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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?"
"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.
Do this mean that with the new interface, his web site will actually indicate what it is he is talking about doing ?
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.
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.
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.
Interesting idea. However, try placing your cursor in a corner and zooming WAY out. Like out to the point where nothing is on screen. Now, move your mouse elsewhere and zoom back in to find whatever you were looking at.
Yup. Apparently it's that easy to lose your data. I really hope that they cap the zoom-out function, assuming this is what the interface is really like.
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
For what it's worth, using the arrow keys is apparantly a limitation of flash. It's supposed to use the left/right mouse buttons for zoom.
I wasn't really impressed with it, though...
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.
I agree. As already stated his web site is not well organized, not good for someone who focuses better interface design. I found a Flash app demonstrating a ZUI and I was underwhelmed - it appeared to be a single large image that you could pan around and zoom in/ zoom out... whoopee. 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.
Forgive my skepticism, I sure there are some great concepts here. This web site does not make that clear.
>>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.
...the Web? Links don't require a hierarchy. They require context. That doesn't require separating content, naming, presentation, as far as the user can tell. It does require a simple way to tell the state of the object in all its references, and to use the references in all their contexts for navigate the rest. The Raskin interface is as intuitive as looking at a newspaper front page - and as useful. Which is to say, not enough to deal with the complexity of actual relationships in our real world, now so interconnected by cheap, immediate communications. This interface's cognitive load is smallish, because it doesn't do much. Or maybe it's just a dinky (8MB?) demo that doesn't do their paradigm justice.
--
make install -not war
It's somewhat interesting that in another one of your posts, you wrote: Why is it that your shopping for a deal on price is a virtue, but a company doing the same thing is a vice? Doesn't a company that spends less on wages have more money to devote to other things (or even more workers)?
So it's basically a matter of having programs that do a single thing, do it well, and can be used together to build more complex functionality ?
Now where have I heard this before ?...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
To answer the specific questions, another feature of this system is that all documents are saved automatically. Think a palm pilot, where you just edit your document and turn it off, then when you turn it back on everything is just like you left it in the real world. There is also global undo (works for any command - if not you are prompted before command is executed) which is saved between power cycles. There is also talk of having an automatic revision history so you can come back to a document at any time later, and revert to a previous version (this isn't infeasable - the VAX had a crude mechanism like this way back when).
:)
The quit command is to exit the entire environment (ie to lougout). There is not quit command for a document - when you are done editing there is nothing special that you need to do just go on to your next task.
As to the global namespace, it may or may not be problematic (and actually calling it a global namespace might have been inacurate on my part). I don't know how they are actually implementing it (I am not involved in the project just read his book and have been watching from the sidelines). From what I have seen though, the commands will be able to do different things to different objects. For example, if I select some text and ^copy it will copy the text, if I select 5 whole documents and ^copy it will copy the documents. I can't imagine that they would attempt to write a single command that handles all the possible object that could act on.
The way I see implementing it is that each document type has a document handler class that provides the direct manipulation interface, as well as a programatic interface to manipulate the data. Then commands are written using this programatic interface. When the user issues a command it is the same as sending a message to a smalltalk object - if the command is recognised for that document it gets executed, otherwise you get an error. With this approach different document types could have commands with the same name, and it would not conflict.
However, from a user-interface point of view, if two documents types support a simular opperation, it is highly desirable for them to share a command name (so you don't have to remember to use ^find on one document type, ^search in another). From a technical point of view, this can all be done very easily with a late binding language like python, and sharing commands between document types can even make development easier - if the people work together. So the "single" command space creates a social problem not a technological one.
Which makes me sceptical of Raskins claims that this system will work well with comercial companies. To begin with, they don't like the idea of being demoted to writing commands, as opposed to developing full applications. This is one of the main reasons that OpenDoc died. Secondly, what happens when Alias writes a set of 3D modeling commands whose names conflict with Discrete's set of modeling commands? What if Maya doesn't like the 3D document handler and writes it's own incompatible one, with incompatible tools? You are back to where you started with walled off applications that don't integrate into the rest of the system, and potentially even conflict with one another, defeating most of the purpose of this new architecture.
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
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
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.
Actually, I've seen more confusion over the last two items.
I've been asked on several occasions to help people find their missing documents. Naturally I've asked them "where did you last see it?" A surpisingly common answer is, "it's in Word."
I would ask them some more questions and they'd show me "exactly where it is" by clicking Open from the File menu of word and showing me "where the doument should be"..." right there in word."
Sometimes they'd show me the list of recently opened documents hanging right off the file menu "in Word."
My point is that this guy and a lot of other computer guys don't seem to realise that most users have no problem understanding applications. They click the icon that looks like a letter and lo and behold, they can write a letter.
Where the problem is for many of them is understanding what happens to their letter when they hit "save". The box that opens up when a user hits "save" doesnt look anything like their desktop or "my documents" to many new computer users. It's obvious to you and me, but to them it's a completly different storage repository. If there was some graphical element that demonstrated more clearly to these users exactly what happens to their document, it would be a godsend for grandmas and other new computer users.
TW
I have a lot of respect for the work Raskin does, but holding down one key while typing a command is *not* a habit I want to get into - I'm almost certain it would lead to some sort of chronic pain.
"Why is it that your shopping for a deal on price is a virtue, but a company doing the same thing is a vice?"
For that matter, why is it that you posted such a stupid question? An individual shopping for the best price in a somewhat fair market is not at all analogous to multinational companies abusing their clout to screw labor, screw the environment, subvert governments and destroy competition whenever and however they can.
In fact, they are so not-analogous that I suspect that even you understood that you were posting a stupid question.
Maybe not, though.