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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!"
Important observation: You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that's obvious).
Herein lies the problem: an interface that requires relearning can, at least in a sense, be said to be flawed. Time that has to be spent up front learning a new interface is widely perceived as wasted time. In order to be accepted, interfaces generally have to be incremental improvements on an existing paradigm. Radically new interfaces, no matter how much they improve on existing UIs, are almost certainly doomed to failure.
There are obvious exceptions. GUIS were such an improvement over CLIs (at least for the masses) that they were readily accepted. I guess the same could really be said for the ascendancy of the CLI over batch jobs.
Maybe a direct neural interface...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I'm a visual being - what does it look like? Some screenshots with a bit of explanation would be nice. If I had a mac, I'd download and look for myself, but since I don't...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Seems to me that's a cheap and unslashdottable way to get a homepage!
Let's discuss some examples. One of Raskin's ideas is that we use the same core set of elementary operations for many purposes (one might say across applications). Such operations include: selection, indication, activation, moving, and copying. If we use the same small set of operations across applications, we can learn a keyboard shortcut or have special purpose keys for each, rather than look them up via menu selection using a pointing device. Why do we have all these special-purpose menu items peppering the top of our displays? Raskin argues that they are unnecessary. In a mistaken attempt to provide us with lots of functionality (feature bloat), designers have cobbled together the elementary operations as menu items. But if the elementary operations are well learned, then a rapid series of command keystrokes will be faster than the menu look up and selection.
Revolutionary, right?
Right off the bat, I think of both Windows and Mac (not a GUI linux user) and how they already have much of this built in. On windows, ctrl-x,c,v cut copy and paste respectively. The equivalent in mac os, I believe, is command-x,c,v. Now there are many more like this such as ctrl-a for selecting all items. And the shortcuts work in Word, Explorer, EditPlus, Photoshop, etc. As long as the developer(s) of the application follow the standard, they are available. So that is where this argument is moot. Its not a new idea but one that has been implemented sporadically across applications.
Also, many would agree that the concept of keyboard shortcuts is only awakened in the advanced user. A person that is new to the computer is going to rely almost exlusively on the mouse. Point 'n Click, right? Creating a standard set of keyboard shortcuts (even when there already is an unwritten standard) will not help the beginning computer user.
I don't know, I'm still going to read the book though.
1;
I'll tell ya a Jef Raskin story.
Sometime in the 1980's - West Coast Computer Faire...
Jef is on a panel, and the talk is about UI, or the
future of computing, or some such.
Jef states that he doesn't see the need for User Groups.
He doesn't like the idea that people that own computers
get together to help each other out.
He said "You don't see Washing Machine User Groups". He may have mentioned the toaster as well.
To this day, I felt he misses a fundamental point:
You don't do your taxes on a washing machine.
You don't write books with your toaster.
A lot of what we do with computers (some of us,
anyways...) is inherently cerebral, and social.
OF COURSE we are going to get together to
talk about them, in person or online.
You can dumb down a UI as much as you want,
hide as many details as possible, in an attempt
to spoon feed the masses of the Blinking Twelve.
But the fact remains: if there's some thinking
involved with the task at hand, users will want to
get together to share experiences.
So Jef, take back the example about the Washing Machine
... that some of his keystroke series in THE are significantly more awkward on a dvorak keyboard... ... which *is* significantly faster, trust me, if you have the time to learn it... ... which is about what he claims that THE is...
I think I'll just stick with my odd blend of CLI and GUI (called MacOS X) and my dvorak keyboard. At least I can customize the bindings in emacs.
( \begin{rant}[parenthetical]
Why doesn't everyone use these? At least the dvorak keyboard? If computers came with them instead of QWERTY at least as a standard option, kids would be able to learn to type this way and wouldn't even have to relearn. Seems like it would offer a greater improvement in speed than THE could.
\end{rant} )
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I've been writing software for most of my life, so I've logged a lot of hours typing on a keyboard. The observation I've made is that my hands are a lot more comfortable if I only have to push one key at a time and if I move my hands (not just my fingers) a lot.
:-)
Jef is advocating the use of shift-space to enter a special mode, then entering commands while still holding the shift key. All this is designed to keep the hands on home row. This seems awfully uncomfortable.
Not long ago the "happy hacker" keyboard came out. My boss got one. At that time I realized I may be one of the few geeks who prefers the ten cursor keys over vi/emacs key sequences. Am I alone?
Raskin's critique of scrollbars for navigation makes some good points, but that was before mousewheel scrolling.