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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?"

5 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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 ?

  4. 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.
  5. 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