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Jef Raskin's Humane Interface Released
cold wolf writes "With a new site layout and information, the Raskin Center has also just released Archy (formally known at The Humane Interface). It is currently in Alpha phase and Windows only, as an executable."
Sweet, I'm going to have to boot into windows when I get windows when I get home to try this out again. I have been following this project from the sidelines for a while now ever since I read his book, and have to admit to being a little giddy about seeing it actually getting somewhere.
I know that they popular trend on slashdot is to love or hate ideas and people, and that is what most of the posts will be about, but my opinion of Raskin has never been one of idol worship or supreme cynicism of anything visionary. I (false)started grad school a couple of years ago, with all sorts of ideas about how to make computing environments better, more pleasant more powerful, only to find that all my "revolutionary ideas" had already been thought of before, sometimes decades ago, and have sat on the shelf ever since. There was really no fundamental research for me to do - all the ideas had already been thought of, and were waiting for someone to do the grunt work of turning them into a practical working system. I became very disillusioned with what I was doing at school - the whole program seemed like a big sham - everyone pretended as if they were doing meaningful research but not one thesis seemed to be anything more than BS. Because of that, and other personal reasons, I dropped out after one semester.
Raskin was one of many of the researchers who ideas I latched onto. I don't know if I agree with all of his ideas, but really want to seem them attempted in something more than a simple proof-of-concept. Universities are not interested in practical grunt work - even if it is pushing the boarders. The huge amount of risk involved in creating an operating environment to compete with MS, not to mention the fact that the ideas are still just ideas, means that no one would dare take this on as a business venture. It seems that the open source community is really the entity most capable of doing projects like this.
Right now the project has mainly focused on the text-editing portion of Raskins ideas, which while interesting, are for the most part a known quantity - they are an incremental improvements on the ideas used in the Canon Cat. What I am really interested in is how they can be expanded to a system environment. For those that haven't read about him, he talks about a computing environment where there are no applications, just documents and tools that act on documents. This would create an incredible amount of flexibility, as is effectively bringing the Unix philosophy to the GUI world. Or alternately it takes the plug-in, undo and scripting functionality that the most powerful applications have and bringing it to the system level, so that everything has those features "for free", and they all interoperate for free, since you don't have a bunch of applications each with their own different, incompatible and likely proprietary methods. You now just have the core document objects, and a bunch of small tools that interface the document object. Apple's CoreData also has me really interested as it seems to implement many of the technical requirements that I have concluded such a system will need.
My other half keeps reminding me that all the attempts at wonderful unified systems have failed, and that it is ugly systems that are good at gluing together disparate, but existing technologies that succeed. But I don't care. I still would like to see it tried even if it does fail.
I do and have done a LOT of typing and I would welcome a powerful text editing system consistant accross platforms that combines the best of all worlds and I think this has a LOT of potential.
The biggest disappointment for me is the non-free license. It's only free for non-commercial use. That's pretty much means it will never go anywhere, IMO. If it was GPL'ed or BSD'ed, then I think it would have a chance.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
The web has helped set UI development back 15 years (better graphics and faster machines have done the rest, at least in the Windows world). Something like Archy would eventually encompass the web as part of the data you can work with.
I don't think you're thinking big enough.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Hmm. Interesting. I always thought the point of technology was not to create the most perfect product out there, but to create a product that users would feel comfortable with.
While theoretically, UI development may have been set back, users are comfortable with the web. Therefore, that is the way technology should progress, i.e. working for the user, not getting the user to work with the product.
I believe that is the motto of Archy itself.
The fact is that as we try to sync computing to the real-world, we're creating false hopes that the "stuff" in the computer will work like stuff in the real world.
That's where Archy is useful - it doesn't try to imitate nothing in the real world, it just looks like a computer. It allows to manage streams of data in a highly efficient way. Of course, you will have to learn it before you can use it (thankfully, the interface is very easy to learn).
The construction of analogies (desktop, files, etc) was good in the 90s to educate people, but now it's time to largely deprecate it.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Is not more difficult than a current WIMP "point-and-click" interface is for novice users. Actually it's easier - more consistent, more simple, you don't have to think what you want to do in advance.
So let me get this straight: it requires special hardware to navigate properly and fails to follow conventions that have been around since electric typewriters themselves, and you're telling me that I am the one that doesn't get it?
Your arrogance makes me sad, because it will condemn this whole project to irrelevance, sinking whatever good it did have to offer along with it.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
You might be onto something if you replaced the word "back" with "ahead".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No, its only strange because you have to learn it from scratch. Is not more difficult than a current WIMP "point-and-click" interface is for novice users. Actually it's easier - more consistent, more simple, you don't have to think what you want to do in advance.
I am really wick of this argument - namely, because there *are* no users anymore who don't know the WIMP interface. It is what everyone in the world has used for the past 30 years to control their PC. The ship has sailed guys - seriously. The mouse has drawbacks, but not enough to justify the cost required to adopt a non-WIMP interface - and there is always a cost. Even if you are somehow a novice who has never used a WIMP interface before (who is this again? Two year olds are using WIMP these days...) you would still be at a disadvantage, because even if you were marginally more productive with this interface, the fact that you are now incompatible with the rest of the world makes it not worth it. It like someone coming along today proclaiming they have a great new interface for driving a car, that uses something other than a wheel. It doesn't matter *how* good the idea is, or how simple the UI is - the cost to adopt is too great.
Short of whenever we get direct brain manipulation, it is highly doubtful that there is ever going to be any major use of a non-WIMP interface in computing, ever.