Slashdot Mirror
GUI Pioneer Jef Raskin Has Passed Away
Viridian writes "Jef Raskin, GUI pioneer, interface expert, Apple employee #31, and the man most credited with the creation of the Apple Macintosh, died of cancer on Saturday February 26, 2005. It was Raskin who named it after his favorite fruit, the McIntosh apple, although he said that he changed the spelling to "Macintosh" to avoid potential copyright conflicts with McIntosh, the audio equipment manufacturer."
Controversial in his views, at least he had some mindshare and was pushing the envelope in innovation with his interface experiments. Rather than incrementally changing what has become the de facto UI over tha past 20 years, he was willing to step out of the box, get some metrics and push a vision for "easy to use" software and interfaces.
Not just some crank with wild ideas, he was able to get some of his visions into practice and leverage that developmental capital into newer and more refined methods and idioms.
We've lost a visionary folks, and that's just a shame. His loss hurts us all.
Sad news indeed. :(
Heres some more information I found about the naming of macintosh apples.
"The Macintosh project began at Apple as one code-named Annie, and spearheaded not by Steve Jobs (he actually lobbied against the Mac project at one point) but by Jeff Raskin, a former computer professor and Apple employee number 31. Raskin is generally credited with quickly changing the codename from Annie to Macintosh, an obvious tie to the Apple brand. Macintosh was spelled differently than the apple variety, however, in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid trademark disputes. Apple itself, lore has it, was named by Steve Jobs for either his love of the Beatles (and their Apple Records label), his interest in health foods, or because of his fond experiences working in the apple orchards of Oregon during a brief stint at college there. Or for none of those reasons. Except for the short-lived Pippin operating system, Apple the company thankfully avoided any other product references to varieties of apple, the fruit."
(taken from creativepro)
From Linda Blum, his wife, comes this note: Dear Friends, Jef died this evening, surrounded by friends and family, with some favorite music playing. While I am overcome by a profound sense of sadness and am not looking forward the days, weeks and years ahead without him, I am also relieved that he did not suffer for a long time and that he is at peace and no longer in pain. There will be a memorial service, time and date to be determined. ----------- My first thoughts: We lost one of the great ones today, a good and generous man. Jef Raskin died of cancer this evening, after being sick for several months. A wonderful spirit and renaissance man, who inspired me and many others. He created the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979, naming it after his personal favorite fruit He left Apple to form Information Appliances, where he designed the Canon Cat with an innovative interface. He continued refining human interface design, publishing his ideas in The Humane Interface (Addison Wesley, 2000.) The Humane Interface ideas are being implemented in the Raskin Center project Archy, where is son, Aza, is a programmer. His artwork was displayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He conducted the San Francisco Chamber Opera Society and wrote the score for a movie, "Smog Patterns," shown on PBS. He has a patent for a "Construction Technique for an Airplane Wing," and was a noted model airplane designer, an accomplished archer, and an occasional race car driver. Website is http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/index.html .There is also a collection of photographs and history at http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/index.h tml Jennie Bourne and I are in the midst of making a movie about him http://www.jefthemovie.com .
The blurb was incorrect. Jef did not design the Mac user interface. He had basically nothing to do with the Mac, in fact. He started the project with his idea for a computer that should be easy to use, but he left the Mac project in 1981, years before the team produced an actual computer.