux and Mac binary is becuase they have problems redefining keyboard inputs. If anyone can help, please do so.

How can we instruct people to perform 50+ instructions via a GUI? We can't. We must use a phone line, or write a document. Click 50 times. Go crazy.

Okay, after that I kinda loose you. Archy is a hybrid CLI/GUI. You want it based on a different language? And why the hell on a weird icongraphic one? So we have another load of shit to memorize? Icons without labels are useless for beginers, let alone the entire thing based on some wierd ass language made of them.

Why a mouse and not a Joystick?

Steve jobs was sold on the mouse. They tested joysticks, force inputs, and more in the early development of GUIs. I can't remember if any of them tested better. But really, have you ever used a touchscreen or sketchpad? I could imagine an interface for a joystick that might be usable, but those things _suck_ to use. No physical feedback, harder to habituate, etc.

I could go on but this is a rather uninformed post so I just hit on what is some more common misconceptions. I am tired, so forgive the lack of spell check again.

What OSS needs now is to invest in things like Archy and for KDE, Gnome, and others to fully embrace these concepts.

Much of the groundwork has already been laid. While continual testing is needed they aren't as expensive as getting voulenteers is pretty easy.

First off let me say that the desktop situation is abysmal on _every_ OS. Their are fundamental decisions stemming from the earliest GUI's that slow the speed of the interfaces and allow for entirely unneeded errors.

All this is _provable_. Speed of an interface can be modeled using the GOMS framework. If you are new to GOMS do not argue its accuracy here, there are several newbie mistakes that have been explained and would only serve to cloud the debate. Ever get annoyed at how fast the terminal is to use, and GUI's only seem to get in the way? GOMS explains it, typing is much much faster than the _multiple steps_ involved in using a mouse. Not to say that GUIs or mice are bad, but poorly implimented. GOMs can show when to use mice, when to use typing, and how to structure the size and conceptual model of an interface to be as speedy as possible.

But GOMs in and of itself is only a tool. Not a guide on how to create an interface. Liken this to racetracks. Once can sure build a fast car when their motive and only measure is speed, but can be more expensive, unsafe, unreliable, etc, etc, etc.

So where can one reliably make an interface that works well with humans? Most use "intuition." But this "intuition" is genrally nothing more than familiarity. And familiarty does not fix the current, demostratable problems.

So where does one turn? To the science of how humans think, their limitations, and the subset focusing on human computer interaction. Cognitives cience

Using this one can construct an interface based on what humans can do. It has exposed our limits and abilities. What mental models we handle better. Folders and Files? A model based on our desks, not a model based on how our brains handle information and computer interactions.

Using these tools we can end up with an interface faster than the terminal, easier to use, and less error prone than either GUI or terminal based programs. Don't believe me? Try Archy. It is a nearly total departure from standard interfaces. Thus for anyone familiar with comptuers have to retrain their muscle memory. One will constantly reach for the mouse in a vein effort to select text. It will piss you off. If you habituate it's use you will find how much harder and more complex the other text editing interfaces are.

Interfaces are a thing we can fix that Windows and OS X can't without major losses. We have upserped Windows in security and stability. Things Windows _cannot_ fix without breaking everything. OS X has poor performance. In fact horrific proformance thanks to the MACH core. The interface is one of the last major thing in OSS software that MS and Apple are beating us at.

BUT ITS FREE!! Which is a lie. Yes, it is not their higher costs of administration, vendor support, and retraining. It is also the worst selling point. Ask any professional sales person. The only people that hooks are people you don't want to deal with. Just reimagine that mangager that was a cheapskate manager who pinched every penny and lost dollars in lost productivity. The old pinch pennies, trip over dollars.

We have to beat them where they are sore, and believe me, their interface sucks. I use OS X. It is only less annoying than windows or UNIX.

Okay, I really have to go, this thing needs to be edited in half, correct the spelling, etc. but I have dinner calling me. Agree, disagree but interested? Email me, we can bitch over the finer points : ) aal357 REPLACETHIS sent dot com

Thanks for the advice!

As you hint at, the story about Jobs being originally inspred by Xerox is in fact a myth. Jef Raskin, then at Apple, had worked with the ideas both as a professor and as an employee at Apple. The purpose of the legendary visit at Xerox was to see what Raskin had talked about in action. You can read all about it at Raskin's Site

While Dotzler makes a few good points, I don't entirly agree with most of them. These in particular.

And what is a Regular Person to think when confronted with a choice between Helix Player, CD Player, and Music Player? Does the Music Player not understand CDs? What's "Helix" mean?
I threw this argument right out the fucking window. Anyone bought a Dell Computer lately? Ye Gods! You get Dell Musicmatch Jukebox (which has explorer controll over the music files), Windows Media Player (Movie control, I think), and Dell Media Experience. All of these play audio. Movies are Dell Media Experience, Windows Media Player, and the Start menu yeilds Power DVD by Cyberlink. Futher investigation would yeild that the Dell Media Experience seems to be nothing more than a front end for other programs, but is our so called "average user" going to be able to deduce that? Moving on to burning software, two icons were on my Dell Laptop desktop by default. "Burn CDs & DVDs with Sonic DigitalMedia LE" and "MyDVD LE". [Average User time] "So, lets see. Sonic does DVDs, so why is there another DVD program right next to it?" [Dummy mode is now on!]. And then we have 3 ISPs to choose from; AOL, Earthlink, and NetZero. Bah!

I don't want to start a desktop war but I really gotta say to the distros, pick a desktop and be happy. Regular People shouldn't have to (guess or learn enough to) choose between Gnome and KDE when they're installing your product.
This also irked me a bit. How many of the average users actually install windows now? Going back to my Dell Laptop I just got, WinXP was already installed on it, so much that I didn't have to activate the installation. If a computer company like Dell, IBM, Compaq, Sony, etc. were to preinstall Linux on their machines instead, would they allow the user to select the desktop on bootup? Personally, I think they would choose one and have you be stuck with it. The "average user" probably would not know the difference.

Meh. I liked the idea of Raskin with the Archy OS (http://rchi.raskincenter.org/aboutrchi/index.php) . Give the average users something simplistic and good enough to do what the average user wants, and leave the complex systems (Linux and, dare I say it, Windows) to those of us who know a little bit about what the box under the desk is and are willing to learn a little more.

Actually it's not. First off, Apple had many parts of the Lisa/Macintosh project devised before they went to XEROX, according to Jeff Raskin, who kept dated notes of all the work. The Mac project started in September, and Steve Jobs went to PARC in late December) And the Xerox computers couldn't do things like tile windows. Pulldown menus are also an Apple invention.

Jeff writes:
"In his book on Silicon Valley events, Accidental Empires, he has the Mac and Lisa (an Apple computer that didn't make it commercially) projects being created by Steve Jobs after Jobs made the visit to PARC "in 1980" and came back all aglow with inspiration."

"I emailed to Cringely to point out that his book--like those of a number of other authors--was wrong; Jobs had indeed made a visit in December, 1979 but the Mac project was proposed in the spring and was officially started in September, 1979. In other words, the project was well under way before the event that was supposed to have inspired it took place. Cringely was unabashed. He emailed back: 'As for all the business of what project started when, whether Lisa started before or after Steve visited PARC, whether the Mac had already begun or not, well I don't think that it really matters very much. My attempt was to EXPLAIN (I say that at the front of the book), not to be a historian.'"

And that's the version of the history most people quite... and it's wrong... Plus... who ever got to use one of these? Most people's introduction to the GUI was via the Macintosh. The early versions of Windows (up to W95) sure didn't work or look like a Mac!

You just answered your own question. Why would I want all the Photoshop windows to come to the front instead of just the one I want?

You didn't read what I wrote. If I click on the icon in the Dock, then all the window will come to the front. Being that you are a Linux guy, you don't use Photoshop. In order to use Photoshop effectively, you need all the pallets and tool bars and such. So to answer your question, that's why you would want all of its windows to come to the front.

Most people don't have a bunch of Photoshop documents open at once, but if you do, Photoshop neatly cascades them. You can then choose the one you want either by choosing the window by right clicking on PS's icon in the Dock, via the Window menu (Window > Documents), or you can just click on that window frame, and only that window will come to the front.

Most Mac users seem to hate that you can bring just one window to the front, and actually turn that off via some free utilities, so that OS X behaves like OS 9. I like it better than the OS 9 way myself.

Oh yeah.. and as I said several times... use Exposé!

See, we have choices. That doesn't suck.

Goms demonstrates this.
It takes a reletive .2 seconds to tap a key. It takes a reletive 1.85 seconds to think about moving to the mouse, locating where to point the mouse, and moving it there.
There is an interface that works all this out to be as fast as the command line, easier to use then any current GUI or command line, and is matched up to what humans can do cognativly. It's text editor is Archy, and as a whole it's called The Humane Interface. It is Jef Raskin's design. The man behind the original Macintosh inteface, and pioneered a lot of earlier interface testing.
KDE, Gnome, MS Windows, and OS X take note: Please stop ripping each other off, and start designing from what a user can do. Also, start doing more both theoretical GOMS testing and real world user testing.
Archy link

In "Literate Programming" the comments are all important and the code itself is trivialized. The code, as Jef told me, is like "raisons in the muffin of the comments." There are paragraphs of verbiage which might go on about the history of the project, why certain features were discarded, etc., etc, and might not even explain what the following line or two of code was concerned with.

It's really very difficult to deal with code that has been written in this style ("literatized?" ) since the actual structure of the program is severly obscured. It serves as an example of how overdoing a good thing is usually a bad thing.

Jef was a nice guy, and I recommend his book, "The Humane Interface" for its many interesting ideas. His attempt to put them into practice in the Archy project http://rchi.raskincenter.org/aboutrchi/index.php/, was not completed before his death. Even for that, Archy is very close to his vision.

But since Jef was in many ways an extremist, one can demonstrate in Archy his pushing of his concepts to the limit resulted in the end fully maching his goals. Somewhat like "Literate Programming", in fact.

JEF RASKIN, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, is best known for his book, The Humane Interface (Addison-Wesley, 2000), and for having created the Macintosh project at Apple. He holds many interface patents, consults for companies around the world, and is often called upon as a speaker at conferences, seminars, and universities. His current project, The Humane Environment (http://humane.sourceforge.net/home/index.html), is attracting interest in both the computer science and business worlds.

For those who don't know (which apparently includes whoever is in charge of the linked article), Jef Raskin passed away this february. You can view the official press release, or read more about his contributions to computer science. I don't know when the article was written, but it seems it should mention that Raskin has passed away. In any case, his advice about commenting is good, just as his advice on user-interface design has always been lucid and helpful.

"To invoke a command, hold down "Caps Lock"...

Isn't the fact that the Mac requires a bit of trickery involving rewriting the keyboard driver to get the Caps Lock key to report it's state like the Control key going to make this paradigm a bit difficult to port to the Mac?

So, uh, you recreated Emacs?

OK, can somebody explain what Archy is, exactly? The intro document seems remarkably content free, and basically just talks about how wonderful it is, and how it's going to make you more productive, and enlarge your penis. But what is it all about, really? I don't have a Windows box handy, so I can't try it out...

And that link should have been in the story itself, instead of a link to the download page. You want to read something about a program before you go to all the hassle of downloading and installing it.

Ok, again.
Opera, I used to like.
Now I don't use windows anymore, and I choose not to use non-free software, for ethical rather than technical reasons. That doesn't mean I don't care about features. I even run some non-free software when I just need to, to get my work done.

What happens to me with Opera is that it was great, tabs were really great. Now Firefox is just smoother to me. I am a usability freak, too. It just happens that Firefox doesn't have usability issues that interfere with _my_ habits. I like, for example, its handling of dialogs, explanation of actions and defaults.

When you talk about innovation... well, what innovation are you talking about? lots of free software (not just OSS software) is way ahead of what is available in proprietary software.
Of course, mainstream free software or OSS is just... mainstream. The most popular pieces of OSS are the replacements to what propriteary software makes.
As a counter-example, you have cinepaint, developed from gaim, that implements lots of useful stuff for movie making. There, gaim started as a copy (I never learned effective photoshop, but I can use gaim) of photoshop, and it helped develop something that wasn't available to the general public.

Another big example of free software innovation, is archy, a different way to do things, that was originally proposed in a book by Jef Raskin, and is developed in the open, without the support of any big software company, at least until now. I believe it doesn't get more innovative than this (http://www.raskincenter.org/index2.html#whatisarc hy).

So if IE sucks because it doesn't support IDN, then Mozilla just started sucking since it dropped IDN.

I don't think I can take much more suckage. Hurry up, Archy...

I don't know... why not ask someone why spells it that way. I see Windows users spell it that way too. I bet it has something to do with their business ethic?

For fuck's sake dickwad, I'm not here to spell things properly.

No, but you're here to give your opinion on a subject in a public forum and you expect people to take you seriously, which would require people to accept (not knowing anything about you) that you have a clue about what you are talking about. How one spells is one indication of their education or intelligence, although admittedly a generalization... how someone presents themselves is important.

If you can't even communicate on an adult level why should anyone think you know what you're talking about? So sit up straight, tuck your shirt in and keep in mind the whole world might be reading what you write! I actually got a job as an advisor to a Mac book that way.

And yes, I have a powerbook, so I've used OS X; it would nice if you don't assume things.

Well you need to spend some more time with it, because you don't sound as if you know how to use it, based on a number of statements you made.

And the Dock is not a taskbar. They're completely different things. With the taskbar, without any need for extra buttons or clicks, I can immediately see every window I have open. With the Dock, all I see is a little arrow that says "dreamweaver" is open, with no idea how many windows within it. Or Safari, etc.

You are assuming that window management is a function of the Dock. That was a design of the Windows task bar, and I think a poor one at that, but not the Mac.

The problem with the Windows task bar is if you have many applications and windows open, it starts to become a crowded mess. The names are truncated, and it's not easy to tell what is what. It tries to be too many things.

Now with OS X the Dock shows you running applications, and if you happened to have minimized any windows, it shows those also. If you right click on an Applications icon you do see a list of the windows, which you can switch to from there.

Or you can just click on its icon and switch all its windows to the front, and select the one you want. Or just use Exposé.

You are trying to use OS X like Windows, and that's the wrong mindset. With Windows you need to see what windows are open, because they are contained within the parent application's main window. Macs obviously don't work that way, and you can generally see all your open windows at once.

Oh, and if you see the Alto you'll see many things that made it into the first Mac. Big deal. Companies get ideas from each other.

The people who were there would disagree with you. Jeff Raskin stated that he started the Mac project before Apple went to PARC. And he was there.

"Jobs had indeed made a visit in December, 1979 but the Mac project was proposed in the spring and was officially started in September, 1979. In other words, the project was well under way before the event that was supposed to have inspired it took place."

"To be sure, PARC's influence was broad, deep, and beneficial, but it was by no means the "single source" of "every important development." Stross's blanket claim ignores the influence of Sutherland's far earlier Sketchpad system, Englebart's prior conception of the mouse and windows, that the all-important invention of the microprocessor itself did not take place at PARC, and that the people who created the early personal computers (Apple I, SOL, Poly 88, Heath H8, IMSAI, Altair, PET, etc.) generally knew nothing of and took nothing from PARC. Many significant examples of influential software that did not derive from PARC's work, such as the systems written by Bill Gates, Gary Kildall, and Steve Wozniak also come to mind." Jeff Raskin - Holes In The Histories

Jef Raskin dies at age 61.

I hope someone at the Raskin centre knows the answer to this http://jef.raskincenter.org/humor/alien_arithmetic .html , or was it just a hoax all along :-(

The Raskin Center has been carrying on his work ... hopefully they'll continue it, especially with the funding they've been given. Oh, the name of THE has been changed, and it's scope has been expanded.

-Billy

Jef also opined on the source of aerodynamic lift, giving rise to airplane flight, with an explanation that runs counter to the traditional one based on the Bernoulli effect.

On this page, Jef discusses the Coanda effect, which is familiar to anyone who's been annoyed by water or juice running down the side of a pitcher (instead of getting into your glass). An interesting read, no matter your stake on the matter.

Neither does Raskins website either. Maybe you should drop him an email?

/. auto inserts spaces, try putting it as a url:
http://jef.raskincenter.org/humane_interface/summa ry_of_thi.html

Give it a try, sparky, and let us know.

Tell me, just how generous do people have to be to give you $2M, when this is your mission statement?

Wow! That's pretty dang neat-o.
I can already see how that would benefit online newspapers.

I have one reservation about the system though. I think it may have problems on machines with old horribly slow video cards - depending on how it's coded.

For those that don't want to actually READ the page, a demo is at the bottom of the page. Linked here. (.swf)

check out the Flash demo[8MB]:
http://www.raskincenter.org/main/img/zoomdemo.swf