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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.