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Jef Raskin On OS X: "It's UNIX, It's backwards."
drfalken writes "Interesting piece here about OS X from Jef Raskin's point-of-view (he was one of the wizards behind the original Mac GUI). He thinks that even the concept of an OS is a hold over from an older era, and that work should be done to get the user closer to the app. I dunno if I agree. "
You fail to comprehend the magnitude of this new paradigm in computing.
The servers you speak of are actually "slightlly thicker clients" connected to "almost fat clients" connected to "so close to servers that you can't really tell the difference clients" connected to Bill G's personal desktop. Think Amway and you're almost there.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
<stepping onto soapbox>
At the rate software "technology" is going, it will never happen, as word processors and browsers keep growing in their memory consumption, at about the same rate as the prices decrease.
Consider, if you will, running Netscape 1.1 and MS Word 4.0 (admittedly only on the Mac). Netscape 1.1 ran on PCs with 8 megs of RAM, perhap better than today's 4.x and 6.0 versions, and MS Word 4.0 worked quite well about 1.5 megs of ram allocated to it. These apps were about as responsive, perhaps better in many ways (on 486/68040 CPUs) as today's versions. It's amazing that today's word processors and browsers aren't any faster (often slower) and exceed the computer's memory capacity, despite a 20 to 40 fold increase in CPU speed and 6 to 10 fold increase in available memory.
<steping off soapbox now...>
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
As for those who say that Internet-distributed apps via Mozilla-XUL or MS-.NET are the future, you are omitting an important human element: Territory. My workstation is my territory; I want to control it's config to suit my tastes, I want to determine its design tradeoffs (e.g. speed v. portability), etc. I would not be comfortable with getting all my apps via the Net no matter the speed, for it would just as weird as living in barracks and getting my toiletries by ration every morning.
It's ironic that you accuse Raskin of having "A Limited Vision" when yours is just as limited!
Why not wait and see what it's like using these distributed types of applications before slamming them? To me, being able to have my desktop and all programs available from ANY WEB BROWSING DEVICE is unbelievably cool. It will probably take 2-3 years for the speed of the net and the quality of these types of applications to become really satisfactory, but have some patience, and a little "Vision," why don't you?
-thomas
"And like that
I think it's one of the goals of Apple, as per their digital lifestyle.
Walk up to an Apple Cube+SE with Bluetooth and wireless firewire and, miraculously...
It detects your PDA and starts synching
It detects your MP3 player and starts up background processes to configure and transfer music
It detects your cell phone/pager unit and starts updating information
Then when you sit down to the OS, and start on a document, that application gains central focus. They tried this in OS X with the one application mode, but that sorta lost out to general opinion.
Their view that the Finder is just an application into browsing and viewing the PC and network, and not the PC or network itself, is one step I think. It's a very strong bias into the shaping of what the user thinks the PC or network is, but it can be swapped out into an email program, so that the network appears to be email lists, users, websites, emails, notes, attachments, and local storage. Or switch it into a web browser, and the device starts to look like web pages, music, movies, external sites, local storage, and information.
Does that sound right?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
This has been tried several times before. 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. IBM tried it with the PC-Jr. Radio Shack had a PC out in the early days that pop up their own little shell when you turned it on and tried to reign the user into their own little arena.
They all fail for the same reason. Joe Blow gets the thing home and uses it for a week just like IBM et.al. intended. Then he heads over to CompUSA and sees how the $10 calendar program lets him put his own pictures on a calendar. "Why can't my computer do that?" he ask. Then he gets mad at whoever it was that sold him the computer in the first place, and starts looking to buy a real computer.
Computers are complex and get in the way, because people want to do complex things that go in so many different directions that no matter where the OS is it is bound to be in the way eventually.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I find it annoying there both the /. headline and the original article's headline focus on MacOS X when the article is clearly about OS's & interfaces in general (though brought up in context of MacOS X.) It would have been more honestly headlined as "Former MacOS developer wishes OS's would fade into background".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Brilliant! I agree, we should move to direct apps.
Hmm...but I want to run more than one...hey wait a minute, I have a great idea! Let's get rid of the OS and just make an app. We'll have the app hold a bunch of shared files, and then we can fiddle with it so it allows multiple instances of one program. No wait, let's make it so we can run a bunch of different apps at once and change between them. And let's make our app "special" so that if one of the mini-apps breaks, the big app can just kill it without the mini-app taking out the whole system. Man, this is going to be GREAT!
Oh yeah, that app would be an, uh, OPERATING SYSTEM. Oops.
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Let me give you the lowdown
- "Raskin goes on to illustrate that a computer should be as easy to use as to start typing on a keyboard to open a word processor -- with no lost keystrokes, or to put a stylus to a tablet and start drawing in a graphics app."
This is all very nice and good, but what if you wanted to use a spreadsheet instead? Not everyone wants to only use a word processor. You have to decide what you're going to do mentally, then tell the computer "I'd like to do this now." Just because I start typing numbers doesn't mean I want to create a spreadsheet, but then again typing words doesn't mean that I'm continuing with my novel - I could be typing the headings for my spreadsheet.- "The idea of walking up to a PC in sleep mode and hitting a button, which would instantly activate a specific app, is compelling. The OS would manage all the applications in the background. If you wanted to switch apps, you hit another hot key. Work files could be stored in yet another "button." Interactivity between the apps could be facilitated the same way they are now, with a GUI shell, but without the preponderance of icons, start menus and switchers, and without the tedious effort of installing apps via the GUI or customizing your environment."
Okay, so now I need a keyboard which has an extra 20 buttons for the apps that I want to be able to access. Great. Saving state on exit is a good idea, but that can already be done. You may have already seen it - it's the 'document changed; save?' dialog box.You're not giving anyone more usability through this. You're giving people something close to PalmOS on a computer, which a few might like, but many would disapprove of. What happens when I want to have two spreadsheets open? do I have two of my keyboard buttons allocated now, or is this even possible? Multitasking on a user level gets thrown out the window with a system like this, and that's a loss in functionality.
- "'One big mistake is the idea of an operating system... It does nothing for you, wastes your time, is unnecessary'"
This is where I laughed the most. The OS doesn't "get in the way", it provides basic services that all applications need. The whole reason that Windows or Linux or the BSDs (even PalmOS is big when you consider the total amount of storage available to the devices) are big is that they don't just act as system kernel, but they come bundled with tons of standardised libraries that make your life as an app writer easier. Probably the most dumb thing I've ever seen someone in the industry say.I wouldn't be following these guidelines too much if I was a system designer.
"It's UNIX, it's backwards." Does that mean it should be XINU, and we've been wrong all along?
Wanna bet?
Here's the process I used:
Here, I'll press command-v for ya here:
(Of course, HTML doesn't know what to do with the linefeeds, but they are there.)
That's a directory listing of my Sinfest archive.
Nothing in that procedure that would be unknown to any Mac user.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Handhelds and kitchen-counter-top Internet appliances have a totally different engineering goal: "What the hell is Bob's phone number?" or "Mommy, can I check my email before dinner?" Just because a user wants to have total convenience in one context does not mean he or she desires the trade-off in flexibility in another. The workstation paradigm still has its place.
As for those who say that Internet-distributed apps via Mozilla-XUL or MS-.NET are the future, you are omitting an important human element: Territory. My workstation is my territory; I want to control it's config to suit my tastes, I want to determine its design tradeoffs (e.g. speed v. portability), etc. I would not be comfortable with getting all my apps via the Net no matter the speed, for it would just as weird as living in barracks and getting my toiletries by ration every morning.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
Just how often does a painter immersed in the creative act stop to think about minutiae of the paintbrush? Or worse still, get interrupted by the paintbrush? Not often, and that's a hallmark of a good tool -- that it be subsumed as completely as possible beneath the user's attention to the task. The PC as we know it can undergo vast improvement towards being a really great tool for a particular task -- and this will likely involve some specialization. Again, read the above books and get a leg up on the next wave...
I think he has a point, but he's thinking about what computers *could* be from the standpoint of being in an ideal world.
.NET will fail. Net access is too expensive and too flaky for consumers to rely on it for their primary means of accessing apps.
.NET. But most people don't have DSL or Cable yet, and won't for some time. And even ME, on a corporate 100-base-T network, t1 connected to the internet, I'm not willing to bet my productivity on the notion that Microsoft's .NET server serving Word will always be up, and fully responsive when I need it (and that the service bills won't get me down).
In the real world, we have limits on hardware performance, some subsystems are far more limited than others, then price comes into the equation, for various subsystems; Video, RAM Storage, Disk Storage, Network IO, etc.
Right now, Network IO is prohibitively expensive, and the state of the technology is way behind that of Disk Storage; it's currently cheaper, and more convenient (offers better price/performance ratio). This is the ultimate factor in why
For what this guy is talking about, today's computers can't possibly do these things. For one thing, we still need disk storage. If RAM Storage was cheaper, and didn't have the volotility issues, then we wouldn't need Disk Storage, and all apps could be in RAM all the time, and we could do things like, sleep a machine, and press a button to be instantly-on in the Word Processor, or instantly-on in the Web Browser. But RAM is still WAY too costly, compared to Disk, so it ain't gonna happen.
Computers and their OSes have been the way they are from day one, because the balances in cost and performance on the hardware side have always been pretty much what they are now. In the early days, of course, Disk Storage was highly cost prohibitive, so those machines were diskless (I'm talking TRS-80). Network connections were unheard of in your standard consumer machines until about 7-15 years ago, this came on gradually, then full-force as the technology evolved into something people could afford. We're experiencing another shift in network availability, speed, and cost, with DSL/Cable, and that's what Microsoft is betting on with
So, the kinds of paradigm shifts that this guy's talking about require the hardware to change, either in performance or cost. If that happened, you can bet the software guys would jump on that damn fast - lots of money to be made during those kinds of periods.
Flatscreen monitors don't appreciably change things. We all thought that super-duper 3D cards would change our user experience into a 3D one (but just because the video could display lots of 3D information quickly, doesn't mean that the rest of the computer can get at that information as quickly, so the 3D interfaces we've seen have been slow, jerkey, useless eye-candy).
My guess is that the next paradigm shift will be a result from an increas in bus speeds. CPU speeds may continue to ramp, or they may stall, network speed will increase per dollar, but I doubt we're going to see an increase in user-trust and reliability. So internal bus speeds are going to change things, and we're going to see computers doing things that they can't currently do, because bus and memory speeds are way too slow. Of course, the technology for this is not even on the horizon yet, so this is all pulled straight out of my ass - but the only other possibility is if RAM gets really cheap. I mean really, really cheap. Cheap enough to make disks look as unattractive as tape currently does. Either of those would surely change the model by which we compute, and OSes run.
And Unix will still be Unix.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Essentially, the article says that Raskin doesn't like MacOS X, MS Windows, or any other general purpose operating system for that matter, because he thinks that computers should be pure appliances, relieving the user of having to worry about mundanities like file storage or program launching, rather than infinitely mutable environments. Raskin is a visionary, which is a good thing, but it means that he is concentrating on the future possabilities of ideal computer interfaces, while missing the more prosaic uses of technology today.
Personally, I agree with Raskin on what I would like my computing experience to be like, but I also recognize that we are a long way from making that experience happen in a ubiquitous manner. For the moment, I get more milage out of an OS centric system that provides me with the primitives that can be combined into a tailored work environment (e.g. Linux running X and Fvwm2 with a small collection of application programs and shell scripts) than I would out of a more turn-key system that wasn't designed by me for my own uses (e.g. MacOS, Windows, PalmOS, and even Gnome and KDE).
Raskin is talking about a system that would be preconfigured to do exactly what the user wants to do, but he fails to mention, and possibly fails to consider, that such a system is nearly impossible to produce, simply because there are too many different kinds of user with too many different preferred modes of work. It is much easier to produce a clumsy generic environment that can be shoehorned into many different task niches, than to custom engineer a system and user-interface for each prospective user.
The users that really care about a streamlined work environment (sometimes referred to as Power Users) will take the time and effort to tailor their system to their tastes. The users that don't care, and such users do exist, will either suffer (silently or otherwise) or pay someone else to produce a more tailored configuration for them. (while I am no Libertarian, or even much of a Capitalist, and as much as I hate to point this out, the dominance of generic, operating system centered, computing environments looks like a perfect example of the free market at work)
I think the point the author was trying to make is not that we don't need OS's, we just need them to be more transparent in certain situations.
Certainly I, nor a large portion of the general computing public, would ever accept such a PC. My computer can be anything from a game console to a web server: I want and need and OS I can work with as an application. But what I want and need isn't necessarily what my uncle or grandmother wants and needs. Yes, anyone can be taught how to operate a computer to make it useable (how to install apps, how to run a program, etc), but why should navigating an OS be a requirement for using a computer, be it Windows, Linux, Be, or whatever?
The idea of being able to walk up to a machine and just start typing a document, or drawing a picture seems interesting to me. Of course, it would take a very powerful OS to give this level of functionality while still remaining transparent, without degrading itself to little more than a toy. At the very least, it's an idea worth exploring at the research level.
This reminds me of the constant wrangling in the web interface community about consistency of interface between sites. How do you create a site that does what you need it to do and conveys whatever aesthetic you're after, without making the site difficult to use? To put it in application terms, how do you build an app that people will appreciate for its innovation, and be able to use the first time around?
Raskin's idea of a disappearing OS seems counter to the quote above about consistency and stability. In the *real world* companies and even Open Source projects are going to create applications that use their own metaphors for movement, action, and so on. Currently, the OS is the only thing keeping interfaces even remotely consistent.
One of the reasons the Mac has such a well-loved interface (how many PC interface zealots do you know?) is that it's consistent from app to app. Basically, you buy a new Mac app, you launch it, and you figure it out on the first try.
I just don't see how an OS-less computer would somehow make things easier for users, when every app would be allowed to have whatever interface it wanted.
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