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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.
...he got funding from a multinational corporation?
Aren't we supposed to, like, hate that, or something?
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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>>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.
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.
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.
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.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.
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.
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
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.
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
... 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
"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...
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.
I think Raskin should get together with Ted Nelson and build a UI for Xanadu.
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.