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Raskin On 'Raskin On OS X'
Kelly McNeill writes: "A recent editorial appearing on osOpinion.com (and linked
to here on Slashdot last Thursday) dealt with comments made by Mac creator
Jef Raskin and his opinion of Apple's upcoming next generation operating
system OS X. The somewhat controversial editorial generated a ton of mixed response
both here as well as on the publishing site. As it seems, Mr. Raskin's thoughts
on OS X (and Unix) were very misunderstood and he has since stepped up to the plate
to clear the air and responded
to the technology community at large."
Down With GUIs!" by Jeff Raskin.
Okay, so there's no whore like a karma whore. Sue me. Hey! Yeah, you. Looking for a l33t time, big boy?
Raskin says (in his book "The Human Interface", if I recall correctly) that in hindsight, the one thing he would have changed about the Mac was the one-button mouse. So yes, he can admit mistakes once in a while. Mr. Raskin, for all his other shortcomings, is one of the few remaining innovators in the area of human-machine interfaces. It's good to see that he's still getting under people's skins... the community needs more crazy prophets to shake things up.
He didn't say "what I meant was" because he wasn't correcting his own work - he was correcting the idiots who jumped to conclusions based on a rather biased magazine report of his work.
His last remark was spot on, anyway. The people who flamed him the last time here on Slashdot were to a man dull and unimaginative. Hardly anyone stopped to think this guy might be worth listening to. Too busy correcting little errors in the reportage.
Not anymore. The xfree86 guru's have had XWindows running inside of Quartz/Aqua for about a month now. So there's no need to shutdown - just start Gimp like you would any other tool. Then have a shootout with Photoshop running in Classic, and Gimp running on BSD....
http://mrcla.com/XonX/
Tom
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Note that Raskin was the one who insisted the Mac have a one button mouse...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I think you're exactly right. I don't have one myself, but the Palm is nice because you don't launch apps, they're always running. And since the storage isn't just like a filesystem, you can do global searches into the contents of the file. What systems are you talking about, that used smalltalk? I've heard that mentioned before..
I think he has a little trouble expressing his points. The title article is very much "I didn't mean that, you don't get it." However, let me interperet for him.
I think his point isn't that the OS is bad, but the notion that the gui interface of your OS is bad. IE: Windows with no applications.
Of course, most of us geeks don't make the mistake that everyone else does by assuming "OS Interface == OS". Mac and Windows users do this a lot though (most articles about Windows and Mac OS updates focus on the GUI improvements/changes).
I highly advise the readers to read his wired article though. You've read this far of slashdot comments, the wired article is much more enlightening.
Perfect. Nailed him.
I think his only excuse may be that the Wired article is fairly old (from 1993).
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
A lot of that wouldn't be terribly difficult...
Already I can double click on a url in many Mac apps and it will automatically be sent to my preferred web browser, or ftp client or whatever.
But there would have to be a HUGE amount of thought put into it before it would be ready for prime time, to ensure that it would really work well, and that the perception of the interface that the users had was a good/useful one.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I say intent, though, because at times I can be caught up in what-ifs with the interface that waste a whole lot of time. :)
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Ok.
h erals.html
:)
If you think that the standard out is the best you can get you are mistaken. Why do you think that the highest grade dvd players don't have them? Its because the wires are too thin and can have cross talk. This is eliminated by using component video in and out. Which sgi's have and apples do not. Ever see a monitor out on a television? Its unbearable.
Ati's Allin wonder doesn't have component, svideo and composite video in and out, and can't handle uncompressed video. Uncompressed video has a very very high data rate. Not to mention variable hardware compression ratios which are all real-time. As you go up higher and higher, you can compress multiple streams at the same time in real-time as well.
For more information go to http://www.sgi.com/peripherals/workstations_perip
Don't forget the nobs and dials
Also, check out the awesome Onyx2
up to 256GB of ram 256 mb of texture memory and it can do 6.4_Billion_pixels a second. 16 pipelines and not to mention fullscreen hdtv antialiasing in real-time.
Ok, enough, i think you get the idea.
I like some apple hardware. I'm really happy about OS X and hope apple will release it for x86 or ia32 or whatever its called now and windows will disappear.
But i still hate the cube. The boss where i used to work was a mac zealot and thought the cube was so cool. It overheated and locked up at least 2 times a day and it started to crack on the top. He would always pretend like he couldn't see the crack.
The shell is not garbage. Eat your words.!
It is an unassuming power tool chest.
You can do anything in the shell and do it well.
And there's nothing stopping you from running the shells in X.
Unix would be poop without the shell.
Ok, not poop, but just a stable windows.
Ok, a hell of a lot better than that
but it wouldn't be as cool and powerful.
The more you use unix the more you appreciate the shell.
And stop calling it command line, thats a windows thing.
You are right about chemistry. My chemistry teacher has shown me some cool software for molecule visualization on his apple, which doesn't surprise me considering apple's penetration into the educational market...but his processor was crying and it started to chop when he got to more complex models.
:)
Unix workstations are still the best for high-end anything.
I'd be interested in seeing some of this software you speak of, it sounds really cool. I like software that simulates physics, especially visually and in real-time. And even more excited that its GPL so i don't have to pay
I wasn't aware there was a higher end GL card for apples. Could you provide a link, i would think that it would go well with the g4.
:)
But it remains a niche thing, but i'm still curious
Hey, you should talk to the company i work for. My boss would probably hook you up with a great deal on bandwidth for your servers in exchange for some advertising. www.vdi.net. I'm one of the sysadmin's there and we've got 2 ds3's and more on the way.
h erals.html and click on audio/video for either O2 or Octane.
t ml . Hope i have been of some help.
If i were you i'd buy an O2 or an Octane from ebay and get the appropriate peripheral for editing and software. As for software, that will probably be expensive. For the peripherals that SGI has go to http://www.sgi.com/peripherals/workstations_perip
My point is, really, that if you buy an O2, your real limiting factor is how much you can spend on software, and once you get some revenue, you just buy more powerful software. If you're looking for software for it other than what it comes with, look at http://www.sgi.com/solutions/broadband/partners.h
I could be all wrong about this because i don't have much experience in the area, but just remember that the best tool is the one that with which you do your job best.
Oh, i thought that OS 10 came with gcc.
Sorry, my fault. Jumping the gun again and assuming.
GTK, QT.
gdb gcc glibc
emacs vi/vim.
python perl
I guess there aren't any tools for linux, oh wait, there are! And they're portable too. They are all getting polished every day and making their way to where apples are. But, Apples aren't portable. Of course they are cleaner and easier to write for, but run on 1 platform. Almost all the general unix tools are extremely polished and portable except for the gui libraries and they are getting there. I'm not bashing apple's just saying don't know unix tools, after all they've been around the longest and are the most polished (except for gtk and qt which are new on the block, relatively).
Mozilla can do it all. And what happened to making portable web pages? Develop for whats out there, not whats going to be out there.
She says she likes the look and feel. if you install Xfree86, that would defeat the purpose.
So, to answer your question, you'll have to wait until there's an OS 10 (x, or whatever) version, which there will be eventually. But don't forget the drawback, youhave to buy apple hardware. $$$
No, the tv out is made so you can hook it up to a studio monitor. Apple makes no claim that the ntsc output is suitable for broadcast.
True, it is a lot better than most pc video output, but cannot touch one of sgi's broadcast machines for output quality.
Ever see a weather report? Thats directly out of an sgi O2. Those aren't expensive at all. The software is of course.
eya.
Yea, i deal with this...but most of the time the client doesn't know what their IP address is let alone their login. But after i explain to them that they can connect to their server as if it were right beside them and their monitor was hooked up to it, they are so amazed. They ask if this is a special package we installed. Its hard for them to believe coming from a windows or mac background that you can have remote access to a comptuer without buying new software.
Although everybody thinks pine and mutt are arcane. But you can see them from anywhere.
Webmail sucks, so they usually go back to pine.
_ramblings_
Dude, until just now, the graphics were old.
Rage128 is hardly a powerhouse anymore.
Nor was it last year.
But the g4 is nice...and Altivec is the supercomputer part. But only if the software was written to take advantage of it.
yea.
Who said anything about games?
Ever hear of anybody doing any 3d modelling on a mac? And zealots don't count.
Seriously, they have been behind the curve for quite some time. The cards aren't as fast at 2d as say a matrox g200 which is 3 years old. But i will admit that all their cards will drive any of their monitors quite well.
As far as cpu goes, they've always been ahead of the pack with IBM/motorola. Intel sucks and AMD sucks less when compared to the G4. I'd still pick up a thunderbird with ddr-ram over an apple because of the cost.
Intel tried to make something like altivec time and time again and can't seem to do anything with it. First it was mmx, then ssimd or somethign and i heard something about mmx2. Anyways, anything really make use of these? Maybe but do people ever notice a difference, no.
Ok, so its available, which is no surprise, its very portable, runs on every unix and apple even uses gcc standard on os X
BUT! they do not include it.
Probably because it wasn't the default shell on 4.4bsd or something.
Or maybe they're all used to it or somethign
I dunno.
Yea looks like a great site.
unfortunately, you are using a version of netscape that is not supported.
this site looks best in Internet Explorer.
if you must use netscape, please use netscape 6.
I wasn't going either way, i was saying that if it did, then it would make a decent workstation.
Thats more of a server thing than a workstation thing i guess.
When it all comes down to it, it is what you use it for that makes it a workstation. If i have a linux box that i play games on only, then it isn't a workstation. It has potential, but it isn't.
Cool. Glad to hear it.
Didn't mean to say that that it wasn't and that OS X was a toy.
Just getting used to people refer to their mac's as workstations is gonna sound weird, thats all.
I didn't say it was a bad thing, i'm saying they won't be able to handle compiling and installing the standard unix way.
Twist my words some more!
Yea, you can replace it. But how many people who use macs have ever compiled somethign before.
They're used to getting a nice graphical installer where they click install and it does everyhthing then they click finish/done .
My point is the default shell is not so hot.
True people like sun use tcsh by default (last i heard) but people who use suns generally have at least some experience...or at least a sysadmin who will do it for them.
Dude, you can get octane's for the price of a mac on ebay, not to mention O2's. Then again, the software might be a little expensive. I dind't know you were a startup. But i wish you the best so you can get the workstation you really deserve :).
:)
Also, i didn't realize this was an internet thing... If this were a television thing a mac would certainly not do, but if its internet, its fine
Anyways, check out ebay sometime, they've got people selling O2's and Octane's and the ocassional onyx or onyx2. But those start to get expensive even on ebay and do stuff that you don't need to do like edit multiple streams of uncompressed analog video non-linearly at the same time and anti-aliasing while rendering effects, etc.
My mother can handle window maker better than apple or windows. I just eliminated all the choices she doesn't need to make. To get on the internet she clicks the red dot and when it turns green she double clicks on the "globe" icon.
Simple enough.
Check out gnome or kde.
Thats the idea, to make unix easier to use and make you more productive.
www.gnome.org
www.kde.org
Ever used their command line?
Not the best.
Actually, Apple has done a fair amount of work in the "beginner" settings. The Finder in 8.5 (maybe 8.0) had a "Simple Finder" setting that removed a lot of the menu options. They've done a "panel" based interface with icons rendered as single-click buttons. (the button mode isn't in OS X PB). The MultipleUsers option has a simplified mode with only specified apps available. Combined with a home folder, it covers most of what, oh... my mom would use.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
The interest and tools just aren't there on Linux (or we'd have them already).
Apple created a programming platform for Everyman with Hypercard, there were a LOT of amateur apps done in HC, personal finance, PIM, games... etc. Bring that to Unix will be a Good Thing. But don't expect it before MWSF2003.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
OK, fine, click the close button to make the window go away.
Now have Granny install new software, and see what happens, and you'll get the point if the whole argument.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
You say: "sure, the tech underneath is crap (an i loathe that as much as any other geek)"
I know you're trying to achieve some reconciliation with the Linux crowd with this comment, but you're totally selling Apple short. Let's be more precise: Apple's process scheduler and memory management is crap. There's actually a whole lot of stuff in MacOS below the GUI (the "tech underneath") that works really, really well.
* Resources - sure, Unix has these too, but Apple's way is a lot better
* File types - Double click any document, and it opens in the right program. Apple did it first. And not in a brain-dead way, either. You can control what the "right program" is; you can drag-drop it onto an alternative; and if the "right program" isn't around, you get a list of alternatives.
* Applications - Drag a folder to install. There is no path to hack -- the OS knows where everything is.
* The Macintosh toolbox - Over 5,000 data types and subroutines that any app can rely on. glibc, eat your heart out.
* Hierarchical File System - B-trees are cool.
* Open Transport
* Sprockets
* WorldScript - Don't forget, Apple co-invented Unicode.
* NuBus, ADB, PCI, USB, SCSI, AirPort, Firewire, AppleTalk - NOBODY else does plug'n'play as well as Apple.
* Multiple monitors - It just plain works. The way you expect it to.
Sure, Apple is the subject of ridicule among PC masochists who believe anyone who doesn't suffer as much as they do must be inferior. And sure, Apple is derided by those too cheap to pay a little more for quality, style, and innovation.
And sure, it's taken Apple a lot longer than it should have to add preemptive multitasking and protected memory to their kernel (although they have offered THREE different flavors of Unix prior to OS X Server). And sure, Apple's management is doing its best to kill the company, and only the loyalty of its customers keeps it alive.
Apart from these minor nit-picks, Apple really does have terrific products with some awesome technology inside them.
Your comments about a friendlier command line are spot-on. Interesting how your syntax reads a lot like AppleScript. :-) The gap between "ought to be" and "is" often may be narrower than we think.
one of your suggested commands (almost) works
open
will open the application specified, or the document specified with the default app for its type.
Now if apple could create an "AppleScript Shell" (assh?) then we could type
$ tell application movieplayer to open porno movie
and so on
Non impediti ratione cogitationis.
"...That's where I've gone beyond the old form of command lines, and adopted the idea that issuing commands via a few alphabetic keystrokes is one of the best ways of operating a computer...."
Commands as pre-set keywords? I wonder where he got that idea.....;)
Sinclair ZX Spectrum forever!
(for newer generation : http://www.sinclairspectrum.com/ )
God, I hate sites that do this:
>unfortunately, you are using a version of netscape that is not supported.
>
>this site looks best in Internet Explorer.
>if you must use netscape, please use netscape 6.
Bite me, silicon god...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
VMS: the only OS that matters
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Nobody who is unable to compile their own app is going to give one teensy tiny little shit about which UNIX shell is included by default. It's amazing to me how much people grouse at Apple's design choices, when their FIRST design choice (Hey, let's use BSD!) made it very easy for anybody with a little initiative to CHANGE the design. In other words, quit whining and set it up the way you want it. Isn't that what all UNIX users like to do anyway? Why (and how) was Apple supposed to read YOUR mind and do it the way YOU want them to?
Not like you're going to buy their hardware anyway...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Well, I understand your points, UNIX interface design was initially a bit poor.
there is a basic mistake that all unix/command-line geeks make. that is that something that's simple must be for beginners. there is also the underlying assumption that something that looks fun cannot be serious (and this was a major, major contributor to DOS in the beginning - it looked more serious than the MacOS).
unix "GUI"s like KDE and Gnome help convincing the unix geek that that stuff is mostly in the way. true. KDE, Gnome, XWindows are horrible and are mostly in the way, they are made by people who don't have a clue about user interface design and who are happy with 10 xterm sessions on one screen.
the mac is an entirely different category. sure, the tech underneath is crap (an i loathe that as much as any other geek), but the usability in term of getting stuff done is just way, way beyond unix. those who say otherwise have not used one for an extended period of time.
i have looked over the shoulders of unix gurus, sys-admins, super-hackers, watched them do stuff on their favorite OS. they all had their xterms and vi's and whatnot, their SGIs, linux boxes, sun's, AIXs. whenever they did something, anything, it took at least twice as long as it would have taken me on a mac. even the most basic things took a whole lot of typing and whatnot. and i have seen mac wizards whom the same things would take half as long as me.
MacOS is not for beginners. it has a _lot_ of depth, and over time one learns all the keyboard shortcuts for frequently used tasks, one optimizes the desktop, etc.
if you don't believe me, well then... keep on typing away! but don't confuse GUI with good user interface. a GUI can be just as screwed up as the worst command line interface.
nik
cars are only for beginners. real men ride horses.
Not that I defend the guy 100%, but the original article was not written by him. He doesn't exactly have absolute control over what another author writes about him, or how he is quoted. Given the fact that 90% of the Slashdot crowd probably hasn't read anything other than that one article, it is understandable that they got the completely wrong impression from the author of the article. Reading the summary of his book The Humane Interface (available online, and linked to in a comment attached to the previous Slashdot story) gives a completely different picture of the guy.
I agree with you. People aren't learning how to use computers at all. They are learning how to perform tasks for their jobs without any understanding of the big picture. They are, in essence, thinking inside the box. A lot of my co-workers are this way. Right now we are taking a Windows 2000 class and 80% of my co-workers are lost. They think that most of the material is out of their scope. They spend their whole day putting out fires rather than finding ways to prevent the fires.
The trainer asked us if our network was designed for usability or job security. The problem is that our network is huge and mangled and best described as chaos. To implement Win2K we need to plan. There's none of that going on. The relationship between Server and PC Support is that of Officer vs. Enlisted man. There is no communication. I could go on for HOURS.
The basic point I was trying to make is that nobody thinks of the end user. A lot of technology is implemented just because it can be. There is no reason a Network Computer wouldn't be more than enough for a lot of the people at the bank. REALLY.
--Mike
Hmmm...
Interesting logic there. I was trying to prove that MacOS X IS a proper workstation since you can ssh to it, but that would be a logical fallacy.
I'm tired and my cerebral fluid is evaporating.
If it is not (not a proper workstation) then you can't can't ssh to it...
OUCH
More like IS departments know Windows now. From my perspective (large bank in Boston with 3000+ users) nobody knows anything. These people remember mouse clicks. If you move an icon from the left side of the screen to the right, they call the help desk.
People around here seem to forget that to a whole bunch of the population computers are just glorified type writers. Try explaining to people outside the IT department how Active Directory is going to make their life easier, and they will say, so fucking what.
Sad but true.
--Mike
When I toured the Philips Petroleum Research Facility in OK I was especially interested in their computational chemistry dept. since thats as close to physics as they get. I was not surprised to see they used SGI, but saw they also used Apple. They were doing 3D Quantum Mechanical Chemical Modeling. The modeling was done with Sandia Labs MPQC (GPLed), and they displayed on either SGI or Apple.
How about you start typing. If you want it to be a spreadsheet you select the text and Alt-Ctrl-S-S and whats selected becomes a cell of a table. Type some more. If you want it to go into the cell it can be. If not, its a word processor. Type commands, and select them and type Alt-Ctrl-R-C. Out put shows up underneath. Is it a word processor? Yes. Is it a command line? Yes. Is it a spreadsheet? Yes. Is it a database? Yes. Is it a web browser? Yes. Yet its *one single windows* with a common set of keystroke commands. The applications get "hidden", just as the OS gets "hidden", and I as a user deal with DATA formated however the hell I want it formatated. His idea is to have libraries that perform operations/transformations on our data. No standalone applications at all. Every application shares and plays with everything else. If I can see it I should be able to select it. If I can select it I can copy it. Why can't I select the "search" button from the browser and drag it to a document? Because we haven't designed applications to be modular enough to embed such functionality seamlessly.
The browser might be a way to start this. Open composer and you can simulate a word processor, insert tables (if only they had spreadsheet functionality), type a url and its automaticly live...and you can immediately execute the url! The urls link you to your documents as well as the WWW. Perhaps a cross between lynx with vi keybindings and netscape composer...and then learn java *sigh*.
Actually, what he was saying is that the reporter who told his story wrote the story in a confusing fashion.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
He seems disappointed with the lack of synergy from the merger of two different breakthough systems (Unix OS design, and MacOS user interface principles).
Given that he was at the heart of the design of one, and has used the other extensively, he seems to think (and I agree) that he should have at least some right to comment on the merger of the two.
--
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Ok then, I humbly retract my comment!
Since I remember he claimed he was such a
genius for inventing the "leap key" for searching on the Canon Cat (a failed standalone
wordprocessor from the 80's). He'd never
heard of emacs or incremental search
I guess. Seems like sort of an arrogant
jerk.
If you want to try it out for yourself, there's a java spectrum emulator available here.
If you click on the Basic link, you'll see what the previous poster means....
This has been bugging me for a while. If Apple puts a *nix OS on their systems, do they become workstations?
You can run the VNC Server and view the X environment in a window, exit the GUI to the command line and startx, or run X-Tools
I don't think Apple really cares about this issue. We all forget that the easy GUI is for consumers, and the developer files like Gcc are for who? Developers! I believe the terminal.app won't even be in the default install, you'll have to grab it off the CD.
I'm pretty sure that the people using the command line apps are going to know a little bit about running make install or whatever. If not, the company tech is the one who sets up the command line apps for your business, let him install it. That looks like Apple's solution to this (hopefully rare) problem.
It's not exactly easy to find a solution with Apple's 1 OS strategy. Apple wants a universally easy OS, and pro users can navigate the complexity easily but with power. Keyboard shortcuts.
Its pretty simple to figure out why Apple is or was #1 in education. Plus, their control panels are much less arcane than Windows System control panel.
The developer tools are free, and much, much, much better than gcc currently has.
They aren't going to bundle it with the OS though, but you can download them from developer.apple.com for free(registration required)
Apple wants an OS that's easy to get started on, but still powerful. Think Eazel, but Apple hates the idea of having a beginner, and expert setting on their OS. Hey, OS X will have a command line and a GUI, so do it any way you want.
The original article on OSopinon was taking one of his sentences out of context, and saying how it fit back in. And every /.er got up in arms over it.
G4's video optimised for DVD & Broadcast?
3 10 20
Piss off. Neither the ATI Rage128, Radeon or Nvidia GF2MX cards are optimised for anything but low-end, consumer applications.
I don't see component or SDI ins or outs on any standard Apple machine.
Nor do i see integrated hardware MPEG-2 encoders/decoders.
Give me my Athlon/Hollywood+ over an overpriced G4 which can't play back DVDs without skipping any day of the week.
Check out Apple's own suggestions on how to improve the crapness of its DVD playback here:
http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Hate to break it to you, but most of Raskin's work on the Mac was a direct response to the work already completed at Xerox PARC, including but not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
Not trying to say that the Mac was totally unoriginal, but the Mac didn't spring forth fully formed as a creation of Apple alone.
> It seems that there are many (but by no means all) Linux users who would rather keep this OS to themselves than to work on making it easier to use and superior to Windows.
... not because of it's technical merits (Win9X is crap ... NT 4/5 is half decent, when it's not leaking memory :) ... but because for the most part, the learning curve isn't as steep as Linux.
...
Exactly. I don't have time to spend 3 days reading incomplete man pages, and HOWTO's that are 200 pages long. THAT is why Windows is "successfull" (popular)
If I'm setting up a firewall, then, yes, I'll take the extra time to secure my system. But for day to day apps, like coding, spreadsheets, fonts, word processing, I want something that works *now*.
I give Linux another 5 years before it reaches "critical mass" of popularity and starts giving Win2K a good run for the desktop.
If only BeOS would open source there OS
> Thats why I'm glad to see projects like Eazel working to make it more userfriendly.
I agree. The SOONER Linux gets userfriendly, the sooner "normal users" can ditch the crap called win 9X/ME and move onto Win2K or Linux (or even Mac OS X)
--
Mod me down. I don't care. I already hit 50 karma. Big freakin Whoop-de-doo.
> Windows NT/2000 command line has tab-completion
Yeah, the idiots at M$ forgot to set "HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Command Process \ CompletionChar" to a non-zero value (perferably 9, which is tab)
> , just like *nix.
Except the Windows version sucks rocks. Hit tab, so a directory is brought up. Now hit Enter. It doesn't change into directory without a "change dir" command.
I already use 4NT, which has filename-completion-cycling. And it auto-appends a backslash on any directory.
e.g.
Every time I press tab, it completes the filename, cycling forward in the appropiate matches. Shift-Tab does it in reverse.
Page-Up and Page-Down show a history.
The BEST feature is Ctrl-Page-Up and Ctrl-Page-Down show a history of directories! (Does BASH have this?)
4NT blows the Windows shell right out of the water.
Cheers
My thoughts exactly. Burg misinterpreted Raskin's comments, quoted them out of context, and didn't cite the interview the comments were made in! From the original article -
Nowhere does he say what "recent interview", or where to find it. Readers of Burg's article couldn't read Raskin's comments in context, because there was no reference.
Very unprofessional if you ask me.
jmp
This quote to me sums up a huge flaw with Linux. It is one that will always keep it beneath Windows. That is the fact that many people who know Linux well, aren't interested in making it easier to use for non-computer literate people.
Both Apple and Microsoft have spent millions of dollars in making their GUIs as userfriendly as possible. Speaking from experience, I know its much easier for my mom to drag a folder into the trashcan than to rm -rf * a directory (not to mention its nice to be able to take things out of the garbage can if you later decide you want them.)
I've noticed an air of elitism in the Linux community. It comes in the form of "I have mastered this difficult OS, thus I am more intelligent than you!" It seems that there are many (but by no means all) Linux users who would rather keep this OS to themselves than to work on making it easier to use and superior to Windows. While its nice to post to /. how much better Linux is than Windows, I think a lot of people need to ask themselves which they'd rather have: An great OS thats useable only to very computer-savvy people, or an OS that is not only the former, but also one that is easy to use by your average person.
The battle between Linux and Windows is going to be won or lost on the desktop market. As long as Linux is difficult for grandmothers to use, Linux'll never win. Thats why I'm glad to see projects like Eazel working to make it more userfriendly.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Really? I take it you haven't been paying attention in history class.... I would say that your failure to apply the leasons learned from studying history is just a sign of personal stupidity and of the stupidity of the people you associate with (teachers, books, whatever). Try talking to an immigrant physics major that just came over here for college - maybe you'll learn the meaning of incoherent.
And please don't confuse "applying" completelely arbitrary and useless formulas with the possible validity or meaning of the formulas themselves - that just means you can do math.
Well, maybe you haven't gotten far along in Physics to think its irrelevant yet. Maybe you think that if you can't configure a media player to be a text editor that means the OS is faulty.
Whatever. I like double clicking.
Take this personaility test.
You're still missing his point, which is not that Mac OS is great, but that it's flawed, and we can do a lot better than it and it's GUI knock-offs (including CDE).
No, he said he didn't say it starts a word processor application, because he's against the idea of applications (and for "command sets").
I'm afraid you haven't caught him in any contradictions, you're just still misunderstanding him (which may well be his fault).
Somebody please try putting a MUD NLP in front of a common shell like bash or csh. I sure think this would do wonders for linux usability and productivity. This would allow you to use the NLP stuff for times when you don't know/can't remember the arcane 'find' args. But, when you just want to "cp x y", you can.
Please, when you choose your next linux project, think about this one.
G4 video output is actually a low-end PC gamer card.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
When I come to the machine to type a letter, I just sit down and type.... I don't have to launch the word processor. I just type; typing is enough of a clue for the interface to do the right thing.--from Down With GUIs
Okay, so the word processor isn't launched, it's built-in to the computer. Still, how does your computer know you want to write a letter, not create a spreadsheet? How does your computer know when you're typing a URL you want to go to?
> Computers cannot predict what you want to do,
tab completion!
i understand (some of) the difficulties of trying to get a computer to 'know' what i want done - i've spent plenty of time at the bar discussing how best to implement some sort of fuzzy logic backed by neural net learning mechanism that will inherently understand that on mondays i prefer to create users accounts than to close help tickets, so everything i type will most likely be based around that. sure, tough as shit and will probably rm -r / every other command.
but then i go to open a file with a long filename, or to select a table with a distinct name, and tab completion saves me a few moments of typing/remembering exactly what that file is, or command is, or the exact path to that file.
this is the simplest way for the computer to 'guess' what i want, and it rocks. i think that if we continue to look for such simplistic methods of answering the tougher wants, we'll get further than always having our heads in the (current) dream-land of computer sentienty.
2:
i understand this guy has been influential in creating so much of what we base our graphical experience on, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he's got anything on us now.
people need to continue to innovate. and i'mnot saying he hasn't, b/c i really don't know what he's done lately, but i'm saying that we need to remember that, as with stocks, past results do not necesarily indicate future growth.
3:
hiding the OS. i'm thinking that what he's wanting is not a removal of the OS, but a hiding of it. obviously an OS is a necessary tool, but is it also necessary for every user to see that tool?
the way we Work is an excercise in abstraction. we do not need to shift gears in our car, we need only knwo that we are driving, and the gears shift for us (though admitedly i can't drive an automatic, only shift for me). and if we had to readjust BIOS everytime we booted, that would become old quick.
just as the kernel is a layer of abstraction between us and the machine coe the processor, bus and devices need, and the OS is a layer of abstraction between us and the kernel, is there an easier way to abstract out the OS and leave us with just data and programs?
personally, i love the cli and can live and die with nothing more than that, but that doesn't mean there's no room in my mind for the exploration of other possibilities.
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
Oh, I've seen them enough, and I can remember enough quotes (mostly on E/Gnome), which were something like this:
"Look at these semi-transparant windows!"
"Look at these cool skins!"
"Hey, look at that, it's not like Windows at all!"
etc. etc.
Most of them turned to Linux, found out that they were supposed to edit files by hand, learn to use a shell and couldn't do any game on it, and returned to Windows.
These are the users we like to call lusers (a general IRC terminology). They run it for some time, show of to their friends and stuff, and before they really got a glitch of the beauty of the UNIX design, they are back to their own comfortable Windows.
When you run any UNIX alike OS (whether this is Solaris, Linux, BSD or whatever), you choose mostly because of it's incredible good internal design. It could have been that you didn't really recognised this, but IMHO this is true.
Another key feature of UNIX is it's really long time history. Standard programs have been looked over, and improved over and over (and over) again. This contributes to stability, speed, ease of use and flexibility (note that ease of use is something different than User Friendly, ease of use is the fact that: "once you know it, it's easy").
This is a replacement signature.
You mean it's all Raskin's fault. Raskin invented the Macintosh.
That sort of concept is basically how users interact with computers in Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey for relatively basic tasks. (They do it vocally rather than through a keyboard, but that doesn't really matter.) Clearly, 'intelligent' computers that can understand plain English (or Spanish, Japanese, Swahili, whatever) commands are the ultimate goal in user interface design. However, is the technology really there, or will it be any time soon?
For that kind of interface to work, it has to be implemented very well. You can't have a computer that acts like a human who understands most English, but won't be able to interpret slang commands or any command that it doesn't already know.
We all hate user interfaces that try but fail to be intelligent; when computers start trying to do what they think we meant rather than what we said and are wrong, they only get in the way. Therefore, the computer has to be right almost all the time when it interprets our commands; until computers can do that, they need a pre-defined set of commands (either character strings in a command line or buttons/ controls in a GUI) and very predictable responses to every set of commands.
Not bad. i was going to troll him by asking what did he mean by saying that he planned to use a Macintosh? Didn't he know that Apple was moribund? (that sounds so much more sophisticated than "dead") and that all the smart people in video postproduction use Linux on amd k6 350's with Broadcast2000 and their BTTV video capture cards?
I think my troll would have been better, but you were first.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Going back to our new interface, say I want to compose a duet for French horn and oboe. I use a command that gives me some musical staves.
What do you do if you want to look at p0rn?
love is just extroverted narcissism
It's probably more useful to have an interface like the REXX ports (port meaning interface in this context) in amiga applications. You can script almost any number of applications together on an amiga, provided they have a REXX port - And they usually do.
I don't know, how small are you?
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GIMP has already been ported.
- Sighuh?
The Weather Channel might be SGI all the way in their studios. But the actual systems at your local cable channel are cheap Windoze boxen.
The TV Guide Channel used to run on Amiga boxen, back when they were called The Prevue Network. That Guru Meditation screen is as unmistakeable as the BSOD. However, I suspect they are also using cheap Windoze boxen now too.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- All your estrogen are belong to us!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Say Amen brother. I run a total of 8 virtual desktops on my Debian box. At any one time ~6 of those just have great big xterms. Once you take the time to learn it the shell *really* is the best way to do many things. And if you have to do phone support for *nix it is a godsend. All terminals look the same no worrying about how to describe their gui to them just have them type.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
He said things about starting to type and a word processor popping up, and pushing buttons to start programs; but when these ideas were interpreted in the only way I can imagine them interpreted, he says that's wrong.
Does anyone have any idea what he is really talking about? Never mind how these things might be implimented--just describe the intended behavoir to me.
Now listen to what Mr. Jobs said in his Keynote address at MWSF. Basically, he said that he envisions the finder (read the mac OS file management GUI) being downplayed.
Click on a pencil & paper icon, and you get a new document. Click on an envelope, and you get your e-mail. Click on the stupid IE 'e' and you get Internet Explorer. Saving a document gives you a very simple dialog asking where you want to save it.
It is fairly apparent that Apple is trying to minimize the importance of a File Management UI. They want the dock to be where you access your apps. They want the toolbar to be how you access your docs. I think that they'll get much closer to a _very_ simple, yet _very_ powerful OS than has ever been seen before. A system that Users will never need to access, but power users (both GUI power users and CL power users) will feel right at home.
That's a pretty good idea. There is a programming environment kind of like this on the Mac platform that is used mainly for audio programming, called Max. You plop down some boxes, set some values, add user-interfaces, and wire it all up with patch cords (pipes). There are Win32 (Pd) and Linux (Pd or jMax).
Perhaps these can be extended to unix commands.
Hate to break it to you, but most of Xerox PARC's work on the Alto was a direct response to the work already completed at Standford University by Raskin and others, including but not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
*Why* can't I select files in the gui, and have a shell "smart enough" to know what I selected!?
In Mac OS X, by dragging a file to the term.app window, the path to that file appears on the command line. Not quite what you're looking for, but closer.
--
$tar -xvf
Start typing to make a document. Start drawing with a pen tablet to make a drawing
Somebody please let me know if I'm wrong, but isn't Whistler, or some other future OS of MSFT, supposed to be more like this, ie one field is available on the screen, and, depending on the content that you fill that field with, the OS determines the best application to handle it and automatically launches?
And, if this is the case, wouldn't it be buggier than hell? Like, how would it tell the difference between an email and a document that I wanted to word-process and print?
--
$tar -xvf
Apparently in new builds of Mac OS X, there is a 'search' field at the top of finder windows, so you can type, for example '.mp3' and it will display only mp3s.
Not exactly what you're talking about but still useful and kinda shell-ish.
But what happens to everybody else? Suddenly making an alternative program requires an OS hack. With undocumented API's this vision could only result in One world, One OS, One App. I don't like it all. Microsoft has shown that they cannot innovate. They can only copy and I'll admit, usually improve after 3 or 4 versions. With no competition, things would never improve.
What Jeff needs to understand is that there's a bigger picture. While a SuperOS/GUI would improve usability, it would cost us so much more because development from the rest of the world would grind to a halt.
steve
Vote Quimby.
At least this "arrogant jerk" did his homework. My book discusses the incremental search in emacs in some detail.
The humble genius who wrote the comment has put his humble foot in his humble mouth by not taking the time to find out what I did say.
And Leap was neat, it was carefully crafted and tested, and loved by thousands of users. I wonder if the humble genius actually tried it or interviewed users?
I'd love to hear humble's response.
I agree, too. My own success is my greatest enemy.
Fair comment. I should have made it clearer that I was talking about the interface to the OS, and not the underlying necessities. I was writing to users, not programmers, who see the OS rather differently.
Fortunately, most people were able to work around my sloppy language.
(And the more I explore NT, the more I see thinly veiled impersonations of Unix.)
Actually, the NT design team was composed mainly of imports from DEC who had worked on VMS. You know that UNIX is not the only archaic text-based industrial-strength operating system, don't you?
you obviously know more history than most slashdotters, so why the inflammtory bits?
but its model of applications and data was not much different from your average DOS machine.
event loops? resource forks? no segments/extended memory/expanded memeory crapola? the list of differences between the Mac and DOS applications and data of the time was huge, although you are certainly correct that the Mac was much more of a hack than the Lisa, let alone the Xerox D-machines.
Also, it should be possible to use longer sequences of keys a' la emacs. Win + w + s should open up a web browser and navigate to slashdot instantly. Similarly, Win + f + h should open up the home directory browser (of konqueror/explorer (not "view-as-web page") type, not the gmc point & drool krap), win + f + r root directory, win + f + e should open /etc and so on... everyone get the idea?
No, I'm not going to implement this.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I read disdain where there probably wasn't any. Oops!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I suppose. And one of those "idiot trolls" might really have a grits-covered Natalie Portman in his bed. (Which would explain why she's not answering any of the letters I send to her at Harvard.) But I'm thinking no.
Well since he was the actual genius who invented the Mac (not Jobs), I can cut him some slack as far as feeling he has some right to speak up. How big would anyone's ego be if they had invented the Mac. Heck, Gates, merely copied it for the most part, and look at him! [joke]
He did not invent the Mac, at least the Mac as we know it. His ideas of a UI were "out there" and not that great, IMO. To get an idea of what he wanted the Macintosh to become, look no further than his creation, the Canon Cat For those who won't follow that link, the cat was a command-line machine that was nothing more than a word processor (you remember those single-purpose "Brother" WPs?).
If he realized his ideal computer at Apple, the macintosh would have died a horrible death and/or certainly wouldn't have become the publishing/graphics professional's choice. MS certainly wouldn't have developed a decent GUI (I'm not arguing that Win is "decent, so don't start) so designers would probably be using $50,000 SGIs or X-acto blades and chartpak tape.
The problem with your nice example is that you assume that you input is pure text. That's nice because that's all a keyboard can take.
Now look at any word processor. What are all those icons for. That's right, meta-information: how to display this text. So in your CLI example, if the guys wants to do layout, or styling, e.g use his computer as a cword-processing machine, and not a stupid teletype. He has to either know a meta language to express his layout (say Latex or Html) or have icons...
Will this spin doctor try to spin this spin on himself in about three weeks?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Apple computer, a computer company that wanted to make "insanely great" products, and in so doing transformed the industry, only to find that there was still a lot of room for improvement.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Oh man, does anyone else damn near /hear/ in this guy's voice just how red in the face he is, or is it just my poor dietary habit? (Hey, you'd be on edge too, if /you/ had Uncle Morb's Spicy Surprise--let's just say 'bean supper' is understatement like electoral clownshow).
Oh, yes, the obligatory Slashdot appeasement: /my/ desktop -- uh, *O* *S*, let's me set things the way I want.
"Some readers think that I am proposing having applications, which could be launched by a button press (as with the Commodore CBM Plus4, Palm). I am not proposing anything of the sort"
In other words, all those poor users who accidentally stumbled upon what the Big Mean Power Users call "shortcut keys" (or "hotkeys", if you're in Gatesville) have finally gotten the best of poor old Raskin. Oh well. Glad
Cheers.
Oh, and obligatory Informative links:
Further information about Raskin.
Information about nearly Raskin.
Oh, come on...they just plain don't like bash, and just thought up the first lame excuse they could think of to avoid including it. Where's ksh? Where's the bourne shell? Nothing but tcsh. Yeah, choice.
nice troll!!
"Smart companies save money by deploying MySQL instead of Oracle." - slashdot post
According to the Darwin website they are affraid to make Bash the default shell (or even include it) because of a confusion of the GPL. (If they make bash available under the GPL does that make the system dependent on GPLed code?)
This sig intentionally left blank.
I'm sure the people at many of the top design houses around the globe and countless print publications ranging from newspapers to high-quality magazines would be interested to hear that they do their highly-paid work on a tool designed for "3rd Graders [sic]". I'm sure many of them would find that amusing enough to laugh all the way to the bank.
--Rick Anderson
If it isn't broken take it apart and find out why.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
I believe the local forecasts are sent out as raw data to each of 8000+ boxes, and the boxes generate the local forecasts from the data. THis is why sometimes, when you see TWC on another cable system, the local forecast graphics look different. The studio stuff is (obviously) identical for all cable systems. The local systems also use it to run ad crawls across the bottom of the screen during studio segements.
Actually, if you go to the "XonX" project page at Sourceforge (it is linked from www.darwinfo.org) you can see in the discussion groups that there are at least 2 concurrent patches working that let you run XFree86 rootless on the aqua desktop, with the Gimp alongside Photoshop, for example. I imagine that in less than 6 months, this whole setup will be a downloadable, double-clickable binary install, if Apple doesn't decide just to bundle it with MacOS X atogether. It is basically Tenon's XTools, but for free.
--
With applications, people are forced into using the notion of tasks. If I started typing, using no application in particular, it might not be a bad idea to have some kind of buffer that intelligently determines what application that text is destined for.
If it saw the string: "#include", I wouldn't mind if the OS pasted that into my favorite text editor or C development environment. Similarly, if it saw the string: "to: someone@somewhere", I wouldn't object to having the OS fire up an email application.
If you went deeper into that thought and tried to make it more powerful, you would end up with something very similar to the W3C browser guidelines that
It's very similar to a command line, if you think about it. Netscape had phony protocols like wysiwyg, mocha, and so forth, but the feature set was fixed. Windows has facilities for a nearly infinite number of these "protocols" and tying them context handling libraries, although in practice, very few are implemented (res, ftp, http, gopher?). I know of only one application that uses their own (reg), which is the MicroPlanet RegStudio. From the command line, you would need to enter "start reg:(key name)", but within IE, a link to "reg:HKLM" would actually fire up RegStudio and open the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key.
Anyway, I had that thought in my head. If Raskin used a better term than "word processor", I'd think of him as half the idiot I do presently think he is. Maybe he dumbs it down, maybe he's just that clueless. All I know is that self proclaimed UI gurus in general (*cough* Nielsen) piss me off, and Raskin is the most annoying of the bunch.
--
We are on cable tv, I've signed 2 cable channels in NJ. I have 2 more channels to sign on my desk. An option ( given free to me ) domestic satalite channel deal for an entire 24 X 7 ONE FULL YEAR (do you have 3.7 million to spare so I can get/produce/buy some show to fill the slots). I do everything on a budget, and always look to promote the cashflow as the only reinvestment into doing a better show. Yah I know I need an AVID system or an SGI sytem. but let the shows prove itself in the market and the advertisers will pay the improvement for me.
In reference to buying on Ebay, I'm new to the television / editing equipment and I've consistanly read in the trade publication about hardware compatibility problems , so I have to look at buying brand new pre-configured systems just to avoid the down-time and config headaches. Trust me I have a small network (6 systems) of 133 to 500 mhz used pc's all networked and running real tight that has a total cost of $ 2500.00. Those will all be turned into a cluster of servers once I can afford a T1 line.
If you take a look at my web site ( shashdot style ) a pal of mine did it for almost free (he'll get pleanty of plugs when were covering the full NJ market). Were still working out all the bugs but hey I'm on a budget.
I'm still looking for editors if anybody is interested.
thanks for your reply and I'm going to start looking into e-bay for the O2 systems
ONEPOINT
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Currently ( don't hold me exactly to this) the weather channel does all it's graphic work on the O2's, then it sends every 12 minutes a compress/final rendered file to cable broadcasting stations ( i think it like 8200 stations) they have O2 systems also and they take the updated rendered file and whatever they need and broadcast it. I think ( and i could be totaly wrong ) it's like a HUGE network of just weather only O2 systems.
Good thing about O2 systems is that they can be networked together to multiply the rendering rate. Note I don't think that the weather Channel system network does this, all that it does is take the rendered file and and some local graphics above the rendered images.
ONEPOINT
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When your a startup, you do your best with what little resources you have. Your arguement is correct up to a certain point. Currently I'm changing from a linear editing to nonlinear. Mac's are what most people start out with. Also the learning curve should not be that steep. Don't get me wrong I want my o2 sgi system but the cash outlay does not justify the return rate. Using the mac system, the rate of return on the investment and the ease of use is justified. Now if I had a $ 30,000 budget I would not be looking at mac's but for 4,000 I think I got the best bang for the buck. With all the new stuff coming out for pc's and mac's theres bound to be better stuff. I'll wait it out alittle longer. Quality is based on different things. If you saw the show ( I closed a broadband deal so you'll be seeing it on our roll out in april) you would not be able to tell that it was done linear and non-digital (SVHS). Now were shoting digitally, and will be editing nonlinear. Quality of the show should be better, cut's should be cleaner, and graphics will be incorporated instead of using character generator. Believe me, I have already calculated the editing time difference ( 70% ). That means the producer can get more footage instead of him staying and editing and missing some good events. wish me luck and thank's again slashdot for opening my eyes onepoint
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When your a startup, you do your best with what little resources you have. Your arguement is correct up to a certain point. Currently I'm changing from a linear editing to nonlinear. Mac's are what most people start out with. Also the learning curve should not be that steep.
Don't get me wrong I want my o2 sgi system but the cash outlay does not justify the return rate. Using the mac system, the rate of return on the investment and the ease of use is justified. Now if I had a $ 30,000 budget I would not be looking at mac's but for 4,000 I think I got the best bang for the buck. With all the new stuff coming out for pc's and mac's theres bound to be better stuff. I'll wait it out alittle longer.
Quality is based on different things. If you saw the show ( I closed a broadband deal so you'll be seeing it on our roll out in april) you would not be able to tell that it was done linear and non-digital (SVHS). Now were shoting digitally, and will be editing nonlinear. Quality of the show should be better, cut's should be cleaner, and graphics will be incorporated instead of using character generator.Believe me, I have already calculated the editing time difference ( 70% ). That means the producer can get more footage instead of him staying and editing and missing some good events.
Wish me luck and thank's again slashdot for opening my eyes
onepoint
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Well, let's hope that all they promised will come foward. I just commited to buying a MAC to help us edit our TV show. One of the things that sold me is that the new OS10 will do is let me use 2 processors instead of one. That is real important, it should let me render the show in less time.
also I like the fact that they are commited to making the mac the best (inexpensive) hardware platform for the film/animation industry ( believe me I would like to have the sun systems here but I can't aford it )
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It's his own fault, and he deserves to get flamed. Especially for posting his work on OSOpinion.
?.....or are Raskin and Burney of Corel Chips off the same Cow..., err..., or is that "block?"
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Listen, big-head, we're all here to change the world. But the difference between you and me is that I won't take credit for it. Why?
Simple! Anyone can do better, and someone else would have figured it out anyways. And if you can stop ranting about MacOS X, maybe you can do something better yourself.
Really. Do something before you become senile and that you rant on everything new...
- Benad
Netscape tried to do this, make the browser the OS. It dosen't seem like all that bad of an idea, take something like ezeal, it'll be able to use OpenOffice components, browse the web, and organize and play your mp3's. While I may never use this, it seems all nice and intergrated, you have a lot of buttons, so everything is just right there, no more browsing hierchies(probably spelled wrong). And you have a nice URL thing for a somewhat command line like interface, not only that it wouldn't be hard to impliment ls, ps, df, adduser buttons, that work in the text area. Have a nice few rows of buttons on the left side, a text area on the right that applications can be used in, the panel thing can be minimized so it's not really in the way. The rows on the left can just be a hacked panel. Although I said no hierchies, you could have each buttons change the panel to show maybe the sysadmin panel, buy pushing the sysadmin button, and have a back button to get back. The only problem of that is that of multiple programs at once. Since this would also be the file manager it would be work with MIME types. In the word processor to open a file, the word processor would just minimize and the file part of the interface would be there. I just though of this while I was typing, and I'm just a 17 year old kid(with horrible spelling and grammer, I don't try). The most confusing thing is finding things, and the "start" menu wasen't a terribly great way to solve this, that though is the OS interaction most people care about. Just do it with a big panel on the side with buttons like office, sys admin, development, some other crap. Then if the user clicks the "office" button, the panel thing now has buttons, Writer, Spreadsheat, Drawing, Back, etc .... Again this has plenty of potental problems, I'd probably have to think about it some more(wich I probably wont), but anyways at the end of my sensless rant "Dont copy MS Windows, it sucks, and always will, theres a better way, except for visual studio, make a free version for UNIX/Linux, but don't copy there APIs!".
so what the fuck do you like??
i've used applescript, and it has a ways to go before it can really be compared to the english commands he used.
Easy answer to this one. Active Directory means that they only need to enter a user name and password once when logging into a system. That way they dont have to re-enter it for each computer they access on the network or the e-mail system. Trust me, people like that. Nothing pisses off users more it seems then having to enter the same user name and password fifty times a dat.
"That's where I've gone beyond the old form of command lines, and adopted the idea that issuing commands via a few alphabetic keystrokes is one of the best ways of operating a computer."
Then what's wrong with the command line in the first place? It isn't pretty enough? Or could he mean he wants an interface with configurable hotkeys? A programmable keyboard that can launch applications? That'd be a brilliant idea if every keyboard maker out there and dozens of independent programmers hadn't come up with it years ago. Raskin doesn't seem to have anything to offer beyond what's currently provided by command prompts, programmable keyboards and existing freeware hotkey configuration programs.
Screwballicus
How to break up with a geek: "You just can't grep all the processes that I'm threading right now. It's not you, it's client-side. Goodbye."
My favourite:
<BEER>happiness</BEER>
Pipes and pipelines are exceedingly important in some application areas. UNIX STREAMS is a great way of generalizing them, but STREAMS isn't the issue; the UI is.
To connect a text document [a producer node] to a grep to a sort to a uniq is done like this in UNIX:
cat mydoc.txt | grep myline | sort | uniq
Quite easy for most of us to understand. It's possible to insert T-junctions using UNIX tee but that's already difficult and a more general graph would be almost impossible to express on the command line.
But this important concept is more suited to a GUI than it is to a command-line. Why can't we have processors like grep and sort have graphical representations - e.g. grep has a place to type the regexp; sort has a "reverse order" checkbox, etc. But *also* they all have input and output connectors.
Then, any user could wire (with the mouse) the text document into the grep box, then grep into sort, the sort into uniq, then uniq into maybe a text window to receive the output, so he can view it.
Graphs with T-junctions and so on would be easy to construct, and future software could even deal with cases involving feedback loops.
If we can take UNIX pipes and make a GUI around it, I think you could make a most powerful and flexible system - and people could learn the basics [rewiring stuff] in under a day.
Call up the Run box on Windows (hold down the Windows-symbol key and press R).
Now type http://slashdot.org and it will start your default web browser and take you there. Type mailto:louisjr@nospam.com and it will start composing a new email message.
The functionality you want is already there, just not in a conventional shell.
I realize you're probably just trolling, but OS9 is one of the major operating systems out there, as far as marketshare is concerned.
And yes, I realize that Apple's marketshare is pretty low, but it's one of the most - if not the most - popular OSes outside of Redmond. Certainly in the consumer market.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- Jeff
My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started.
Many of the basic principles of the Mac were firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.
I play Nerd-Folk!
But can't you replace it? I mean, put in another shell or whatever.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Good for you my Wiccan friend. Xfree86 has been ported to OSX, so don't worry about not being able to use GIMP. Also, check out Colorit!. It takes PS plugins and is under $50. I jump from GIMP to Painter, to Colorit!, playing to the strengths of each. The Nix geeks won't be able to resist OSX. They love new toys. Tenon has some tools for it too.
photosMy Photostream
while there are some nice elements of System/MacOS, I find that using an OS designed for 3rd Graders/Grandmothers a bit annoying.
Funny you should mention this.
They guy I work with has a son who did a Geographic Information Systems project on wetlands while he was in the thrid grade. He used a Mac with the MapGrafix software from ComGrafix. It kicked the shit out of a lot of college GIS projects.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Jef Raskin?
:)
Wow, I can't believe it. I just sent you an email last night. (A long rambling thing about wanting to write a new environment using your ideas.) Then I notice that one of my "old" posts on slashdot went from 7 replies to 8 replies and it was Jef Raskin himself.
(I noticed your posts aren't getting moderated up. On slashdot, if you don't reply to an article right away it won't get noticed, because the moderators' attention goes when they are done with the article and move on to the next. Slashdot doesn't make a good bulletin board, but it does keep the topic moving.)
Hmm, I guess I have nothing interesting to say other than I hope you have a chance to read the email I sent you earlier.
Don Rivers
Well, I can't find the original Raskin article (if there even was one). Basically he says we got it all wrong...but then he doesn't clarify what he actually meant! So what *does* he mean by the OS being unnecessarily in the way?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
In what way is your standard VGA/RGB output not of sufficiently high quality for broadcast? It seems to me that anything that looks ok on a monitor should be way overspec for conversion to NTSC and display on consumer grade TVs. (NB: I'm assuming you use some special purpose hardware for VGA->NTSC conversion, and not just using the TV-out option)
Could you expand on the ways that SGIs are better to say an ATI-All In Wonder (just to pick a card at random, feel free to choose another).
The hollywood probly does smoothing; apparently studios (there was a slashcomment about this a few months back, but since we can't search archived discussions, it's effectively gone) do edge enhancement because 1) most TVs smooth the image, so the two cancel out 2) it makes people think the DVDs are sharper (a-la early CD players being unbearably "bright" in their sound to make make people notice that crystal clear "digital" sound). 1) implies that a good card optimising for monitor display would apply smoothing.
As for the idct, that is just a bunch of cosine waves that need to be multiply-accumulated -- exactly the thing a DSP is good at, so it makes perfect sense to put that as special purpose hardware. However, I do have to add a bit of salt to your claim that all others do it in software, as MAC loops are bread-and-butter for all DSPs, and most video cards have DSPs (I'm guessing about that one).
Maybe ATI are the only ones to have it completely in hardware, as opposed to firmware+DSP, but why would they do that?
The possibilities would be fantastic:
> go to my document directory
Shell> OK
> edit my shopping list
Shell> I don't know how to "edit"
> open my shopping list
Shell> I can't see a "shopping list" here
> open the document shopping_list.doc
Shell> You can't do that to a "shopping_list.doc"
> load the damn text editor and let me edit shopping_list.doc!!
Shell> OK (you don't need to swear!)
> go up a level
Shell> OK
> go into pictures
Shell> You are lost in a maze of twisty little directories. You can go up or down.
> go into pr0n
Shell> You are lost in a maze of twisty little directories. You can go up or down. There is a jpg here!
> xyzzy
Shell> that's the magic word! starting bash...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I think this speaks for itself: "Jef Raskin can be reached for response to this column by e-mailing him at: JefRaskin@aol.com."
Well, I just took Raskin's advice and read his article in WIRED, but to be honest, I'm still having trouble envisioning his proposal in practice. Perhaps he could mock up a demo of this new interface? Even a picture or diagram of some sort would help...
The Windows NT/2000 command line has tab-completion, just like *nix. This would do exactly what you wanted. Its not enabled by default, but once you install TweakUI and set it, you're all good to go.
Back in the old days of Apple had a technology that tried to address this called OpenDoc. Essentially it was a document centric technology, that pushed the application subordinate to the document. The result was that you'd have a document that was created by a bunch of small applications providing limited functionality on their own, but when combined gave the user real flexibility in what they wanted in a document. Basically, it was poised as a more flexible alternative to OLE, where it didn't require a larger application like word. IIRC, it was based off SOM. It was like a gui to java beans.
Obvously, it never took off. It suffered from poor marketing and management, as many projects at Apple did at the time. Also it was really buggy. It's memory management really sucked. It was supposed to be cross platform too, but that got nixed when MS realized it competed with their technology ( and their whole development model).
I'm sure Microsoft would lust after the opportunity to do exactly what Apple did: build a well-designed Interface atop a core like OpenBSD. If it weren't for the fact that MS sold their Unix to another company, and are thus contractually obligated not to produce another Unix, their present push toward NT technology would have taken exactly this turn. (And the more I explore NT, the more I see thinly veiled impersonations of Unix.)
My favorite book for getting outside the old paradigms of "files" and "applications" is Computers as Theatre by Dr. Brenda Laurel. "Actors" on a "Stage" makes for a much richer metaphor to the causal whole.
I didn't know that existed!
I sorta wish Netscape were smarter too. That the default action when I start typing when it has focus is to redirect the text into the location-bar...
Thanks!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
What, isn't *every* person who buys an Apple a consumer?
Regardless of whether Apple cares about or caters to developers, it's nothing to laugh at in terms of making development easy or easier. Anything that makes developing on an Apple easier is a win for Apple, because it gets them more developers.
If it means greating their own CC based on GCC with functional improvements, or an IDE, developer libs, or kits... I dunno.
But development user interface is as valid a concern as graphical user interface, or any other user interface.
Because computers are getting more powerful and more capable, they can start acting more intelligently.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
That's some of the problem, right there.
Jef is almost talking about doing away with icons, close boxes, and button bars. Try to imagine what the UI to a word processor is without the preconceived notions of toolbars, icons, OS widgets, etc. The thought that the OS itself gets in the way of the app!
When you use your word processor, you use the keyboard to type; there's most of the input. So why not use that? That almost means a return to the command line, if you haven't noticed.
So you want to write a letter:
At a cli, just type:
write a letter to TWX the Linux Zealot
The OS should launch the preferred editor, with the appropriate format for a letter.
If one is still using a mouse, just click on where to start typing. Is it the header?
TWX the Linux Zealot
10220 Davenport Dr
Cupertino, Ca 95145
That's finished. Where next? The body?
Dear TWX,
It is with deepest regret that I inform you...
Then you finish your letter. Now what? email it? Print it? save it? What UI would you use if you didn't have icons to save you? No floppy disk, no printer, no letter icon?
How about the CLI again?
save letter to TWX the Linux Zealot at c:\documents\Louis\private
Letter interface closes!
Or, type:
save
And a window shows up with all unsaved documents. Click on the one that you want (pictures? the first line? Time and date? command that started it?) and it saves it. Do you care where? No, not really, as long as there is enough space, it's easy for you to find it, and the OS can find it again.
Printing. Easy. type:
print
Or
print last saved document
Or print last document
Or print letter to TWX
You get the idea. Icons and widgets, while useful at the time, are not the end all and be all of UI!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
What?
It's bad to click install and then finish/done?
If Apple had another revolution up their sleeve, I would guess...
a button 'compile', then a button 'install', then a button 'done'!
Command Line Interface is an issue independent and unrelated to the people who have ever or never compiled things before. The OS that makes difficult things easy, and the impossible, possible.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Why should the UI be constrained to envelope icons, pencil and paper icons, or a blue crystal E?
If Apple were to tap into the Terminal app, and create a CLI.app of magnificent proportions...
Imagine typing into CLI.app the web address you want to visit:
Goto http://slashdot.org
Visit http://www.apple.com
URL http://www.yahoo.com
Or better yet
search net Apples OS X beta rebate
And it automagically loads Google, from IE, with those search constraints? Why not?
Or for your doc; just start typing:
New Doc
And a blank doc starts up
Open Game Design Draft 2
And the Game Design Draft 2 document opens.
Those are relatively easy because both require text input in the first place.
But by analogy, Apple already has their CD-R interface, their CDDB interface, etc. Why should it be constrained to icons and widgets? That's a holdover from 20 years ago. It doesn't have to be that way, anymore, if a better way can be found, right?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
What surprises me is that Raskin should criticise OS X's interface while praising Unix. Just when people were saying 'atlast a Unix that's easy to use'!
If you want a model of ease of use, it sure as hell isn't Unix or Linux. Start a program with a few keystrokes - Like 'cp', 'grep', 'chmod'.. That's really intuitive! Surely the fact that people need to be trained to use Unix defeats what he's trying to achieve.
But he'd just say "that's not what I meant! read my book!" Great, but don't treat me like an idiot just because I haven't researched your life.
I am surprised that computers haven't evolved more than they have, but I don't think we'll see a major shift forward until Microsoft or Apple have refined everything they can refine in their OSes, and there's still a lot of little jobs to do.
I'd like to see a next-generation Shell - with intuitive commands, natural language, maybe a mixture of icons and words if you want. If only text-adventures hadn't lost their popularity, there would be greater awareness of what can be achieved with parsers. I'd like to be able to 'cd' through applications -eg. "cd word", "cd inserts", "insert date & " - " & time".
I haven't read Raskins' book. I know his work at Apple from reading 'Infinite Loop'. I have no idea what he's talking about. But I think I'm still capable of being a little visionary.
Chris
while there are some nice elements of System/MacOS, I find that using an OS designed for 3rd Graders/Grandmothers a bit annoying. I dealt with too many problems on Apple's Mac OS in the 6.0-7.5 levels to want to think about their old-designed, cooperative multitasking OS, and while this may sound like a dis on it's creator, it is. At school I often use HP Terminals running CDE, and while not perfect, they're not too much harder than the MacOS, I click on the little pictures at the bottom, and the apps launch. I click the close box, and the app goes away. If grannies and 3rd graders want an easier to use OS, fine, but don't expect me to really care about it...
And who says that UNIX can't be made at least somewhat usable to Joe Schmoe?
</rant>
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
they were big in schools because they had the pretty pictures before the PCs did, and because the GOVERNMENT subsidized their purchase... those "register receipts for apples" programs were not paid for by Apple, but by taxpayers...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
At issue is the clunky way in which most current GUIs, including the Macintosh and Window burden the user with concepts like "files" and "applications".
As a criticism of OS X, Raskin is right, and what he says applies equally to Windows, Gnome, and KDE. But Apple didn't have a choice: they were trapped in their own legacy. That was a problem Raskin himself could have helped avoid in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, devices and services like Apple's own Newton, Palm Pilots, broadband phones, web-based applications, and game consoles are already redefining what "operating system" and "application" mean.
I have sent Jef Raskin's email below,
after a few framing paragraphs.
A few days ago, I sent an email to Mr. Malda asking to please
consider starting a new topic heading, with its own icon:
User Interface Design.
Continuously improving UI design seems critical,
to me, for the spread of free\open software.
After not receiving any reply
(and expecting nobody has time to answer email soon)
I decided, with Jef's okay, to post it here.
Today's follow-up of last week's thread heartens me.
I see two early questionable comments rated 4.
One seems, to me, to suggest that Raskin shouldn't
expect people to read his writing carefully,
let alone to check their references, before replying.
The other seems, to me, to misinterpret,
and quote out of context, from his
article in the Dec. 1993 issue of Wired.
Both have corrections rated 5.
Way to go!
The Slashdot self organizing community does self correct.
Many respondents (both today and last week)
seem truly unable or unwilling to understand basics of interface design,
or even the importance of it, let alone more complex ideas
(like those addressed in "The Humane Interface" and books like it).
All the more reason for a new topic heading.
I had emailed Jef Raskin about
Slashdot's linking to the osOpinion.com
editorial regarding his OSX concerns.
He replied with a lengthy response to the Slashdot thread.
Regardless of the decision about the new heading,
here is what he wrote in response to last week's thread.
Jef Raskin wrote:
Thanks to Slashdot for notifying its readers of Michael Burg's article about
my opinions on operating systems; unlike a lot of such articles, his was
quite accurate. I have only a few comments on the article itself, which I
will get to in a minute.
The reader commentary, mostly anonymous, ranged from helpful and insightful to stupid and spiteful. Often, when the writer did not know how to do something I proposed, they labeled it impossible. In other cases, they assumed an inept solution of their own and then criticized their own solution, assuming that it would be how I'd do it.
I do not imply malice to the contributions. This kind of stuff happens even with well-meaning writers. For example, my friend Simson Garfinkel reviewed my book "The Humane Interface" in Wired. He critiqued only one point in the book (about how to ease password-protected sign-ons) by assuming a particular implementation, one which I'd never propose. I sent Simson an email showing how it could be done quite nicely, and he agreed that he'd goofed (perhaps I should have given an explicit method). Unfortunately, the tens of thousands of readers of Wired will never know this.
Fortunately, I can communicate directly with the Slashdot audience.
My main critique of OSX has not to do with the underpinnings, which represent a long-needed set of improvements, but with its user interface. Burg clearly stated this. Many readers seem to have missed his point. I have always thought, and still think, that UNIX is a work of genius. I was a UNIX hacker for years, and its elegance, power, and flexibility continue to be an inspiration. It is based on a deep understanding of operating systems. The designers of Unix, and the majority of programmers who have gone on to expand it and to develop Linux, OSX, and other derivative systems, have not had a correspondingly deep understanding of user interfaces. As a result, the interfaces are difficult to learn and much harder than necessary to use.
This is admitted by the UNIX world, which builds shells to protect us from its interface ugliness. Unfortunately, the various GUIs and other front ends have been created by people who do not have a as masterful understanding of interface design as they do of computers. Thus, the interfaces suck deeply.
The failings of the OSX interface are less excusable because it is a contemporary product, and the designers did not take full advantage of what is known about interaction.
A primary audience for my book "The Humane Interface" is my fellow nerds and hackers who have as little patience for psychological mumbo-jumbo as I do. We needed, and the existing literature did not supply, a sourcebook of straightforward and first principles with real, quantitative, measures that a programmer or software architect could use (not just a bunch of examples that peter out when you try to apply them to other problems). I assume that my readers are not scared off by a few logarithms.
Burg quotes me correctly as saying that an operating system "is the program you have to hassle with before you get to hassle with the application." But the rest of the quote, "It does nothing for you, wastes your time, is unnecessary" applies only to having to deal with the operating system's interface. The stuff an OS does underneath, such as handling disk I/O, is, of course, essential. It is as essential as the circuit that comprises the disk motor clock, and the application-level user has as little need for knowing how one works as a programmer needs to know the other. Today's GUI interfaces require the user to understand far too much. They are primitive, crude, and surprisingly counterproductive. Burg put it well: "In short: the omnipresence of the OS is obsolete."
But he also said, "The ability to be transparent, such as on the Palm handhelds... is far more important." Unfortunately, this is only a relative transparency. You still have to launch applications on the Palm. The OS is still obnoxiously there. But that's a whole other article that I won't repeat here (surf to my article "Down with GUIs" in Wired).
Another example where Burg is still trapped in the old paradigm, while struggling mightily to escape, is where he said, "The idea of walking up to a PC in sleep mode and hitting a button, which would instantly activate a specific app, is compelling." He is still thinking in terms of having to hit a button and having applications. This tells me that he has gotten, maybe, a third of the way to understanding the kinds of interfaces that would really be easy to use. But, to quote his dead-on concluding paragraph "Raskin
wasn't criticizing OSX for its qualities as an OS, but for the fundamental principal that it represents: something standing between you and whatever you want to do."
Now let's get down and dirty and deal with some of the threads that followed the article.
As TheJohn pointed out, "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."
An example of what TheJohn was talking about is a statement like this, from another poster "is that what the world really wants? a simple pad to activate your apps, a disk (cartridge) for a simple install and no real flexibility? I can see my grandma or mother using it, but me, my father, my sisters, or really anyone whos not "afraid" of that off white box would disregard it as another applience." I never suggested anything of the sort. Never have, never would.
My Canon Cat design has been dumped on by the ignorant for its supposed limitation to its own built-in tasks. In fact, you could write code, even assembly code, in the word processor and execute it without leaving the letter you were typing. The user had access to all system resources. True, we didn't want users to execute code by accident. You had to type in a one-time password (it was in the manual) to gain access. That was it.
To get at the Mac's power, you have to buy software, like compilers. My kind of designing gives far more flexibility than what we now have. So much for that rant. bear@spdcc.com pointed out that the piece was poorly titled. I had the same thought when I read it.
Here's another case of someone being misled by their own preconceptions: Burg's article said, "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." To which someone replied, "This is all very nice and good,but what if you wanted to use a spreadsheet instead?" I've explained this many times in print, so I won't go into it again as this reply is getting longish.
Dancin Santa said, "It's one thing to make an OS as non-intrusive as possible, but it's a whole different proposition to remove any semblance of an OS altogether." Yup, it's a whole different proposition. And it can be done.
osgeek@my-deja.com says (I have a lot of respect for those who sign their opinions), "A palm pilot is a very specific device that is normally only used for several simple applications: taking notes, scheduling, and keeping contact info. As soon as you start adding tons of varied applications to your Palm Pilot, you begin to find that its specialized interface & transparent OS are a hindrance." osgeek is so correct! But he or she went on, "You begin to wish that you had a better way to organize your files or add hardware. If you could keep adding all of that functionality back in there, guess what you'd have... a PC." osgeek is so wrong! Just because osgeek can't see anyway around the problem s no proof that it can't be solved. This is another case of a reader tripping on his own boxed-in-ness.
Unfortunately, osgeek then becomes less civil, "Everyone is always looking to topple the PC with bullshit articles and arguments like Raskin's. They think that just complaining about it is going to inspire the industry to create something new and different that will change everything. For once, I'd like to see one of these pundits put forth a legitimate idea for the future of computing that might obsolete the PC - and no, web phones, PDA's, and Internet-saavy refrigerators don't count." I heard stuff like that about my "complaints" about usability before I created the Mac at Apple. Why does osgeek assume that I'm not developing something right now? Does osgeek know about the systems I've designed for various companies over the last decade?
A quote from another commenter thought my machine would work like this:
"Turn on keyboard
Type letter.
print letter.s
You don't have to tell me I'm right, I know I'm right!"
Wrong. You shouldn't have to turn on the keyboard.
Sourav.mandal@nospam.ikaran.com wrote, "The 'computer as appliance' vision is stultifying. There's a reason a computer has totally general input (keyboard, mouse) and output (pixel-based monitor, sound) devices -- people want their workspace to be totally abstracted from the hardware in which it resides."
Sourav, thinking to disagree with me, actually agrees. Read my book, which says that our present hardware, with its general text and graphic input devices and graphic and aural output devices are a sound basis for the future.
Who is it that these people are arguing against?
Enough examples. There was also a personal attack that requires an answer. I've run into this many times and usually just point people to the original sources (you can find many at <http://library.stanford.edu/mac/>) or to careful book-length accounts of the history such as Linzmayer's well-researched "Apple Confidential" or Malone's "Infinite Loop".
Sabat said, "Jef Raskin did not have any hand in designing the Macintosh as we know it. He had the original idea of an "appliance" computer (sound like his current rant?) and started the project, misspelling its name as "Macintosh" (instead of McIntosh). Shortly after, Steve Jobs kicked Jef off the project and changed it completely, basing it on the idea of a low-cost version of the Lisa (which was not selling well at $10k a pop). Guys like Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson are to thank for the Mac GUI, not Jef."
First, what does it mean to invent something? Edison invented the light bulb, and the Wright brothers invented the airplane. However, Edison certainly had no hand in designing the fluorescents that illuminate my office, and neither Wilbur nor Orville contributed to designing the Boeing 747. In 1978 I saw that Apple had no product that would take the company into the future. I also believed that getting personal computers to the world in quantity would require making them far easier to use. This was a vision very different than anything at Apple at the time. I called my invention "Macintosh" after my favorite apple, the McIntosh. I changed the spelling to avoid (I hoped) conflict with the McIntosh hi-fi company.
I did coin the term "information appliance," so I knew that the Macintosh was not one. I designed it with provisions for bus expansion because I knew that people would want to add hardware. I wanted to have a programming language built in. Jobs took the bus expansion off and deleted the programming. The bus came back with the Mac SE, but you still(!) have to buy programming languages for it.
Thousands of people have contributed, some brilliantly, to the Mac and its applications. I didn't write a single line of code or design a single circuit. I did hire great people and give them a direction which did not then exist in the personal computer world. I did create a number of new interface methods now taken for granted in every GUI-based machine.
Sabat is unaware that the Lisa was originally a character-generator machine, and it *gained* its graphics-based screen from the Mac project. (I went over and convinced the Lisa team to change their architecture.) Jobs did not kick me off the project; that never happened, and is insulting to Jobs as well. (The facts are to the contrary: When I resigned, he tried to convince me to stay).
I don't want to belabor this, or detail here the influence of Xerox PARCs outstanding contributions to interface design. Bottom line is that I created the Mac and ran the project for nearly four years. A zillion details were changed (some for the better, some for the worse) both while I was project leader and afterward my basic vision of a computer-based-on-an-interface instead of the prevailing build-it-and-then-add-random-software did change the face (and interface) of computing. Jobs, Hertzfeld, and Atkinson were major factors in making my invention a commercial reality, along with many others (Brian Howard was especially important, but rarely mentioned). My dream became their dream.
Get the facts and turn down the flames. I am always happy to discuss real issues.
-- Jef
</ Jef Raskin>
Sorry; I hit "submit" when I intended to "preview" before. This reads better.
If Bobby Fischer told me how to play chess, or Bill Gates told me how to make money, I'd listen, I'd thank them, and I'd think long and hard before I contradicted them.
Please forgive my mistakes, & thanks for reading,
J. Daniels
"Kindness is my religion." The Dalai Lama
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Gimp already runs under MacOS X. However Gimp is dependant on X Windows for it's display and this doesn't ship with MacOS X. Instead Apple developed their own Display-PDF based "Quartz" graphics engine and then built their "Aqua" GUI on top of this.
X-Free86 has been ported to Apple's Darwin & MacOS X but it doesn't run under Quartz/Aqua. Thus under MacOS X one must shut them down and run X-Free 86 on it's own; not most Mac users first choice since they then can't use any native GUI applications.
Tenon does have a commercial X Windows server for MacOS X that runs under Quartz/Aqua. Indeed it already runs Gimp just fine. "Xtools" is still in extended beta but it's expected to be final when MacOS X finally ships. This is the sort of thing most Mac users are likely to be most interested in - X windows as a peer and not a separate environment.
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.
"The user must be in command, and the computer, the obedient servant. "
:)
I don't know about you, but I work only to support my computer habit.
I don't use eleetism in my Email
... is a *TIGHTER* integration
d
/k *cdd %1
/e,%_cwd
;-)
*Why* can't I select files in the gui, and have a shell "smart enough" to know what I selected!?
Or,
*Why* can't I select files in the shell, i.e. select *.txt *.doc, and have those files selected in the gui explorer!?
Here is how I have a partial compromise on my Win2K boxes:
I press Windows-E to bring up the explorer, with drives on the left pane, current contents of the selected folder on the right pane. I can right-click on a folder/directoy, and I get a menu choice "4NT Prompt Here" A shell opens up with it already in the selected directory.
If I navigate around in the shell, changing directories, I have a command called "explore", (which I usually make an alias called "x") that brings up the 2 pane explorer view, with the current directory allready selected!
It is REAL handy being able to go back and forth between the shell and the gui explorer.
Here is how you can do this under Windows...
Regedit:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Prompt\
(Default)&Prompt there
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Prompt\comman
REG_SZ: 4NT
explorer
4NT has the special commands "cdd" for change drive & directory, and %_cwd for "current working directory", since the default cmd.exe that ships with Windows is, uhm, under-powered
Not to say that it couldn't be done, but if you want Gimp to have an interface consistent with OSX (I don't mean aqua, I mean menu selections, keyboard shorcuts, dialogs, etc), that will necessitate some major changes. If you like appearances, this will especially be an issue. For starters, there's the matter of menus. The menu selections in Gimp (as pretty much in all other GNOME programs that use libgnomeui macros) are copied from M$. This means getting into the source code and changing the menu selections such as "Exit" to "Quit"(and dealing gracefully with the unused underline accelerators). It sounds petty, but mac people are UI afficiado's, and we don't tolerate windoze-lookin' stuff. You also have to keep in mind that the Gimp UI was designed for a UI system that doesn't have the menubar at the top. In order to have multiple top-level windows without having a menu for each one(which might be weird in a graphics program), gimp on X-windows uses (and IMAO, abuses) the hell out of contextual menus (aka right-clicking). To get GIMP to work, look, and feel well on an UI that implements a global menubar (such as OS X), you're going to have to move or duplicate alot of the stuff from contextual menu and put it in pull down menus. And some stuff that you find in a right-click menu might not translate very well to a global menubar menu if it's blindly copied. Yet more code writing.
There's other UI matters, such as dialogs. For example, mac users are used to seeing dialogs that have the "Cancel" button on the left and the "OK" button on the right (UI experts such as Bruce Tognizzini say this is the correct way to do it, but that's another arguement for another time). Gnome does it the other way (the Windows way), where you have "Ok" on the left and "Cancel" on the right. Until the Gnome project decides to implement some sort of platform look and feel code (or libgnomeui for OSX is seriously recoded), the dialogs in Gimp under OSX wouldn't look like real mac dialogs.
Finally, the other thing you have to keep in mind is that Gtk/Gnome straightly recompiled without serious work probably wouldn't take advantage of all those tasty OSX/G4 graphics features like Altivec (someone correct me if the powerpc linux gdk, libart, etc. work well with altivec), PDF-based graphics system, and color correction. I'm not saying a port of Gimp to OS X can't be done, but to keep UI consistency with OS X and utilize all its special features and optimizations to the fullest would probably be a lot of work.
I'd like to see it happen, tho'.The ATI video cards since the Rage 128 based units have had one thing sorely lacking in any other video cards even today: an integrated idct (inverse discrete cosine transform, if I recall) unit in the video hardware. Basically, the idct is the most intensive part of MPEG-2/DVD decoding, so doing it in hardware takes most of the work off the CPU. Granted, a full hardware MPEG-2 card takes almost all the burden off the processor, but there's something you obviously don't know.
Hardware isn't necessarily better than software, if the hardware takes shortcuts that the software doesn't and you have enough processing power to run the software. I myself have a Hollywood+ card which I have been very happy with--I used to laugh at those fools using PowerDVD or other software-based DVD players, when I had dedicated hardware that had higher image quality.
However, for analogue video capture as well as its TV tuner features--the best on the market, bar none--I got an ATI All-in-Wonder 128. On my old K6-2 400 machine it couldn't play DVDs well at all, which was fine since I got the Hollywood+ for that. Well, when I got my new KT7-RAID not too long ago, with a processor that'll o/c to 1GHz, I reformatted and reinstalled everything. I tried the ATI's DVD software, just to soo if it worked with the faster machine and all--and it did, surprisingly so. It has much better image quality than the Hollywood+ does. I hate to say it, since I championed the REALmagic card for so long, so smug that it was better than any other DVD solution. But, the fact is thatimages don't lie, and after comparing the output time and again from both cards--the Hollywood+ with its complete hardware MPEG-2 decoding, and the ATI with its hardware idct unit and the rest in software, I came to the reluctant realization that the ATI unit had a much clearer, more detailed image.
The key is that I think the Hollywood+ must be trying to do some edge enhancement or something, because when I examine the two streams on my 20 inch 1600x1200 display, the ATI looks extremely lifelike and the Hollywood+ seems to look duller, less sharp but with more prominent edges. To try to eliminate resolution as a factor, I dropped down to 800x600 and 1024x768 to see if it made a difference--but it didn't. The ATI was always clearer, crisper, than the H+. This was on a new install with the latest drivers and the latest VIA 4-in-1's and the latest BIOS, with a Pioneer 10x DVD drive, and everything seemed to be functioning perfectly.
Basically, I think the ATI's DVD software, based around the Cinemaster decoding engine, does a reference-quality job of decoding DVDs. The H+, on the other hand, seems to use some edge enhancement trick, or just doesn't decode as well. I think it's the former, because the H+ does in fact look better than the ATI when viewed on a standard television via the on-card TV Out. I think the H+'s decoding engine was designed around the idea of decoding DVDs for display on a standard TV, which doesn't benefit from a clear full-res picture but does benefit from a little bit of modest edge enhancement. Now, I could be totally off base with thisedge-enhancement theory, maybe the H+ doesn't do that, but the fact remains that its picture is not nearly as clear and pristine as that of the ATI at high resolutions or the native DVD res, though the H+ does look better than the ATI on a regular TV. The other area in which the H+ is superior is in its color: it has more vivid, rich colors and saturation than the ATI, but this is a function ATI and Cinemaster could easily improve in future software revisions--as it is, the ATI software offers little in the way of color/saturation/hue/brightness tweaking, while the H+ gives you total control.
And it could go without saying that the ATI needs more CPU time, but even with my little Duron cranked down to a paltry 700 it still only eats ~30 to ~50 percent of the CPU, with a few other processes in the background to boot. The H+ uses much less, but the tradeoff is in image quality. Disagree all you want, but as an owner of both I have compared performance and decided to use the ATI when viewing DVDs on my PC, but when playing them on my TV for other people I use the H+. At high res, the ATI wins hands-down.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
1) Virtually all of today's GUI's are derived directly or indirectly from his work on and before the Mac.
2) He's written a book that explains what 'something much better' might look like.
Then came along Apple with their underpowered Macintosh programmed in assembly language and Pascal. They produced something that looked nice, but its model of applications and data was not much different from your average DOS machine. And that metaphor has held the desktop in a tight grip ever since and been copied over and over again, by Windows and now Gnome and KDE.
I think what Raskin is complaining about is ultimately due to Apple and their initial success with what was already then a broken paradigm. It seems like adding insult to injury for an Apple employee to come back now, 15 years later, and say that everybody is doing things wrong. Well, of course we are doing things wrong. That's because the market and users expect things to be done "wrong". Undoing the damage now will be much harder because everybody now expects things to be done that way.
Others have Linux because of either the free/open-source model as a philosophical thing, or because they're in education and linux (w/ the source codes) is a great way to learn OS design and implementation.
I couldn't name one person out there who says "yeah, i just HAD to go get Linux 'cause there's this great Desktop called GNOME out there..."
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I'm sure he has some great ideas (it's giving me a few ideas) but I don't think he's helping himself much. The whole piece was "I didn't say that. If you would read my book you would know better." Well, let's see. Here's an (printer friendly version) article by him, from Wired magazine.
p r.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/1.6_guis_
What does he say? The same stuff he says he didn't say. Start typing to make a document. Start drawing with a pen tablet to make a drawing. "One big mistake is the idea of an operating system." And, "An operating system, even the saccharine Mac or Windows desktop, is the program you have to hassle with before you get to hassle
with the application. It does nothing for you, wastes your time, is unnecessary."
How can he blame his critics for saying such things?
AI shell> get all files ending in tmp in my home place
OK, I've found 10 files for your request
AI shell> go to the place where my temporary files are stored
OK
AI shell> drop the files there
10 files dropped.
You have been eaten by a Grue.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
AI Shell> Go North
Ok.
You see a troll.
AI Shell> Kill Troll
You hit the troll.
Troll says "p0uR h0t gr1tZ d0Wn mY pAnTz!"
Troll died.
You found one suspicious box of kleenex (used).
And for the bloat-haters out there, such an "AI Shell" would actually be very similiar to the natural language interpreter in Zork and other Infocom games. And that ran fine on 8-bit 48K machines.
Apple has something similiar with HyperTalk/AppleScript, but the filesystem bindings are really wierd, and furthermore, it doesn't really run interactively.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Definitely. The command line for the average user is absolutely garbage. Why doesn't the Linux/FreeBSD community recognize its explosive growth for what it is: proliferation of decent GUI's like KDE2, Gnome and Eazel is causing the growth.
I have a professor who's been using Unix for some 20 years (he is the only one in our college with a Sparc on his desktop), and he prefers the GUI to the command line for most tasks. I installed RedHat on his laptop, just with the command line (he originally said this was fine) and he came back in a month asking for X-Windows.
Point is, neither the command line nor most GUIs are terribly intuitive. But GUIs, for the end user, make a hell of a lot more sense. Unix's underpinnings are great. Its current interface is absolute garbage.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
He just hates to be wrong...
he refered to us as "making a mistake" and "he is disappointed so few of them(us) took the time to understand the context of his remark(s)"
Not once does he say, "well I guess I should have said".....or "what i meant was"....He seemed to blame us for not getting it. As if he made no mistakes, but it was the reader that was mistaken 100%.
I guess I just dont like the idea that he did not put his ideas out correctly and then goes on the make it the reader's problem - I almost get the feeling of "if you did not read it right, you are dumb."
Quite cocky if you ask me...
Jef is right.
When you're writing a document in your favorite OS, be it OS X, Win2k, or Linux, it should be the interface of writing the document, and not the interface of the OS, that you should be dealing with. The constraint, put before by he and his crew upon the first iteration of the Mac OS, was of consistent UI so that all apps looked alike and felt alike. It was supposed to lessen the learning curve.
What he is saying isn't wrong. If the OS is an interface you have to learn first, before you can use your app or do your work, it is a waste of time, it is unnecessary. Hardware should be powerful enough today that the OS intrusion should be minimal. When you're using something like Netscape, a web browser, it should be a world of URLs, links, images, files, and content. You shouldn't have to worry about fonts, except perhaps as a preference, or printer setup, except when you want to choose specific printers, or about security settings, except when you want warnings or such. Compare that with Linux, and compare that with Windows. Printers and fonts and stuff just works behind the scenes. Netscape does it's part, and gets what it needs from the OS, without having to fiddle with configuring printers for Netscape, configuring fonts or font servers for Netscape, etc.
Or something similar with CD burning, under OS X and under Windows. If the drive is connected, all you have to do is drag files to it to burn stuff to it! No interface windows, no volume information, no format or filename or filesystem fiddling. Just treat is as another device to write to!
Treat ripping music, making mp3s, and burning them as one set of functions. That's iTunes. OS doesn't get in the way. In fact, if OS really didn't get in the way, the CD should automatically connect with CDDB, so that when you popped up explorer or Finder, the CD has all the names, titles, album info, etc. Drag one of these items into an MP3 folder, or just drag the whole CD into the MP3 folder, and mp3 files, or even a whole mp3 album, gets created. The UI, in this case drag and drop, don't get in the way, and are the seamless transparent means by which one could operate. The OS merges functionality with the Apps involved, but it's the app you're using that gets the focus.
His much maligned word processing example; start typing, and the OS should figure out you're writing an email, or a letter, or drafting a document. Does the system do it for you now? No, you need to find the right icon or the right folder, first. Why should this be? Why should the system be smart enough to figure out what we need? If you want to start browsing, just typing http://slashdot.org into a commandline-like interface should be enough to bring up Netscape. If you want to send an email, typing louisjr@nospam.com should bring up the right email program. Want to play music? How about 'play sad_songs' Or pop a CD into the drive. Want to copy it? 'copy CD to c:\scratch\music'
Of course, my own guesses and implementation of Jef's idea may be broken too. But I think there's merit.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Mac OS X is basically BSD under the hood, so source compatibility should be good. I was able to compile and run most of the Obfuscated C Contest entries without a hitch. XFree86 has already been ported to OS X in full-screen mode; a hot key toggles between it and the normal OS X interface. Tenon is working on a (commercial) rootless X server for OS X, they have a beta available here.
I really tend to judge OS's by looks a,d not substance I suppose, which is why I like gnome and Macs and not MS so much.
I hope you're not implying that MS wins on substance :)
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Mac OS X has very little to do with Mac OS 6.0-7.5, and the relationship between them is only on the surface. (Hell, not one machine that can run Mac OS 7.5 will run OS X.) Mac OS X is not an "old-designed, cooperative multitasking OS;" it is "UNIX... made at least somewhat usable to Joe Schmoe."
The Mac OS's strength has always been its powerful but easy to use (the two are not mutually exclusive) interface. It was never designed for novices; it was designed so that the computer does not get in the way of the user's work (as Raskin said). The user could be a third grader or any power user who could stand the OS's admittedly weak underpinnings. The lack of a command line does not make Mac OS < 10 a toy for third graders and grandmothers; it makes it a tool that a relatively large audience can use relatively efficiently, whether they be third graders, grandmothers, or people who know computers very well and have real work to get done.
At the risk of pointing at the blatantly obvious, Mac OS X has a GUI that seems like it will be at least decent (it may not be as mature as Mac OS 9 until version X.1 or X.2) coupled with a command line (for those who want it) all built on top of a buzzword compliant core.
Therefore, Mac OS X is an OS that third graders can and 'power users' can both use as they see fit. I've been running the Public Beta for 4 months now, and this is definitely not your grandmother's OS (although mine will be using it :) ).
Apple has "been dying" for the past 10-12 years or so. Just like I wouldn't reccomend Linux for people who have problems running winblows, I wouldn't reccomend an AVID or an SGI to someone who just wants to edit their Public Access TV show.
Having worked on SGIs and Apples (both Mac powered AVIDs and standalone DV-equipped Macs), in both professional and commercial-grade applications, Apple is *far* better at doing most TV-quality applications that need to get done.
Unless you're doing Music Video editing, special effects, or are producing the next 3 hour long movie, an Apple w/ Final Cut Pro (or even Imovie) will do what you want, when you want it to, without having to resort to more costly options that produce only marginally higher quality stuff.
P.S. G4 video output made for TV production and watching DVDs. Most PC video cards are made for playng quake. Which tastes better: Apples or Oranges?