The Humane Environment

rael9real writes "Jeff Raskin, developer of the MacOS and author of The Humane Interface [ed.: which was reviewed last year], has been hard at work with several others coding The Humane Environment. They have a developers edition out for Christmas. It runs on Mac OS 9/X. Reading the manual, it is basically a text editor/Python IDE, but it does seem to incorporate some neat ideas in the field. I can't wait to get home and try it out!"

Comments

The Relevant Links

[TheRIAAMustDie]

Bug List A list of bugs in THE that need to be fixed. When all astrixed items are completed we will make our first release.

External Technical Spec Before going on to the design of the visually-oriented zooming portion of The Humane Environment (THE), it seems wise to specify the low-level interactions that take place within the document-centric portion. Also, this portion allows interaction by the visually impaired. We specify first that software necessary to demonstrate LEAP and some of the selection and command interface techniques and other benefits described in "The Humane Interface" [Raskin, 2000]. THE is intended to run on at least Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. This specification describes the first portions to be implemented and gives some indications for future directions.

Joining the THE Team This is an unusual open-source project in that we are exploring a user interface and programming environment that is quite different than current practice. This document explains where to begin to become a contributer.

Manual The user manual, written for developers of the Humane Environment

Mission Statement To make computer technology available to a wider audience than has been possible by radically and rationally improving its usability.

Using CVS and Sourceforge.net This guide should get you a copy of the Humane Environment in its development incarnation. It is not quite ready for general user application. When it is, we will set up a simple, straightforward download.

Peace Out

Re:what's it look like ?

[furballphat]

Here's a couple of screenshots I just knocked up.

Please be nice to my poor computer.

Re:what's it look like ?

[Ponty]

It looks like a white square with text in it. It appears to be mostly keyboard. You can read the manual, but it really helps to be using the program at the same time.

And it's really funky! I'm trying, but it's fairly strange.

Re:Interesting, but....

[swbozo]

It makes me wonder.... Is this the same guy who thought all files should be arranged by association, instead of in a tree structure? That would just make things SLOPPY. I sure hope this Humane interface doesn't promote sloppiness!

"Association" doesn't have to mean "sloppiness." In fact, Hans Reiser, who designed the reiserfs filesystem, wrote an interesting paper which describes some of the virtues of associative organization of namespaces, as opposed to the traditional hierarchical organization (e.g. the Unix filesystem.)

Reiser's paper is very interesting, and IMO fits quite nicely with The Humane Environment's "no applications" paradigm. The focus then becomes the data (the stuff inside of documents), instead of the data access mechanism (applications manipulating documents.)

Re:VIM, Emacs?

[AnEmbodiedMind]

Yeah, Defn. modal... BTW, when you get stuck in that damb minibuffer active thing, press C-g rather then ESC.

OT: Escape key in vi

[jjc2222]

Now, the ESC key is nasty in vi -- generally, uppermost left key, but it also creeps on the keyboard.

FYI, you can use C-[ (Control-Open Bracket) instead of the Escape key. I find this infinitely easier, especially on a Sun keyboard (with Ctrl to the left of the 'a').