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?"

Comments

radical, but not new

[peter303]

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.

Re:radical, but not new

[BMazurek]

This is also very similar to a demo I saw on a video for SIGGraph 1993. It was called Pad.

The demo showed something like an article or a financial statement. There was a dot near the end of a sentence, and when you zoomed in, it was a spreadsheet with the financials. It was totally black and white (monochrome black and green, actually), but it looked really nifty. Everything pixelated like hell, but with some of the scalable interface components that Apple and Microsoft and probably others are working on, you could perhaps even do away with the pixelation.

I also found a website for Pad++.

From the SIGGraph article:

• We believe that navigation in information spaces is best supported by tapping into our natural spatial and geographic ways of thinking. To this end, we are developing a new computer interface model called Pad.

  The ongoing Pad project uses a spatial metaphor for computer interface design. It provides an intuitive base for the support of such applications as electronic marketplaces, information services, and on-line collaboration. Pad is an infinite two-dimensional information plane that is shared among users, much as a network file system is shared. Objects are organized geographically; every object occupies a well defined region on the Pad surface.

  For navigation, Pad uses "portals" - magnifying glasses that can peer into and roam over different parts of this single infinite shared desktop; links to specific items are established and broken continually as the portal's view changes. Portals can recursively look onto other portals. This paradigm enables the sort of peripheral activity generally found in real phy...

And so the article continues. Citeseer reference to the article can be found here.

Re:radical, but not new

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

There was also one laptop made, but Jef himself has it and he's not giving it up (or at least wasn't when I asked him about it a few years ago).

I wouldn't give it up either, if I were him. But it seems he is willing to share a picture and loan a prototype: http://www.digibarn.org/collections/systems/swyft/ index.html

check out the Flash demo

[file cabinet]

check out the Flash demo[8MB]:
http://www.raskincenter.org/main/img/zoomdemo.swf

Re:How many co-creators of the Machintosh are ther

[n1ywb]

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.

Sheesh! You kids these days.

[HarveyBirdman]

They created the Apple II.

Re:How many co-creators of the Machintosh are ther

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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

Re:How many co-creators of the Machintosh are ther

[It doesn't come easy]

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).

Sounds like OpenDoc

[kuwan]

Your description sounds a lot like what OpenDoc used to be:

OpenDoc was initially released to run under Mac OS System 7.5 to provide a document-based, rather than application-based, computing experience. Documents were made of modular parts, which could contain different types of content, such as pictures, spreadsheet information, text or even Quicktime multimedia elements.

OpenDoc's primary distinction from other compound document architectures lay in the depth of its support for dynamic media. OpenDoc containers could include embedded live content, and could perform arbitrary real-time composition of the content. The architecture used a design pattern which insulated container from embedded content using intermediate objects, greatly enhancing interoperability and simplifying testing of part handlers.

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

Re:THIS is humane?

[pavon]

Let me explain how the system works. All interfaces involve a combination of directly modifying document contents, and issuing commands. Consider a word processor. In VI you have to switch between modes to issue commands and edit text. In emacs there is one mode, with shortcut keys to issue commands. However, as the number of commands grows these shortcuts become increasingly archane. In a GUI commands are issued by clicking in a menu or toolbar, but again as the number of commands increases you can end up with a very large menu tree to traverse.

Raskin's environment involves breaking a program like a wordprocessor apart so that there is no monolithic application - just a document handler and a bunch of small command that operate on the document - ie he is bringing the UNIX philosophy to the GUI world. Since all the commands are issued at the system level (like in unix) as opposed to the application level (like in Word) there will be a large number of commands in a single namespace (like in unix). Therefore shortcut keys are not acceptable, and both emacs-like hyroglyphics and vi-like modal interfaces have their own problems.

The solution he proposes can be thought of in two ways. One is to look at it a shortcut keys of infinate length. IE addition to the 30-odd single letter shortcuts possible on a keyboard (^c ^x etc) you can also type ^ls or ^repaginate. The Caps Lock key is not really a Caps Lock Key - it is a command key that just happens to be where the caps lock Key is on PC keyboards (BTW as any unix guru will tell you, that is where God intended the control key to be).

Another way of thinking about it is that holding down the command key brings up a floating command prompt, where you can type your command. Once you release the command key the command is executed.

This seems a little weird but it isn't that hard to type with your pinky held down (I DO IT ALL THE TIME WHEN TYPING ALL CAPS), and if someone does have difficulty, then special hardware like foot pedal, keyboard with command key under the thumb etc, or in worst case making the command key sticky (toggled) will easily solve the problem.

Raskin likes buttons

[jfengel]

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.

Re:I've got a vibe about this

[wazzzup]

I've been reading "Revolution in the Valley" from OReilly (a really fun read, I highly recommend it) and really, Jef had very lettle to do with the Macintosh interface. Steve Jobs forced him out very early on into the Macintosh development process - well before they had a working prototype. In fact, Jef's vision of the Macintosh was much more text-based than what we know the Mac to be today. Jef's vision of the Macintosh looked more like the Osborne 1 than the Banana Junior 2000 form factor we're all familiar with. The interface borrowed heavily from the Apple Lisa for which Bill Atkinson developed.

Jef was a music major by training, so while I still respect him and what he's done, it's not like he was formally educated in the field.

You can read about this at folklore.org as well but the book is great.

Re:Where's the project?

[TuringTest]

Then I found a page describing some arcane "command language" thing called THE which reminded me of using Emacs or vi, not exactly user friendly.

Exactly. But why were Emacs and vi not user friendly? It was because they were heavily modal interfaces, which made learning to use them a real pain. Raskin claims to have identified the design errors of those tools and constructed a better interface based on similar principles.

Emacs and vi are regarded as the most efficient programming environments for people in the know. The new interface would provide an equivalent interface without the steep learning curve and with increased usability. Read The Humane Interface (coralized link) for further explanation of the main concepts.

Re:I've got a vibe about this

[ratboy666]

Raskin is "the man" for UI?

In a word; no.

And, if you don't believe me, check out the Canon Cat. Really.
Post Mac, and has NOTHING that is on your standard UI list. Big (BIG) flop.

Check out Raskins ramblings -- boils down to "The UI should be vi; and people will love it". Especially, vi with dedicated function keys.

In a sense, he *is* right. It would be a better UI. But, he *is* very wrong; people will *not* love it. So its a non-starter.

Ratboy.

Mr Raskin I presume?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.