Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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?
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.
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
From the flash demo: "The design specification calls for the left mouse button to zoom in and the right to zoom out. Unfortunately, Macromedia's Flash, in which the demo was implemented, does not recognize both mouse buttons so we have to use keyboard buttons, even though they are not nearly as pleasant to use."
"Co-creator of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, Raskin..."
Anyone find this funny, considering the Macintosh's infamous one-buttoned mouse? Simple doesn't imply useful. Except perhaps in simple folk.
That said, this is really cool. It is what Microsoft's Active Desktop never-was-but-should-have-been. I may or may not be drooling at the possible functionality of this at a high resolution on a big screen display. Anyone else not able to determine which multinational corporation provided funding? I guess it is not Apple, if it calls for a two-buttoned mouse. Weird..
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.)
Then Jeff partnered with the Cannon [ copier ] company with the CAT-PC.
Yes, I have one, it's an interesting beast. It wasn't so much that the disk was a giant piece of text, what you did was save the entire state of the computers memory onto the floppy. If you wanted to start a new document, then you would simply plop in a blank floppy. The whole thing was written in Forth and there is an "easter egg" that allows you to get direct access to the Forth interpreter.
However the most "novel" thing about it was how you navigated. It didn't use a pointing device (i.e. mouse) but used two dedicated keys on the keyboards labeled "JUMP" (you'll have to forgive me, it's been a while since I've had it out and played with it, so this might not be perfectly correct). You would use the jump keys to "hop" around the document/screen.
There was also an add-in card made for the Apple II that was basically a Cat on a card. If anyone knows of one of these, please let me know. 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).
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
It gets even funnier when he had nothing to do with the Mac besides the earliest of stages years before the machine was done. Not only that but he was in charge of documentation.
Naming himself "co-creator" or just making himself as part of the team who created the mac is intellectually disingenuous at best.
He was in charge of documentation, how that makes him somehow an expert in human/computer intergaces is beyond me really.
Yawn....
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.
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.
... 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.
Very good post, but I think that you have missunderstood Raskin on one point.
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.
The point is: habits are neither good nor bad; they are human nature. If a system is not designed with human nature in mind, then habits might end up being a bad thing. If we design a system from the ground up with human habits in mind, then they might end up helping us use the system.
That said, I also do not see how Raskin's ideas could be used outside of a text editor domain. I have read the THI book (and even reviewed it on slashdot a few years back) and look through the project, but I still fail to see how to use THE for, say, video, or in a mobile phone.
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
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
...but let's remember that he opposed the use of GUIs
Whatever gave you that idea? According to his book and Jef's own website he was one of the early spokesmen of WYSIWYG. He even invented drag'n'drop - building on other's design ideas.
What he IS opposing is the way current GUIs use the mouse and modes - even alot of his own designs from the time when he was working for Apple.
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.
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.