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Jef Raskin Gets $2 Million To Develop RCHI
Dr Twox writes "The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces has received a $2 million dollar boost from a multi-national corporation to further develop Jef Raskin's RCHI project, a radical new and simple to way interact with computers. Co-creator of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, Raskin hopes to have RCHI finished within 18 months. "When you actually try it," says Jef. "It actually does what we say. We've got the goods."
It's built with Python and SDL, so how long before someone ports this to *nix?"
Hm,dropalofthextraletersandwecouldimediatelycompre sfilesanaditionaltentotwentypercent(dospacescounta sleters?)
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Jef, requisition a new forename, or at least some additional consonants for the one you already have.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Congrads to my friend Atul who works there ;)
There are lives at stake here!
...he got funding from a multinational corporation?
Aren't we supposed to, like, hate that, or something?
RCHI is suppoused to be an os.
using python. doesnt that sounds like a good break? a "new" proigramming language for an os that wants to change everything... sweet
"It's built with Python and SDL, so how long before someone ports this to *nix?"
Umm... correct me if I'm wrong... but wouldn't it more or less run out of the box?
Or are you really asking how long before people take it, strip it down, and glue bits piecemeal into things like Gnome or KDE, and gut it so the old-timers don't raise heck over the changes (cf. Nautilus spatial interface instead of browsers)?
No, I don't have any love for the want-better-but-hate-change crowd.
Jeff has been promoting these extremely simple interfaces since the late 1970s. The original MacIntosh computer, before Steve Jobs co-opted it and jammed it full of Xerox GUI technology, was supposed to be like this. Then Jeff partnered with the Cannon [ copier ] company with the CAT-PC. This PC had no explicit operating system. It came up in a text edit mode. The disk was one giant piece of text you could search and edit. You could highlight sections and execute them as computation.
check out the Flash demo[8MB]:
http://www.raskincenter.org/main/img/zoomdemo.swf
yet boosts claims that it really is as good as he claims "when you try it"?
he's got a crystal ball too, then? maybe that's integrated to the product to make it guess what you want. like clippy on speed.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Anybody ever tried the humane interface? From the conversations i've had with my friend on the dev team, the concept is that all functionality should be interoperable and sort of generalized i guess (perhaps somebody can give a better description). The root of the project as i recall came from the complaint that there is a lot of functional redundancy within a single program (spreadsheets that have calculators and word processors, wordprocessors that have spreadsheet functionality in them, etc.), and that they all functioned differently. So if one could flatten all of this & make a bunch of the functionality interoperable, it would make the learning curve for using these programs much more comfortable. But, i haven't tried it out yet.
There are lives at stake here!
Do this mean that with the new interface, his web site will actually indicate what it is he is talking about doing ?
This guy gets 2 million for something that doesn't even run?
I can't get the stupid THE thing to work at all.
I know! I'll write up a small p2p application and call it a social experiment! That'll roll in the dough!
i hope the interface they're designing is better than the one on their website...
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
It seems like every other day an article shows up here saying so and so (the co-creator of the Mac) is doing something new.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought it was just Jobs and Woz?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Wow! That's pretty dang neat-o.
I can already see how that would benefit online newspapers.
I have one reservation about the system though. I think it may have problems on machines with old horribly slow video cards - depending on how it's coded.
For those that don't want to actually READ the page, a demo is at the bottom of the page. Linked here. (.swf)
It's not like they read those "Is something wrong with this post?" emails..
or was that.. it's not like we use the link?
I can never remember.
Woz didn't really do much work at all on the Mac, he was mostly an Apple II guy. Jobs is a suit, not a beard, and so obviously did no real work in creating the Mac.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
A sourceforge project might be nice, or at least a Wiki.
--Mike--
Tell me, just how generous do people have to be to give you $2M, when this is your mission statement?
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
> Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought it was just Jobs and Woz? OK. You're wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh
Woz wasn't mac but apple ][
Mac was Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld on the tech side, Jobs on the marketing side and Raskin on the dreamy idea in the first place then get turfed side.
8MB to view the demo times slashdot traffic = ?
...
How much will be left of the $2 Mil
They created the Apple II.
--- Ban humanity.
does one of the masters of UI have such a hopeless website? Everything in some inane monospaced font, and on a single page. A specification that relies on the Find command for navigation. Gah.
A straightforward, hierachical system of folders, An easy to use and intuitive task bar, and keyboard shortcuts for those who want them.
How much more efficient can it get?
> Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought it was just Jobs and Woz?
You really need to read a bit about the history of the Mac. Jobs and Woz created the company, where Woz was the engineering genius and Jobs was the maketer/salesman/dealmaker. Just before Woz left Apple he contributed to the Mac's floppy drive controller. The bulk of the hardware and OS engineering for the Mac was done by folks like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld. Check out Andy's site for a great collection of stories about the making of the Mac:
http://www.folklore.org
There's no doubt this guy is the man when it comes to UI. He's got the reputation, and he's very insightful.
Unlike some of the dumber "new UI" things we've seen over the past few years (anyone remember the OpenGL one with the 3D windows).
I've got a good vibe about this one. It's been a long time since anyone even approached the UI with something "new".
Desktop
Window
Menu
Bar
Scroll Bar
Maximize
Minimize
That has been our UI for over a decade. Nobody has successfully thought outside the box in over 10 years.
The good thing about this one is that Microsoft is pretty dedicated to their own UI. Meaning Linux could gain a new feature by supporting this new Interface. Microsoft isn't likely to drop what they have. So if it is good, Linux could pick it up, and pretty much have the exclusive advantage of this revolutionary new way to interact with computers.
Hey that's uncalled for!
Dyslexia is a serious problem.
Is this the guy responsible for the bloody one-button mouse? Reverting to pessimism...
Did ya find the picture of the intersection on Market Street in the demo???
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Isn't it (this self-promotion) against some rule on SourceForge? SF exists to host collaborative development of free software, not to promote the work of someone or to sell his books.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Holding down the Caps Lock key and typing. I supposed it's touch to top Ctrl+Alt+Del...
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
The demo is way cool. It'll be interesting to see how this system scales up. Would it work for navigating all the files on a computer (with ~100k files on my system), for instance?
Maybe they could make the zooms "snap" between levels of group/detail, rather than wait for the widgets to enlarge. The data is structured, though their cluttered display suggests little of that. We don't need to struggle within all the limits of physical representation to reuse their cues in navigating among their virtual versions. And their "direct manipulation" of objects, rather than the "indirect" manipulation of, say, icons of objects, seems a great loss. No more symlinks? Every object has only a single context? It's like C without pointers. Or electronics without transistors. References are the most revolutionary aspect of the virtual world, and they are largely giving them up. So they can call the icon you select, before pressing the key to delete some disk data associated with the icon in a table in memory, the "object itself". It's not, and they've just thrown out references in the GUI paradigm where it's as fundamentally useful to users as it is in their implementation, to their programmers.
Those are elementary UI principles. I'm not working on UI fulltime, at some "UI institute", or shilling for corporate donations. Hell, those aren't even my most interesting UI kvetches, even among those I've posted on Slashdot. Give *me* $2M, and I'll amaze the world with a UI paradigm that everyone from ages 10-70 can use, in any language, on any device, from 2-way wrist radio to Discman to ATM to PC to mainframe, in any job from marketer to project manager to programmer to tester, to grocery clerk to CEO to senator. And I talk a better game, too, as well as walk a better paradigm. Fund me!
--
make install -not war
...or is Jef[f] using the zoom like the rest of the world uses hypertext? I'm thinking specifically of the picture of Jef with his book and pipe organ, next to which is information about both, smaller. A link could do the same thing.
Another one bites the dust
Anyone else remember his work on the Cannon Cat info appliance - it was early mid 80's. what a completely wild device. It was like a palm pilot but given the constraints of the day was about the size of a toaser...
No, it wasn't. The Mac was very much a team effort.
Its obvious that applications should work completely differently in a Zoomable User Interface. The separation between applications and the interface blurs, and at best disappears.
Now learn to stop saying ZUIs are a new interface paradigm. They're not. But we definitely should have them instead of the current WIMP desktop. Pssst, Avalon is a good environment for building a ZUI desktop. Yes, MS research has been doing related work around ZUIs and interaction design.
Note that this is an 8MB Flash so after you click you will be presented with a blank screen for a while.
Also, when slashdotted, the 'a while' becomes 'ever'.
-Adam
he needs some funding for the RCFBN -- Raskin Center for Better Names.
how good at human interface can he be if the best he can do is RCHI???
One thing that Raskin has gotten right is the idea that the user should not have to know your corporate structure to use the page. Niether should the user have to know his or her status within your structure. The thing that he does not address, and one reason why I found Home Page Usability less than perfect, is how to meld the utopian usability with realistic personal and corporate needs.
The reality is that most large usability problems can be solved by following his basic principles. In one school district web site, a third of the web page is used by navigation and rotating banner ads. And this is the intranet. The place where the employees are supposed to be productive. The IE only code does not resize properly to page width, and uses a lot of distrating widgets. Likewise the Rice University web presence forces the user to choose 'student' 'public' etcetera, and has no default navigation that lets you just find a map. The University of Houston has some of the same problems, but provides a second simple text navigation for those who just want some quick info.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Jobs and Woz built the first Apple computer in their garage. Years later, engineers working for Jobs et al designed the Macintosh (the Apple and the Mac are two different computers; they both are based on Motorola chips but otherwise are years apart).
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
It amazes me that a huge percentage of the computer applications we use can be better done in a character mode 3270 or vt100 terminal.
Those interested in zoomable interface might want to have a look at Flexlay, it is basically a collection of OpenGL based layers and objects that can be placed and edited on an almost unlimited large workspace (as much as a float can hold). Its currently mainly usefull as a simple editor for 2d games (SuperTux, netPanzer), but also comes with a drawing component that allows todo simple paint operations (like Gimps brushtool) on an unlimited and non-pixel based canvas. Beside zooming and panning it also has support for rotating the drawing area in realtime, which give it quite a natural paper-like feel. There is support for graphic tablets too.
Those interested in it should check out the latest SVN version, since the last release doesn't contain any of the more interesting features.
PS: This is blunt self-advertisment, hope you can forgive me, but it kind of fitted here and might be interesting for some people. And by the way its GPL.
I think the best user interface ever has already been invented. Its called VI.
There are articles describing Jef Raskin and The Humane Interface in the Wikipedia.
T.H.E. was supposed to be released as Open Source, but this really didn't happen as far as I know. That's not important though, as this interface implementation was never finished - the important bit was the system specification.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
No man, you dont get it dude. With this lil' gizmo we're gonna be totally able to way interact with computers!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Well, after trying hard to find out what exactly this is about, I have reached the conclusion that Mr. Raskin has invented WordStar.
They are called directories, not folders.
No. Bill Gates did not invent them.
Just goes to show there's people with money who never had the "opportunity" to see a Canon Cat in action, BFD ;-)
As I recall from years ago, Jeff used to claim that the division between "Operating System", "Application" and "Content" was big learning barrier and slowed down computer use. So he would essentially abolish the first two items, or at least keep them largely invisible from the user.
I wonder if something like Google Desktop is along these lines. You'd use that to immediately find some information to act on, without having to muck around some cluttered file system.
Likewise MicroSoft's attempt to webify the desktop and access it through the browser is another attempt at hiding barriers. (I will make no comments on whether I think It is working adequately.)
I was zooming in and out while moving the mouse in circles and I lost the data off screen.
Also, my keyboard arrow keys are on the right of my keyboard. So I have to reach across by body with my left hand to control the arrow keys while moving the mouse. Bad design.
Other than that, I'm not impressed by the zoom function. Sure, it's a cool hack for a webpage, but maps.yahoo.com has been doing similar things for years (and better as in the data set changes the closer you get).
I tried the flash demo. It's like a virtual screen that you can zoom in and out. Virtual screens have been available for years. The zooming thing is kind of interesting but not anything new. I assume the interface is based on a vector drawing back-end (display postscript/PDF?).
This has several problems. Is this thing suppose to manage all your documents and applications? Does that mean everything is being displayed and active at the same time? The CPU and memory requirements of this must be off the chart. This thing would totally choke based on the pure amount of data I have on my machine. Can this interface handle a terabyte or more of information?
Spacial interfaces suck anyway. It might seem like it is better for organizing your data because you can group things together and "zoom out" to view everything on a large scale, but in real life you're going to spend too much time zooming in and out trying to find what you are looking for. It is very much like those suck-ass 3D file managers that someone creates every once in a while.
I suppose you could query for items and they could be marked similar to MapQuest, then you could zoom in on it. That sounds like a very tedious to use interface though.
Really, the current UI system that most computers use is not a bad design, it just needs refinement. Modern UI's just need to be better about remembering which data items I've been working with recently and which items go with each other. We are already seeing the beginnings of this with things like "favorites" and "home/desktop" in most file dialogs these days. That just needs to be taken to a higher level and cleaned up.
Sorry if my post is disorganized, I just woke up...
The ratio of people to cake is too big
...the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. You know, the one that will create a blackhole into which will swallow the planet.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
It's always nice to see Jef Raskin's latest ideas, especially since they're so often pompous and inaccurate.
I especially love the rather arbitrary and academic distinction that the icons of today are stand-ins for objects rather than objects themselves.
If I drag a CD to the eject icon, the CD is ejected. If I delete a file using its icon, the file is deleted. If I drag a file somewhere else, the file is (for all intents and purposes) moved.
I fail to see how the hell it's useful to me to have all my documents rendered into incomprehensible text and I work on them by "zooming in" to them. When you're zoomed out, they're all going to look like the same melange of black and white anyway, so... uh... what's the big non-academic difference between direct representation and "direct enough" representation?
Also: if the interface is supposed to use the LMB to zoom in in the RMB to zoom out, but still somehow supports selection, are we all going backwards in time to Jef's keyboard interfaces? How many modifier keys will we end up with? Sheesh, just use EMACS and get it over with.
If you ever get to hear Raskin talk about the Mac -- especially when there are no other original developers around -- you'll get a better idea for just how crazy he is.
Just like a real Turing Machine! Hopefully the giant peice of text wasn't on the slowest component...
Sometimes I think that Windows runs like this, and it simply gets to the little blue end of the tape... and, like no more memory!
Here is a good place to get a little history on how the Mac came to be. Pretty interesting anecdotes from the people who made it happen.
This space intentionally left blank.
OpenDoc really was quite cool. You could literally drag your web browser (CyberDog) into your word-processor in order to embed a live web page into the document you were creating. The embedded web page would also retain all of the functionality (clickable links, forward/backward navigation, bookmarks, history, etc.) that it would have if you were to be viewing it directly from the browser. OpenDoc, though it was a great technology, was killed by Steve Jobs shortly after his return to Apple when they were losing money. You can read a bit more about it here.
--
Join the Pyramid - Free Flat Screens
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
for the most part it looks like this is ment to be a desktop. Sometimes I have trouble finding what I need on my desktop now, can you imagine what would happen when all your documents are on your desktop? I can see this as useful for someone who likes to keep lots of items on thier desktop, but right now I wouldn't use it much.
I could, however, see this as good for a very very large screen, some kinda of hand (or eye senor) and (in particular) fuzzy logic for searching. i.e. "display all my pictures from last Christmas", the system shows thumbnails, you point at what you need, or wave to go back and forth.
I guess that we'll see in ten (or twenty) years if he strikes gold once again.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
If I remember the story properly, the original chip out of MOS Technologies was the 6501, a 6800 clone. They then made some "minor" modifications (*shudder*, the ultra-8bittiness of the 6502 where even addressing was eight bit all has to do with those modifications. Quite why people loved it is something I'll never understand. Sure, it was fast, so was the 6809, and that was a beautiful chip) when Motorola threatened to sue, and called this the 6502.
The 6502, and its variants, become standard amongst half the 8 bit computers, with the Z80 being the other major chip of its day. The chips that inspired them, the 6800 and 8080, ended up becoming relatively obscure, except to lead to their eventual successors, the 68000 and 8086, that powered the new generation of "16 bit" machines.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Raskin's work is based on Fitt's Law and Hicks' Law.
Maybe he needs to take a lesson or two in web site design.
Putting all the information you have ever gathered on your front page so that it's roughly 300 pages long is sooooo 1995.
For some jobs (i.e. ssh to box A and reboot the database) vt100 works great. For things that are more complex, say dealing with two and three-dimensional data, it is not as good as it can be. I personally would not want to go back to pine for email.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Mouse cursor and arrow keys? Two hands to do what you can do with one? There is this brand new invention (from about five years ago) called the *scroll wheel*. That would be a lot easier than the arrow key. Granted, that would make it difficult for those that don have a scroll wheel, but why not have both? Not a very auspicious beginning. Of course, I'm cynical about these things. I think he is full of crap and I'd be happy for him to prove me wrong.
>>Umm... correct me if I'm wrong... but wouldn't it more or less run out of the box?
Nope. Not until you glue on a LEAP(tm) key and install a SwyftCard.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. The idea is definitely intriguing, the implementation is definitely lacking (IMHO of course).
The whole idea behind the Caps Lock key was because it is in fact awkward to hold down a key while typing for long lengths of time. (Also the shift key had the inadvertant effect of shifting numbers to symbols as well.)
As for a single command space isn't that just begging for trouble? What about the specialized commands needed for specialized tasks? Why should QUIT save the document in its current state? What's the exit without saving option then? Are you going to have to do Caps-Lock UNDO to fix a typo?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Yes, I tried the demo. Nice but... I don't know. I never really thought I had a good overview.
What about recursive structures? Two webpages linking to each other recursively, and you can scroll in indefinitely. Do this scripted and it's almost DoS?
What, if I don't *want* some content to be on constant preview, like my smut and porn?
The interface does not get rid of symlinks, they're actually replaced by something better: portals.
An object *can* be in several places, but in all them you see the real object - updated to the second and fully functional, not just a proxy of the object with its properties crippled. Also the information is browsed visually only when doing visual tasks, otherwise you browse it with incremental text search (like the one found in Firefox).
This guy Raskin is incredibly insightful on what makes computers a pain to use. The proposed system combines the power of Emacs without the hard learning curve. Read a description of the navigation tools of this system in The Humane Environment.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
"Spacial interfaces suck anyway. It might seem like it is better for organizing your data because you can group things together and "zoom out" to view everything on a large scale, but in real life you're going to spend too much time zooming in and out trying to find what you are looking for. It is very much like those suck-ass 3D file managers that someone creates every once in a while."
Zooming interfaces work best at the metaidea level. Not the "everything is a file" level.
In fact I'd like to see the return of the document centric viewpoint coupled with the hypertext of xanadu. One is why you have a computer in the first place (create a document). The other is a resource (think wikipedia on steroids).
When using the flash demo, I found that because zoom centered on where I would move the mouse pointer, the click and drag to move one's view was actually counter-intuitive. It would of made sense if the document acted as an invisible scroll bar and the direction I pushed the mouse with the left button down was the direction I wanted to go in. This would also minimize the amount of mouse movement, as I wouldn't have to reset the mouse upon re-zooming in.
Did anyone else fell this way?
If you can't keep at least some minimal standard of consistency, and if you're working to amuse yourself without giving people a rope to grab onto, no one's going to bother following you.
I realize it's in a prototype phase now, and developers of prototypes tradtionally get cute. But if he really wants to revolutionize the world, he needs to apply some basic marketing principles before he goes live with this stuff, like not naming your centerpiece "A'ali'i" or "RCHI."
I am a big fan of The Humane Interface; I reviewed the book in its early phases.
Raskin is a big fan of buttons, as long as each button does exactly one thing. He says that the best way to use a computer is to develop habits, so that you can do things without thinking about them.
That works best when things are incredibly consistent. Modes are the enemy of habits; you have to remember that in this context the right button does X, but in that content the right button does Y.
He goes for something he calls "quasimodes", where you press and hold a button to temporarily and actively shift into a different mode. You only have one mouse to do a lot of gestures, but you want to press and hold a "zoom in" button rather than clicking into a "zoom in" mode and then clicking out.
The theory is good, but I was never completely comfortable with the idea. It seems to create rather a proliferation of buttons, and new applications can't add new buttons to your keyboard. His ideas are heavily centered around everything being a word processor or spreadsheet, and I have a hard time adapting his ideas to applications that are basically forms instead. Those cases are heavily modal: typing in one field means something very different from typing in another field.
Obviously, all the teeny weeny photos blurred on extreme zoom. Maybe if that were alleviated...
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I was really inspired by The Humane Interface, and I've incorporated a lot of his ideas into what I do. But he doesn't need to rewrite it in Python.
.NET port as well.
I use Piccolo, from the University of Maryland's HCI lab. The Piccolo demo is nearly identical to the Shockwave demo app. Piccolo is originally in Java, but they have a
I use it for viewing big graphs, almsost literally "drilling down" into them: you go "down" into the page and see more detail. It's like looking more closely at a sheet of paper. My users love it (not least because it's great eye candy), and I love it because my eyesight is less-than-perfect and I like to zoom applications to read the text more easily.
I'm sure they Python groupies will enjoy having their version of it, but it's free from the Piccolo group.
The problem with present interfaces (aside from inertia), is that we have the bits and pieces, but no integration (sum of parts greater than whole).
That's what Jef and others are presently doing. by trying various parts (like a zigzaw puzzle) and seeing what fits.
The ultimate interface will be similiar to the cell phone network in that both what's local (the phone) and the global phone net work together to give a seamless experience.
Wow, can I browse the known Universe this way? Like zoom from the edge of the Big Bang down through galaxies, star systems, planets, down, down, to molecules, atoms, quarks, and maybe find strings...
Reminds me of some little song and cartoon bit they used to run on Sesame Street.
"That's about the size, where you put your eyes, that's about the size of it."
Anybody else remember that?
I'd say a more accurate way to say it is "Woz built the first Apple computer in his garage and his pal Jobs, the eternal slick salesfiend, brought it to market." Jobs didn't know squat about electronics design.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Mod parent +1 Insightful. He actually has RTFA.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Jeff says : ...In current interfaces, tasks are needlessly compartmentalized. Say you are putting together a presentation and want to place it on your website. You need PhotoShop to edit any images you use, Excel to do a financial spreadsheet, PowerPoint to compile the presentation, Dreamweaver to create the appropriate web pages, Mozilla to check it, and an FTP client to upload it when you are done. A substantial portion of your time is flat-out wasted when you are moving content from one application to another: You are fiddling with the tool and not being productive. To make matters worse, there is the time loss and frustration from errors caused by the significant mental overhead required to switch applications, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies -- A keyboard shortcut may make text bold in PowerPoint but create a bookmark in the Mozilla; You may be able to spellcheck in Dreamweaver, but not in Photoshop. A user should not have to worry or think about what application they are in, and any habits they form using the system should not be betrayed.
If you use a web-based email account, how many times have you wanted to spellcheck your email only to be forced to either use an awkward web-interface, or transfer the text to a different application, spellcheck it there, and transfer it back? Why can't you just use a full-functioned spellcheck command right there? The same spell check (and same code) that you use everywhere else. If you want to edit an image on your website, why should you have to download it with one program, edit it with another, and upload it again? Why can't you just edit the image in the browser? There is no good reason but for the inherent limitations of the concept of applications. A user should be able to issue a command (like spellcheck or change contrast) anywhere, at anytime, and have it always do the same thing. This is truly humane. It cannot be achieved with our current application-centric computing model. Thus, in THE there is exactly one workspace in which you keep and view your content and instead of standalone applications we have command sets....
This is exactly the kind of thing that OLE and ActiveX has been doing for years! You can drag drop an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document and have Excel editing capabilities inside Word. Of course, since Microsoft has pushed this, no one really acknowledges this as something cool.
"no kidding after playing with the demo of it for a while I keep finding myself trying to use the mouse to pan. the interface is that intuitive!"
Yes that's intuitive. Maybe putting some physics into the interface would help (like inertia)?
A "zoom to fit" would keep it from shrinking to nothing, as well as a "home" button.
Hey, if I had $2 million, I'd be rchi, too.
The demo design is terrible. (did I meantion ugly)
Zooming is somewhat interesting, though it could be implemented into other OSs easily enough (OS X has a zooming feature that could be mapped to mouse buttons).
This guy is so in love with text mode, that his fractal program in the demo uses ASCII graphics as if it was 1978!
I'm sure Mr Raskin is an excellent man. He appears to have a solid reputation, and I certainly wish him no ill.
However, much to my bemusement I received an e-mail nastigram from him three or four years back requesting an open source project I was (and still am) in charge of change it's name. My project had a resemblance in name to a *patent* he'd registered some years ago. My projects in an entirely different field of computing: he had issue with my software name clashing with the name of an operation within a patent. It was - in my view - utterly groundless.
So I ignored it. I never heard any more from him. It helped too that I was neither in the same country to him, privy to the same laws as him, and that ignoring such things usually does help them go away when individuals are involved. None the less, Mr Raskin was implying lawyers. I always worry when lawyers are mentioned.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, having veiled legal threats from a co-creator of the Mac (of which I'm a big fan) is an interesting experience to talk about over a beer.
I wish him all the best, but I do hope he isn't still firing nastigrams off to open source developers.
I mean, I know that I can certainly do without the nipple-clips and acid-sprays of the current breed of INhumane interfaces! One has to wonder, though, what the third-world despots and their minions will do once this breed of interfaces catches on -- pity the "banana republic" that has to run its already antiquated document management system with a laughably "90's" front end...OH, the INhumanity!!!
For some reason reading that article gives me a giant distaste for the whole project. It just seems that they are very very full of themselves.
They really think that every ones stupid except for them and their idea is going to revolutionize the industry.
They don't even clearly explain what the damn project is anyway. Just less buttons and less manuals. And 'razor' programs. Yawn. He might have some good ideas but this article is mostly hype.
in the description of the demo, he says that in an actual application, the left mouse button would zoom in, and the right mouse button would zoom out. but in the demo, holding the left mouse button pans the viewport, so obviously if you are going to use the left mouse button to zoom in, that would have to be moved to another button. on top of that, you would still need to use the mouse to interact with the objects, so you need another one or two buttons there. a scroll wheel would be nice too, but not necessary. so unless i'm missing something, in order to use this interface, you need at least 4 or 5 mouse buttons, or alternatively 4 different bucky bits for a one button mouse- i can only imagine telling a user to ctrl-shift-right click in order to achieve some task.
my other observation, which i don't see addressed anywhere, but i suspect is just another aspect of this being a flash demo, is that you can't reflow objects to fit your current viewport. apparently the author of the demo either uses a much lower resolution than i do or always does everything full-screen. if i zoom to a point where the text is large enough to be comfortably readable, i find i have to constantly pan back and forth to read it, which is definitely an interface no-no. Alternatively, zooming out so that the text fits width-wise results in barely readable text.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
In Jef Raskin's world, a world that will undoubtedly become everyone's world someday
I like good ideas. I like good thinking. I like good implementations.
I don't like when somebody tells me about something being in its (not so early) infancy that this will be your way of doing things. Let me decide that one. Thanks.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Sounds really neat, but how about a FAQ at their website? And what's with the site's layout!?!? As an engineering type I kind-of like it, but as Joe Average (the mode my brain is usually in) I can't find crap.
It's also funny that after viewing the demo and browsing some of their site, I reviewed the section on downloading and giving "Archy" (formerly "THE") a test drive. There's, like, 140 steps just to download and install this thing on Windows. The entire MS-Office suite of 10+ bloat-ware tools only takes 5 clicks of "Next."
Don't get me wrong, it's a great idea and I'm going to look for a cheap copy of Raskin's book right now.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
From Folklore.org - a funny about Burrell Smith claiming that HE invented Jef Raskin (Burrell could well have done more to make the Mac what it is than Jef - you read and decide) - you read and decide
One correction, the 6502 had 16-bit addressing, hence the 64K Apple II, Commodore 64, etc.
You might be thinking of the 8-bit X and Y index registers, and of course the *Accumulator* register was 8-bit.
As for the 8086 and beyond, I'm of the school that thinks there's a special place in hell reserved for the IBM Engineers who chose Intel's 16-bit architecture over Motorola's for a savings of what amounted to chump change even at the time. How many here have had days/weeks/months/years of their lives drained into the millions of developer person-years that have been wasted on working around the horrible memory models spawned by the x86 architecture. Of course, there's plenty of room for the Microsoft OS *cough* Eng *cough* in *cough* eers *cough* and their memory models.
I, for one, will not miss the demise of Win32 as the last relic of this dark age!
My, aren't we feeling geeky today :)
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
while jef raskin is known as a leader in human interface ideas, you have to look at what he's done to understand where his interests lie. he left the macintosh team before having a large impact - hell, he didn't like the mouse. his ideas are often interesting and thought provoking, but rarely practical and for better or worse, rarely ship.
the zooming flash demo is interesting - but why should i have my hands on the keyboard AND the mouse to navigate a document?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I used to wonder why new (or old) ultra-clean, elegant GUI ideas never caught on. I can understand why things like 3d desktops have had a rather slow start, but why do the simple things also fail to measure up to the horrible old overlapping windows model?
Well, the design of this web page makes it absolutely crystal clear:
Because these things are designed by the same kind of people who make pages like this.
Now, there are an awful lot of ways this page can be criticized, from the presentation (grey! with lots of little lines! and tiny writing! in randomly chosen fonts! monospaced!) to the utility (want to find something? try crtl-F! better, try saving the page and using grep! or maybe you can write a perl script to do it!), to the nitpicky (there's a column called 'title' and the first thing in it is not a title) and I'm sure a funny little essay could be written about it. But what's important is not the actual particular failings of this page, it's the deep lesson the page teaches.
Ideas fail because they get presented like this.
The idea in this case may be bad or good; all one can really be sure of is that it's doomed, VC or no VC.
And this deep lesson, which I am even now still awed by, is just a shadow of a still deeper truth:
People are dumb, and that includes smart people
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Raskin's lasting contributions to the Mac were pretty much the name. Jobs changed just about everything when he came in, and Raskin was pissed about it.
If it had been up to Raskin, the original Macintosh would have been text-based with a processor barely more powerful than a 6502.
--AC
The industry NEEDS these kinds of ideas! Regular users no longer want to be their own IT departments, and are getting sick of having to do so due to the usual slathering of viral/spyware problems - they'll welcome a new paradigm if it gets presented/promoted rightly.
Did anyone else get physically dizzy - as in a vertigo-like effect - when zooming in too fast? It feels like I'm falling at breakneck speed onto the paper. It was very strange, and it happened repeatedly, not just upon initial viewing...
interesting how well your brain can be fooled, even when it's being treated Humanely
It's built with Python and SDL, so how long before someone ports this to *nix?"
Good point... I'll take a stab at it:
Okay all set, it now runs on a *nix... what do I get?
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
>>Raskin is a big fan of buttons, as long as each button does exactly one thing. He says that the best way to use a computer is to develop habits, so that you can do things without thinking about them.
Yes, but he contradicts himself, too. I clearly remember Jef railing about the problems of habits -- he complained, for example, that the "Are you sure?" dialog is not just worthless, but dangerous because people develop the habit of clicking "yes" without pausing to consider the implications. So are habits good or bad, Mr. Raskin? One can't have it both ways, I'm afraid.
For a single-task system (such as his Canon Cat word processor) a single-purpose specialized interface such as a dedicated keyboard button may be fine, but for a general purpose system, which may be called upon to create documents, create video, play music, organize photographs or simulate a 3D space, dedicating a button to a task (e.g. the LEAP(tm) key) is too restrictive a model because it leads to confusion of it's own.
In short, tasks which are different should feel different, and the interface should reflect that. Personally, I think having one interface for everything is a BAD idea; and modality is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, I play a number of different musical instruments and someone asked me once, "Don't you get confused when you switch? How do you remember them all?" My answer was "It's easy -- they're different." Each one feels different, I hold a saxaphone like so, but the highland bagpipes are quite a different thing altogether. The point at which I interface with the instrument is completely different, even if I'm playing the same musical notes in the same order. The same applies to language. Russian has it's own phonems, tempo, feel, mood, which is quite different from Spanish, and different again from Engligh. Keeping them straight is actually quite easy, one just shifts to a different mode.
Getting back to the point at hand, I believe some of the most forward-reaching studies in computer-human interaction are taking place in studies which examine robot/human interaction (e.g. Sony labs and the MIT AI lab such as Cynthia Braezeal-Ferrel's Kizmet). They've gotten beyond interacting with stuff drawn on a CRT to study interactions with objects in the real world rather than a simulation. "The world as it's own model," as Rod Brooks would say, is where the future of computer/human interaction lies.
So, what does this funding source expect in return for their $2 million?
It would be a shame if after all these years Raskin finally is given the chance to implement a Humane Interface that we should all be using in exchange for making it unusable for twenty years by ANYONE as part of a holding company patent portfolio.
Then again, $2 million isn't much money in the scheme of things; maybe he worked something out.
-braddock
Would I be trolling if I say that I think Jef Raskin is totally overrated? He likes to promote himself as the "creator of the Macintosh" and an expert in optimal user interfaces, but let's remember that he opposed the use of GUIs, and believe that the "optimal" user interface involves chording combinations of arcane keystrokes. Just read the description of Raskin's [url=http://www.jagshouse.com/swyft.html]Canon Cat,[/url] then compare it to your favorite user interfaces, and realize how way off-base Raskin is.
To be fair, Jef does have some nice ideas, such that a computer should turn on instantly, and that commands across different applications should be consistent. But hey, we've already got [url=http://www.apple.com/ibook/]computers that do that.[/url]
The worship of Jef Raskin as some sort of unparalleled visionary has no basis in reality.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Them figgerin' machines? That's jest crazy talk.
The whole premise seemed to consist of:
/, ? and : in vi for the last twenty years. People use / and CTRL-G to search web pages in Firefox today.
- hold down ALT-GR to search forwards
- hold down ALT to search backwards
- hold down CAPS LOCK to enter a command
How the hell is this new? People have been using the keys
Was there a single innovative user interface technique in this application that I have missed?
And as for the zoomable ui demo: Pad++, Jazz and Piccolo have been there already. What do you have to say that's actually new, Jef?
I wish I could get $2 million investment for recycling other peoples ideas.
The main link is toast but I got to it on the Coral Cache:
zoomdemo.swf
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
body,td,th {
.fixed_document_body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
color: #000000;
}
Pretty much every style is like this: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif in that order. Most of the page usese this style. If you're getting monospaced everywhere, it's your browser settings that are at fault.
Here is the only monospaced style
font-family: Courier, mono;
font-size: 12px;
border-right-width: thin;
border-bottom-width: thin;
border-right-style: solid;
border-bottom-style: solid;
border-right-color: #999999;
border-bottom-color: #999999;
}
This style is used on the page for parts that are supposed to look like quotations from other documents, such as the "Table of Targets", which I take to be a flattened out representation of one of their hyper-documents.
WRT to the unusual organization of the page, well what do you expect? They're supposed to be challenging UI assumptions. The page actually functions pretty well, and it loads OK because it is not text heavy. My usual pet peeves aren't here or don't apply: it's possibel to figure out what the organization does; it's possibel to figure out how to contact this organization etc. So, basically it's unconventional, but I'm OK with that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was indeed thinking of the eight bit index registers, that's kind of the point! If it had had sixteen bit index registers, then it'd have been legitimate to talk in terms of 16 bit addressing. But it didn't. That's what made it horrible.
I've heard contradictory stories about why IBM chose the 8086. The one I believe, because it's the one I heard at the time, is that IBM was trying to build a natural successor to the 8080/Z80 based S100 CP/M systems that were considered the only respectable microcomputers at the time. The 8086 was largely source compatable with the 8080 (though not binary compatable...) so mainstream CP/M programs, theoretically, could be ported with ease to the new platform.
Since then the story has morphed from that to "IBM had a license to make 8086s" and other tales. I suspect, ultimately, it was a range of factors, and probably a management decision, not an engineering one.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
so where are the applications that can take advantage of it?
Like the CAT-PC and Macintosh when they first came out, hardly any applications for them. At least Apple got Microsoft and a few others to write apps for the Macintosh, the CAT-PC ended up as a weird word processor.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
... since geniuses often obfuscate simple things that people have already grown accustomed to. And as such, I see it perfectly reasonable to waste another 2 million dollars on this ridiculous project. People don't think spatially; they think categorically. This is why filing systems and folders work so well and why it's so easy for some people to get lost on a desktop which is larger than the viewable image on the screen.
There is also a divide for people wanting to sell add-ons (software apps) for the system. How do you integrate it? How do you make it visible?
In a convnetional, modular computer system, you add and sell more modules.
On my winxp desktop (hypothetical user interface):
Click (or even hover) on a desktop icon entitled "Games". A small window pops up just below (or above) the icon, showing other icons. I click on one, and i start playing solitaire.
More or less the same thing could be done on the start menu. But instead of the 1,000 programs, i get a bar of categories (created when I installed a program). I click -or hover - on one, and a menu of icons pops up.
Windows 3.x had something similar, but more cumbersome. It was called Program Manager. It was more or less easy, with the exception that (IIRC) you couldn't stack groups inside other groups. Major design flaw.
And now we're stuck with this huge popup menu with no categories whatsoever (arts, multimedia, music, games, utils) but about 100 of different applications fighting for desktop space.
With a minimum investment, we could have a very user-friendly interface. Why can't they do that instead of spending $2 million?
I tried the Flash demo and the zooming in and out reminds me of a project I worked on at MIT nad later at UCB called Boxer. With Boxer, everything in data and program space is a box, and every object has a place on the screen. You can zoom in and out of boxes for navigation, and create menus by typing in words and putting a box around them. You can share data by naming boxes or create "portals" between boxes (and across networks).
No, I've just been playing City of Heroes too much. There are habits you get with the chat filters.
what gets me is with apps likee office telling you what it thinks is best. the problem is when anti social programmers come up with the guis. the software process needs to evolve methods for coders and ui people to interact. in most cases competition should bring out the simplest and most useful interface. but with every changing comptuers, the software that leads is the one with the most features albeit half broken. i have hopes that google with change this.
Wow this is really going to be incredible. Seriously look at the intuitive navigation of thier website! I have never been so impressed with anything! It is the most intuitive interface I have encountered of all time!
That is not the real problem, though. The real problem is triangle trading schemes that let corporations sell products to themselves at a "loss" so they can claim they made no money. Almost all multinational corporations do this; it's no secret.
In case you aren't familiar with the scheme, the multinational company has subsidiary X in the US, its main headquarters. In some third world country, they have subsidiary Y, which produces, say, tennis shoes. Then they have subsidiary Z, a tiny, unofficial office in the Virgin Islands. Subsidiary Y sells the shoes to subsidiary Z for $3 a pair. Then subsidiary Z sells those same shoes to subsidiary X for $50 a pair. But since subsidiary Y is not officially part of the multinational, so it appears the company is LOSING $47 on each pair of shoes. They sell them in the US for $97 a pair, and the net balance is zero. No taxes to pay. Or in some cases, when there is a negative net balance, they ask for bailout money from the government (and that money sure didn't come from taxes the corporation paid).
You can easily imagine a company using subsidiary Y in the opposite way, to artificially inflate corporation income if necessary to meet Wall Street's expectations.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
If a companie catalogs websites on computer networks spread throughout the world, does that make it multinational? It'd be nice if it were Google, because they tend to make really good products, plus they have a significant amount of influence now. Searching is a huge part of the HI as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if they got together. About his website... seriously kids, he's got bigger fish to fry. I'd rather he put all his time and effort into the HI, not a pithy website.
Archiving webmail is a rather annoying problem, though--especially with yahoo, since they cut off POP access for all free accounts. I'd really like a webmail application with well-behaved tabs that allowed me to select multiple messages and download them to my home computer, in a neat folder with each message a text file named according to sender and date. How hard would that be, really?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Try this instead
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
"Already a household name for his work on developing the Macintosh computer while one of Apple's first employees, Raskin has recently set his sights on a larger goal."
Does anyone actually believe outside of the Slashdot world that Jef Raskin is a household name? Or even inside Slashdot, for that matter...
The most surprising thing, to me, is that someone actually gave Raskin and his mania $2 million to mess around and do something with this bullshit that nobody wants and nobody will ever use.
I say bullshit, because Raskin is still stuck in the days of the custom CLI based computers, such as C64, Amiga, Osbourne etc, not having realised that that time is long gone and, to compound that, has an obsessive personality that is even worse than Stallmans, with a feeling of self importance that no one else on the planet, with the exception of his brainwashed kids, sees.
I have an idea that the reason Raskin was given the money was because someone realised that the interfaces to cellphones are very bad and in need of some improvement, which they are, and, since cellphones have keypads (ooh laa laa!) and are therefore a good target for Raskin's bullshit.
The thing is, cellphones could definitely use a user interface improvement, as the current method of scrolling through a tiny screen and pressing an ok/not ok button is difficult and time consuming, but the idea of zoom and boom, as Raskin's newest idea is implemented, is not going to be the slightest improvement on this, especially for your average user that is flumoxed by modern guis.
God, the guy is like chewing gum, he just won't go away.
He has enlisted into the business his son, Aza, a 20-year-old college student who has clearly inherited his father's uncanny brilliance (he speaks fluent Japanese and will likely be courted by MIT and Stanford to do graduate work in quantum physics).
Raskin's ideas may be half-baked, but this bit proves this project is headed nowhere fast.
Enjoy the 2 mil while you got it, Jef!
in a pathetic attempt to see what the fuss was all about, i /.'d their website. d'oh! after scrolling for a while, i got bored and bailed...
maybe someone could give me money for my badly designed webpage...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this Project X? That interesting browsing technique Apple tried in 1996/1997 to XSpace web content?
Interesting that their website is so fugly... given their focus on human interfaces.
The 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, PII, PIII, P4 are much more closely related to each other than the 6800 and 68000 were.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I find this kind of ponderous to use.
Interestingly, I was reminded a little of Expose while using it - in fact that interface might be a nice addition on top of expose when in the "zoomed out' state to help make quick work of identifying text documents.
But as a primary interface I don't like how much work it is to move around between apps. I ad virtual desktops like that before that were all one big screen, but in the end I always preferred a room approach with segmentation of apps.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I like Jef, I really do. But I don't really consider him a co-created of the macintosh. He contributed the name, and I believe the keyboard. The rest of the stuff his team put together was scrapped when Steve took a special interest in the project and tore it away from Jef. Personally I'm surprised that Steve even kept the name "Macintosh", it's my understand that Steve didn't really like Jef Raskin at all.
Personally I think the Canon Cat was a much more important product for Jef. It's an amazing piece of hardware and software, quite a powerful system for doing professional word processing (students, writers and journalists seemed to be the target audience for the product). It also had a very easy to use FORTH system built-in which allowed you to extend and customized the system, but unlike most other script-extendable applications, it wasn't necessary to be a programmer to find the software useful.
It also had an extremely low bug count (I believe it was 0 bugs) for a project of it's size in the short amount of time it was written in. (it was written in FORTH, and the devel tools were also written from scratch).
Of course the CAT simply wasn't marketed very well. Like many interesting and useful products it has gone into obscurity.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
While it wouldn't be ideal for the multitude of things that "computers" tend to be used for at the moment, I don't see this as an entirely unreasonable way to think of things. From everything I've read in The Humane Interface, I quite like Jef Raskin's way of thinking.
The amount of learning and knowledge required to carry out many everyday tasks took a leap when things like paper, electronic typewriters, calculators, games, and whatever else, were all forced into a generic box called a PC.
For instance, the electronic typewriter wasn't a big jump from a mechanical typewriter, but the word processor was a huge jump from either of them. On the one hand, there's a tangible object that people can relate to. It has buttons and controls that do definite things, and there's quite a good mental mapping from the control to the result. (Electronic typewriters mimicked mechanical ones reasonably closely in this regard.) With a word processor application, though, everything's virtual. It tries to use metaphor here and there, but they're really only useful if the user recognises and understands the metaphor in the way it was intended.
My own theory is that if these things are separated again so that they're individual tangible tools for individual tasks, augmented by computing power and networking capabilities where appropriate, things will once again become substantially easier for many people to comprehend, understand and learn.
It probably can't be done for everything -- spreadsheets became available almost as a result of all the digital computing power, and I'm not entirely sure how to represent something like that in an individual tool. But then, it's mostly only accountants and other professionals who frequently use spreadsheets as actual spreadsheets. Many other people use them as a way to lay things out as if on paper, and it might be quite possible to develop something else tangible to cater to that.
... is the fact that people think differently, using differ methods of thinking. Someone who can visualize things will tend to use that in thinking, where a person who thinks in terms of abstraction (words) will use that, etc...
What is real, is abstraction physics. The understanding of abstraction creation and use, knowing that you can attach what ever interface you find useful to you....
Jefs direction of commands sets acting upon content is the right direction but what about the users ability to create such???
BTW, there are three primary UIs. Jef got the first two right, the third he apparently doesn't mention, but must know about in order to make his system work. (the side door port to functionality access)
There is another work being done regarding Abstraction Physics. Yeah, I need to spend some more money on hiring a coder.
"To me is seems that this project will only work if it is managed as a coherent whole, like BSD or Squeak, and that means being open source with a strong leader. And now that I've gotten completely off-topic of your question I'll end my post :)"
A Coherent Interface has been available for quite some time. Unfortunately Good Enough won instead of it's nearest Competitor.
I think Raskin should get together with Ted Nelson and build a UI for Xanadu.
Well, Jobs knew enough about electronic design to work at for Nolan Bushnell early on at Atari and it's not like he was hanging around the homebrew computer club with an expectation of finding a product.
There was an article in NeXTWorld which noted he used to scavenge electronics to build things when he was in high school---not finding at the moment, but I believe there're on-line archives of NeXTWorld listed at John Mark Ockerbloom's ``Online Books Page''.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It would take *forever8 to use an OS designed around this concept. Instead of just clicking an icon and *boom*, it executes, you need to zzzoooooommmmmm in on it to use it.
Some people have said there would be "snap levels" to aleviate this, as in, the icon woudl just snap into a full size. after two clicks. But if this is the case, hwo does it figger from the file preview icons in KDE and Windows?
I duno, to me, this is nothing groundbreaking.
The Palm example makes more sense to me.
Also the explanation of QUIT is better. I guess I've still got the OS and Application mindset and was applying it to the example unfairly.
I think you've actually touched on the main problem of any development effort like this in your tangent. As long as there is competition for similar applications/commands/whatever you call them then the commercial companies really don't get any benefit from cooperating.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
And that's another problem. If the document is longer than the screen I have to use the mouse to "scroll" through the document. This is never smooth because.... I'm using a mouse. So just after a little browsing my eyes get even more tired.
Since this is just a demo for one part of the UI I'm assuming there is a way to break out of this mode and have a documentment "snap-to" the screen. If there isn't I'm going to go blind jerking around with the thing (pun intended.) Another question I have is how the UI assists the user in organizing documents. I could really see someone screw themselves over by minimizing documents haphazardly.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
i truly appreciate that people are out there are researching radical new ideas on GUI design, and are willing to think outside the box. my hat off to Mr. Raskin for that. i have no problem with him telling me what i should do, either, because an oversized ego is often necessary to change the status quo.
that said, i also think Raskin is totally off with his direction, just like many others. i wrote my thesis on GUI design - visual programming, so be exact and then went on to work with the best approach i found in this regard.
for the thesis, i had the (somewhat tedious) task to look at all other research in this area. what i found was surprisingly bad - there usually was some theory / psychological approach / philosophy, which sounded pretty reasonable. and then there was the implementation (if there was one at all), which was almost always just awful.
raskin fits in there pretty well: just take a look at the website! it reminds me of man-pages. i consider myself an expert user of man pages (and unix and vi and all that) but man pages are NOT a good way to present information. lots of scrolling and find-commands are not an efficient way to navigate information. to the contrary.
well, ok, i thought, maybe they slipped on the web page. so i checked the flash demo. i read the intro, which contains sentences like "check the little specks, they hide images and all kinds of cool stuff". ahm. ok?! i am sorry but i don't buy this for one second.
in the meantime, the desktop interfaces are evolving. latest lovely feature i found in OS X is the search field in every Finder window, which allows you to instantly search the current selected directory. i use it almost every day now. instant search results and content search are immediately useful additions.
i am betting that i can set up my desktop to do anything i want to do quicker and with less thinking than any command line interface. my apps are in the dock, 1/10th of a second to start. they all have "recent files" lists. most of the time, i never quit them. the computer is on instantly from sleep. if i use an app that is not in the dock, i hit cmd-shift-A in the finder... it's all very, very efficient.
I'm German, you insensitive clod! And just to torture you - look, more words that must seem alien to Americans: neighbour doughnut tonight Christmas democracy Dan.
Interesting that you think this practice would "dry up pretty quickly" if the US didn't impose taxes on income earned by foreign subsidiaries. That would just legitimize shell companies, which would soon be earning 100% of the corporation's income, seeing as it would all be tax-free. How are you going to otherwise quantify exactly how much of a multinational corporation's income came from sales in the US? Did I say income? Because I meant profit. Although private citizens' incomes are taxed, a corporation only has to pay taxes on its profit. That will only be fair once I can deduct living expenses (rent, groceries, non-luxury utilities) from my personal income.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
The most well known in that bunch were: Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Burrel Smith, Bud Tribble, Steve Capps, Bruce Horn, Jef Raskin, ...
Woz was not on the Mac team, and Raskin left a couple of years before the Mac made it to the market. Atkinson, Capps, and Hertzfeld were probably the best known on the software side 'cos their names were also on things like MacPaint, Finder, etc...
Read all about it at Folklore.org.
Dr. Freud
Technology meets Transportation.