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Jef Raskin Gets $2 Million To Develop RCHI

Posted by timothy on from the fill-in-the-blank dept.

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?"

10 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Wait... by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...he got funding from a multinational corporation?

    Aren't we supposed to, like, hate that, or something?

  2. Uhh... non-problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  3. radical, but not new by peter303 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:radical, but not new by BMazurek · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.
    2. Re:radical, but not new by binaryDigit · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

  4. check out the Flash demo by file+cabinet · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  5. Improved interface? by wingome · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do this mean that with the new interface, his web site will actually indicate what it is he is talking about doing ?

  6. interface gurus? by pgilman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. Why on earth... by hcdejong · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Jef Raskin is vastly overrated by rjung2k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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