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Jef Raskin On The Mac
der Kopf writes "Jeff Raskin, one of the creators of the Macintosh and inventor of the click-and-drag interface, states in an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian that "the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine."" While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP.
what about the overwhelming majority of users who have no trouble at all using more than one button?
We tend to have lots of cheap USB mice with multiple buttons lying around the house, so not including one in the box is not a big deal.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
When Apple bought NeXT (and Steve Jobs) in 1997, the joke was "NeXT was paid to take over Apple". Indeed, Apple today is just a consumer/prosumer version of NeXT.
The original Macintosh and the original Macintosh OS had input from Raskin, but also from a whole score of designers working to make a GUI-based computer for "the rest of us". (http://www.folklore.org). Over time, Apple added more and more features to Mac OS until it became the Mac OS 9 horrible mess.
Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD). If you run across something about Mac OS X that seems un-mac-like or just plain weird (and isn't a true bug), it's probably an intentional NeXTism.
Raskin didn't like the NeXT in 1988, there's no reason why he'd like Mac OS X in 2004.
How the hell is that a jab?
When I fire up my PC with Win XP and compare it to my G5 with 10.3.5, there's a fair bit of difference between them.
It's not a jab if it's the truth.
He did, though it was a long time ago. See information on Raskin's Canon Cat. It would be interesting to see him make a more modern computer interface, but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.
and you missed his point. Jeff is talking about BLOATED software, not seti, and not CPU performance. Jeff is talking about a simple program that now takes much longer to open files because they are filled with all sorts of information the user does not care about, etc. What he is saying is that a similar program that used to run on his Apple II executed it's much simpler tasks faster than today's counterpart. For a guy who focuses on simplicity, it comes as no surprise that he doesn't feel he needs faster CPUs.
When purchasing a mac (at least from the online store) you have the option of buying a mulitple-button mouse. I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if it weren't the same way at one of their retail stores.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
It's easy to write a concise Mac OS "Classic" manual when there's no command-line interface, nor are there any Unix underpinnings.
A default install of Mac OS X contains a full Unix environment. (You can opt to not install the "BSD Subsystem", which just doesn't install terminal.app and several Unix userland applications).
I've seen emacs books that are 400+ pages and I've seen a 700 page sendmail manual. There are entire volumes of perl manuals. One could easily write a 10,000 page Mac OS X "Manual".
Maybe Apple should team up with ORA to write a 100 page getting started / user manual, like NeXT did in 1988. The Mac OS X interface is actually pretty simple, and an average user can only initially see about 20 control panels, about 15 applications, and about 15 utility applications. As long as you ignore the command-line world and don't write chapters on file sharing fundamentals or netbooting, I'll bet a 100 page manual would be quite sufficent.
(Source, Insanely Great by Steven Levy)
--AC
What, you mean you don't like emacs and perl? :)
I personally find Mac OS X to be rather simple (unless you dig into the NetInfo database or fire up terminal.app). There aren't that many applications or control panels in a default install. Adjusting settings are also much easier these days in 10.3 Panther than they were in the wild days of 10.0 Public Beta in 1999.
Mac OS X is only slightly more complex than NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP of 1988/1994. (Unless you're a developer... not just ObjC and NSAPI, now you have C++, Java, OpenGL, OpenAL, CoreThis and CoreThat, etc...)
You don't have to rely on your impression of him, or consider a *possibility* that his ideal machine might be different than what we have now. You could instead read what he's written, but for free on his website and in his book; you could download his "The Humane Editor" and play with the second draft of his ideal interface.
And your claim that Jef designs interfaces for novices is purely ignorant. Jef designs interfaces almost completely without regard for novices; all of his calculations are designed to ensure ease of use, NOT ease of learning. He does give lip service (and work) to ease of learning, but all the math calculates and optimizes actual ongoing ease of _use_.
-Billy
where as XP uses an NT core
XP *is* NT.
Well, OK, XP is NT 5.1.
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) is NT 4 with minor kernel updates and modern DirectX support. (I think NT 4 was limited to DX4!) There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.
Windows XP is NT 5.0 with minor kernel updates and a new appearance manager. There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.
Interestingly, XP SP2 has a very significant update: out-of-the-box support for multiple simultaneous users, via the local console and/or remote desktop.
well, if you're talking about computer human interface (which we are, because this is about Jef Raskin), what you've said is not true. that's not what a review by Anand said when he reviewed his new PowerMac G5.
p.3 and p. 4 are particularly pertinent:
The fundamental difference between OS X and Windows is how applications and windows are handled. What OS X has going for it is uniformity between applications and windows; for example, the keyboard shortcut for the preferences dialog in any OS X application is Command and the "," key. So, regardless of what application you're in, the same keystroke combination will have the same expected effect - pretty useful.
Check the whole article out. There are some things he's got wrong, but not surprising for anyone whose just switched to a totally new platform.
Iran has endorsed
That's bullshit. Try reading about Raskin's opinions on user interfaces before critizising him. A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.
My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now. If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.
He is doing it. It's called The Humane Interface, and you can download it from sourceforge and give it a try.
Given that some strengths of this interface are the same which make the CLI a good tool for advanced users, you should at ponder about it for a while.
If you believe that the current GUIs is "quite efficient" for intermediate users then you have not seen many of then doing something even a little bit complex. This quote from the interview perfectly resumes the real situation:
" There has been immense progress, primarily in the richness of applications. But all this power is lost on many people, and impedes the utility of it for the rest, because of the unnecessary complexity of using computers. "
You have to bear in mind that the human brain is a processor with limited power, it's main bottleneck being it's small short-term memory. Also the Input/Output protocols are constrained by perceptive capabilities. A guy who promotes design ing software optimized for this restrictions is worthy of some respect, moreover given that he is able to provide some actual solutions.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
This NPR interview (audio) is much more interesting / in-depth:y Id=1606665
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
But it seems to me that research towards more complicated UIs (and how to manage the complexity)
And that's just what Jef Raskin's doing in his daily job. Your point is?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Mac OS X requires more horsepower than XP. There's more overhead with Mach, the Unix underpinnings, the Cocoa classes, and the Quartz PDF graphics engine. It's a tradeoff between the original (but old) NeXT code and modern clean design.
That said, I've found Mac OS X 10.3.x to run fine on a 500 MHz G3 with 384 MB of RAM and Rage 128 graphics. 10.3 will work "OK" on 350 MHz with 256 MB (basiclly the slowest slot-load iMac or slowest blue & white G3 tower). 10.2 and older are far slower, and performance on a first-generation tray-load iMac or a beige G3 is slower yet.
Rule of thumb:
With 256+ MB RAM,
OS X on Beige or Black hardware: SLOW
OS X on Colorful (slot-load) hardware: OK
OS X on Silver hardware: AWESOME
A default install of WinXP SP1a is quite sluggish on my Dell: PII/350, 192MB, RagePro. Disabling the appearance manager service (giving it the WinNT4/Win2K look) makes it quite a bit faster.
Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical:
Remember, at the time of development, mice were unheard of. A graphic user interface wouldn't have implied a mouse, and many people - presumably including Raskin himself - would have considered it a complication, an extra device that would have required user learning.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'd use mod points, but there is no "uninformative" choice.
XP SP2 has no such feature! Granted, early betas of SP2 did have this feature, but it disappeared at least 6 month ago. This feature may live on in XP Media Center Edition 2004, as I hear it may be used to handle some multi-room a/v features, but it is certainly not a feature of XP Home SP2 or XP Professional SP2.
Now, if you really want this feature, you can mix and match an early beta version of one of the terminal server dll's with some registry and group policy changes, and get this to work, but you'd be violating the EULA if you did so. [Instructions are just a google away...]
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
Dynabook was an Alan Kay thing, Raskin is the leap guy. Kay gets into rants like this too, but usually about C++ and Java and their inferiority to Smalltalk.
Control F2 brings up the menu. Control F3 does the dock. I believe these are on by DEFAULT.
They are listed in the Keyboard and Mouse control panel, and so are many many other shortcuts.
There is also a check box which makes the mac handle keyboard input pretty much like XP.
He talks about the need to have someone with knowledge (not JR himelf, but someone who has read a couple of books con cognitive sciences, and interface design) in the designer team.
Which all assumes that Jobs did not hire design people who understood such issues.
The truth is that NeXT, while a commercial failure, had a UI which was already superior to the Mac in several ways, and included many former Mac-heads among it's fanatical followers.
OS X is an improvedment on the NeXT concepts, which also retained many of the best things about the old Macintosh interface.
At the same time, it gave the option to dump things it supplanted... As a former MacOS7/8/9 user (I couldn't afford a NeXT Cube), I originally was keeping my internal HD's mounted on the desktop, just like any Aplle True Believer would probably insist on. The Finder for OS X has become so useful, however, that now the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting. I'm sure Apple would turn it off by default if it weren't for all the Jeff Raskin types who consider the old desktop metaphor such a vital security blanket that the thought of accessing all their drives through that icon on the left side of the dock merely frightens and confuses them.
The more I use OS X, the more I like it, and the more certain I am that I would never want to go back to the way that OS 9 organized the UI.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Do you mean the GEOS-64/128/Apple II GUIs from Berkeley Softworks, and the later PC-GEOS GUI from the same company, then named GeoWorks? PC-GEOS didn't have a GUI of its own; it had a flexible interface model (pretty advanced for PC stuff at that point) that used a system library (SPUI class, I think - specific UI) to apply look and feel. It shipped with a MOTIF SPUI by default, but there was some school-targeted version that had an OS/2-like (CUA?) SPUI as well. Interestingly, the PC-GEOS SDK called GOC (GEOS Objective C; Objective-C with a set of frameworks) for development... much like MacOS X does now with Cocoa! -Dan (used to be a big GEOS user, then went Linux, then OS X)
From what I've read, the closest would probably be those Royale PDAs. He was proposing a simple to use machine that run a small, fixed, set of applications.
Perhaps, but the Canon Cat was the closest product to his vision -- it was his baby.
Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical
Well, if by GUI you mean bit-mapped graphics, then the Canon Cat had a GUI. But I think most people would look askance at calling it a GUI when only one quarter of the WIMP set was used. And character-based menus for applications had been around for a while by then.
Here's how a Cat evangelist describes the interface Raskin thought was optimal:
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Raskin's idea of the ideal user interface boiled down to a souped-up typewriter. Calling it a GUI seems overly charitable.
And don't get me started on the lunacy -- still popular with some Forth programmers -- that you don't really need a file system or file format compatiblity with other computers. Arghh!
Tyler