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."

Comments

Re:Command line garbage

[acroyear]

Hate to break it to you, but the "killer-app" growth of linux comes from Apache and old-line Unix stuff like NFS, and other server-side tools like Samba, not from KDE or Gnome. Yes, those can have GUI configurators, but nobody really uses them on a regular basis yet. At any rate, its servers that you set up and CAN TRUST to leave alone to do their thing without having to check on them every hour on the hour like with some other...proprietary...O/S out there...

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..."

Contradicts himself

[drivers]

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.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/1.6_guis_p r.html

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?

Re:Contradicts himself

[nehril]

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.

He is describing one system he designed that operates in that fashion. He doesn't say that all computers should operate in that way, just that once he designed one like that, and it worked. He used that as an example of how designers should break away from conventional thinking. fFr all we know the system he referred to was a simple experimental prototype. Hardly contradictory stuff for a researcher.

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."

I see no contradictions here. He is describing the "operating system" concept as it has been sold to us. What is the "Windows Operating System" to most users? It's the Start Menu, the nested menus, the dancing paperclip. In short, the cruft you have to slog through before you start typing your paper or drawing your next masterpiece. He is purposely describing what an OS is from a user's perspective, not from a computer scientist's.

How can he blame his critics for saying such things?

A great many of the derogatory comments I read here came from people who failed to see that when he says "an operating system" he is usually referring to the user interface of that operating system (average user perspective), not the collection of system calls and programs that provide access to hardware (computer scientist perspective). If you can keep straight in your head that he is a UI researcher, most of what he says makes sense, or at least makes you think.

Re:Command line garbage

[1010011010]

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.

- - - - -

you forgot:

[Fross]

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).

Re:Command line garbage

[MrBogus]

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.

Command line garbage

[Fervent]

Many people missed, and Burg did not make clear, that I was talking about the *interface* to UNIX, not to UNIX itself, which I think is a work of genius and a masterpiece of elegant design.

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.

Re:Command line garbage

[mauddib~]

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.

Well, I understand your points, UNIX interface design was initially a bit poor. But the idea of pipes (and pipelines), shell subsitution, input and output redirectors, etc. etc. has been introduced with a thought behind it.

This thought is called flexibility. And I can't underline this term even more. One of the key things why I use UNIX to it's full extend, and learned to love it, is flexibility. Small applications like sed, awk, find, grep, ls, cp and the others only contribute to this. Good editors like vi or emacs even extends this idea.

But there is a drawback in this idea and it is called "User Friendly". This term has been introduced mainly for new users. The need for this term is obvious in two ways.

First of all, not everybody is as techy as the average Slashdot reader. It is completely out of mind to think that a new computer user will pick up the idea behind UNIX and shells easily.

The second drawback in this idea of flexibility is that it keeps open too many ways for a user to interact with the OS. Again: most techies will like this idea of open-mindedness, and are always willing to learn (myself included). But it also introduces doubt in how to act on certain problems. In 10 seconds I can think of 10 different ways of finding a file on a certain operating system. This might be ideal for flexibility, but it leaves the user with a problem on how to choose his/her best bet.

The idea of using GUI's comes in mind. The use of a mouse comes in mind. But as we can see now, it doesn't really solve the problems involved in making things less complex. Instead of reading manual pages, people are now browsing through all the menus, different windows and still help pages. As it's biggest drawback it seems to loose a lot of flexibility. GUI programs tend to be bigger, capable of doing more and more things, but less than the sum of all the small command line utilities.

Of course, the need for graphical applications is very high. We just *need* them, no doubt about it, but as noted above, it also limits a lot of things. My answer: introduce a shell which is understandable for normal users. A shell which understands lines like:

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
AI shell> no, I made an error there, put them back
OK, 10 files put back to your home place
AI shell> edit the document I was working on yesterday
2 files found:
foo.doc
bar.doc
AI shell> edit the last document
OK, editor started
user gets a word editor, opening the file bar.doc

This might seem a bit strange, and really difficult to implement, but if something like this would only nearly be possible, it would be a huge leap for new users to overcome the UNIX-anxiety.

hmmm...

[iso9k]

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...

Think a little about what you said

[2nd Post!]

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!

Re:I'm really excited :P

[bnenning]

Just how compatible will Mac OSX be with Linux? There are some programs I like on Linux, like the GIMP, that I would like to use on the Mac too.

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 :)

3rd Graders and Grandmothers?!

[schwanerhill]

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?

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 is dying?

[nickfarr]

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?