theolein should do a bit of research before leaping into a discussion. I just put the Canon Cat manuals on the site (in the last week or so) because of many requests for them, and a kind volunteer who wanted them enough to do the scanning.
My "pet project" has not been released, it's still being built, which would make it a miracle if it had even presence on any platform, much less popularity.
And, if he had read my site, he'd know that THE is not a text editor.
As for "bitter", that's a matter of personal take. If theolein wishes to be ageist, we'll ask how he feels about calling someone "old" when he's gotten a bit more mature. Like in his 60s or 70s.
Perhaps he's jealous of the millions of dollars just poured into my company, or the fun our crew is having developing better ways to use technology. Anyway, a definitely underinformed flame.
Rarely has an interview mixed up my answers and gotten so much so wrong in so little space. Wired magazine is also in my personal doghouse for similar inadvertent distortion made in the name of editorial pruning. Nonetheless, if you are using the same application in OSX and on Windows, there is little difference in either look or feel (which is what I was talking about). Get into the OSs and the difference grows, in Mac's favor. Become a developer and there's a world of difference, and OSX is considerably easier to deal with, usually. But not always.
One of the posts states: "In 1984, IBM still had a stranglehold on the corporate market. This was, in all honesty, the market the Mac was originally intended for. It was designed as an easier computer for non-technical company drones to use - rather than spending weeks training on how to use an IBM PC, they just sit down and start clicking around with their mouse. "
The poster correctly identifies one of the original marketing directions. But the original major application I proposed was the Net (which didn't exist yet). If you want to read the original document about what I expected people to do with it, see the Appendix (written in 1979, when I started the Mac project) to my article "Holes in the Histories" on www.jefraskin.com.
BookRead has some facts sort of sideways. The Lisa certainly did not start "the mouse thing" for Apple. What most people don't know is that the Mac and the Lisa were started within a few months of each other and were parallel products. When I started the Mac project, the Lisa was still a character-generator, green-on-black, machine. I sold the Lisa team on going graphic.
The Mac was a lot more than something that "simply brought" the Lisa price down.
Diamondsw says that the original Mac didn't have a GUI, sound, etc. He also says that I made up a "lot of history". Please give me an example or two. The example has to be something I actually said or wrote, not what somebody else said or an example of bad reporting. For example a web site recently said that I said that I "started Apple". I wrote to them to tell them it was wrong and they corrected it: I had said no such thing (and never have).
Before you respond, consider taking a look at the "Holes in the Histories" article on www.jefraskin.com. If you want dates and want to see original documents dating back to 1979, read "The Book of Macintosh" much of which is in the Stanford University History of Technology collection.
If you want proof that I wanted computers to be graphics-based and human-centered (and that I had invented and built my own graphic input device in 1965 or 66) see "The Quick Draw Graphics System", my thesis, which was published (Penn State) in 1967 -- 5 years before PARC was established. This puts the lie to the often-stated claim that the Mac stole its basic orientation from Xerox PARC. Not that we didn't learn a lot from PARC's brilliant work later.
So, diamondsw, even if the original Mac didn't have a GUI as most people now know it, but it did have a graphics-based interface that was (IMHO) even easier to learn and use. As for sound, it had it from the first -- I've been doing computer music for years before the Mac and there's no way I'd design a product without built-in sound.
Also see the Appendices to my book, "The Humane Interface" which has a detailed, button-press-by-button-press, account of some of the differences between PARCs interface and the one I designed.
It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to do excellent UI design with a distributed contributing community. Having an open-source UI is fine, but for an interface to even aspire to a high degree of usability, it must be (in certain ways) consistent. It must allow the formation of habits so that it can be used without conscious attention, and it must not cause the formation of habits that will foster errors.
To meet these goals, and there are of course others, requires very careful design by people who deeply understand the principles of cognetics. These people are uncommon even in the interface design community, and exceedingly rare in the programming community. The problem is compounded by the legions of the ignorant whose criteria go no farther than "I know what I like" or "This works well for me."
What can profitably be open is the design specification. Input from many sources can be of great value, so long as there is a moderator with the requisite knowlege. This is not to say that different moderators might might not make different decisions, but that the final design decisions have to be made by, at most, a small and technically knowledgable group.
A number of commentators have mentioned "focus group" testing. Usability is not tested in focus groups. Desirability is closer to the kind of quality tested by focus groups.
One way to find out what jobs are available is to join a professional group such as the ACMs SigCHI. Our local chapter (BayCHI, which meets in Palo Alto, California) distributes a list of current openings.
raskinjef@aol.com
Re:What about the programmer's humane work conditi
on
The Humane Interface
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to build interfaces (and usually they just rebuild old-fashioned GUIs with a few new wrinkles) without understanding the principles of interface design.
Just as you'd not look forward to working with a programmer who didn't know what a subroutine, a linked list, or what inheritance is, you can ask an interface designer if they know what Hick's law, GOMS analysis, and Fitts's law are. Ask, what is visibility, what are modes and what difficulties to they cause, and why logs to the base two often show up in interface analyses?
In fact, you can ask these questions of yourself. And if you don't know the answers, you don't have the basics and need some education before you start designing interfaces.
There's a lot more to know than these few items, either for programming or for interface design, but it is better to be viewing from the shoulders of giants than to be fooling around anywhere near their feet.
Fair comment. I should have made it clearer that I was talking about the interface to the OS, and not the underlying necessities. I was writing to users, not programmers, who see the OS rather differently.
Fortunately, most people were able to work around my sloppy language.
At least this "arrogant jerk" did his homework. My book discusses the incremental search in emacs in some detail.
The humble genius who wrote the comment has put his humble foot in his humble mouth by not taking the time to find out what I did say.
And Leap was neat, it was carefully crafted and tested, and loved by thousands of users. I wonder if the humble genius actually tried it or interviewed users?
I have said, in print, that the one-button mouse was a mistake. It's in an appendix to my book. I also explain how the mistake came about, why it was a better idea than state-of-the art practice *at that time*, why the present multi-button mouses are wrongish, and how to do it better.
I am not trying to sell books, just ideas. But *please*, get your fuel tank full of something more than hot air before you turn on your flame thrower.
If you don't want to see me have the satisfaction of getting a trifle of royalties from your purchase of the book, then borrow it from a library.
I admit to being a bit of a tease, and somewhat deliberately so, hoping that people will get around their preconceptions.
For example, people assume that "do the right thing" when you type (from the Wired article) is taken to mean to "open a word processor" Unless you make this assumption, there is no contradiction. Because opening a word processor (or opening any application) is never the right thing, for the reasons stated in my book, I am being consistent. Doing the right thing means to accept, display, and preserve what you have typed, in a way appropriate to the context.
I am writing more articles and maybe another book to give more details. It is certainly too much to put into a posting.
A freindly voice wrote that "I can't expect everyon to run out and buy" my book. If they want to read it, that's one good way to get it. Libraries are another. That's why I wrote the book, to put out ideas that didn't fit into a shorter format. I could have put it out on the web but a book from a major publisher carries more credibility, and makes it work better as a text (it is already in use in at least 11 universities). That's one good way to get ideas out to a particular audience.
When I used to talk about my ideas, people said, "why don't you write a book." Now that I've written one, I seem to be hearing "you can't expect people to actually go out and read it".
Is it really too much to ask that people who want to know about my ideas read my book and articles? If I want to know what John McPhee wrote about geology, or Wittgenstein about philosophy, I just get their books.
I do like the question "just describe the intended behavior". That's exactly the right question. The answer is in the form of either a detailed spec or a working system. The former I'm not ready to make public, and the latter requires either money or a cadre of helpful programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
theolein should do a bit of research before leaping into a discussion. I just put the Canon Cat manuals on the site (in the last week or so) because of many requests for them, and a kind volunteer who wanted them enough to do the scanning.
My "pet project" has not been released, it's still being built, which would make it a miracle if it had even presence on any platform, much less popularity.
And, if he had read my site, he'd know that THE is not a text editor.
As for "bitter", that's a matter of personal take. If theolein wishes to be ageist, we'll ask how he feels about calling someone "old" when he's gotten a bit more mature. Like in his 60s or 70s.
Perhaps he's jealous of the millions of dollars just poured into my company, or the fun our crew is having developing better ways to use technology. Anyway, a definitely underinformed flame.
Rarely has an interview mixed up my answers and gotten so much so wrong in so little space. Wired magazine is also in my personal doghouse for similar inadvertent distortion made in the name of editorial pruning. Nonetheless, if you are using the same application in OSX and on Windows, there is little difference in either look or feel (which is what I was talking about). Get into the OSs and the difference grows, in Mac's favor. Become a developer and there's a world of difference, and OSX is considerably easier to deal with, usually. But not always.
One of the posts states: "In 1984, IBM still had a stranglehold on the corporate market. This was, in all honesty, the market the Mac was originally intended for. It was designed as an easier computer for non-technical company drones to use - rather than spending weeks training on how to use an IBM PC, they just sit down and start clicking around with their mouse. "
:-) Raskin
The poster correctly identifies one of the original marketing directions. But the original major application I proposed was the Net (which didn't exist yet). If you want to read the original document about what I expected people to do with it, see the Appendix (written in 1979, when I started the Mac project) to my article "Holes in the Histories" on www.jefraskin.com.
Jef (I was there
Both sentences are incorrect.
Neither was Jobs the visionary for this product nor was it a Xerox copy.
:-) Raskin
Save me some typing and see my article "Holes in the Histories" on www.jefraskin.com
I also have some longer postings on this topic somewhere nearby...
Jef (I was there
BookRead has some facts sort of sideways. The Lisa certainly did not start "the mouse thing" for Apple. What most people don't know is that the Mac and the Lisa were started within a few months of each other and were parallel products. When I started the Mac project, the Lisa was still a character-generator, green-on-black, machine. I sold the Lisa team on going graphic.
:-) Raskin
The Mac was a lot more than something that "simply brought" the Lisa price down.
Jef (I was there
Diamondsw says that the original Mac didn't have a GUI, sound, etc. He also says that I made up a "lot of history". Please give me an example or two. The example has to be something I actually said or wrote, not what somebody else said or an example of bad reporting. For example a web site recently said that I said that I "started Apple". I wrote to them to tell them it was wrong and they corrected it: I had said no such thing (and never have).
:-) Raskin
Before you respond, consider taking a look at the "Holes in the Histories" article on www.jefraskin.com. If you want dates and want to see original documents dating back to 1979, read "The Book of Macintosh" much of which is in the Stanford University History of Technology collection.
If you want proof that I wanted computers to be graphics-based and human-centered (and that I had invented and built my own graphic input device in 1965 or 66) see "The Quick Draw Graphics System", my thesis, which was published (Penn State) in 1967 -- 5 years before PARC was established. This puts the lie to the often-stated claim that the Mac stole its basic orientation from Xerox PARC. Not that we didn't learn a lot from PARC's brilliant work later.
So, diamondsw, even if the original Mac didn't have a GUI as most people now know it, but it did have a graphics-based interface that was (IMHO) even easier to learn and use. As for sound, it had it from the first -- I've been doing computer music for years before the Mac and there's no way I'd design a product without built-in sound.
Also see the Appendices to my book, "The Humane Interface" which has a detailed, button-press-by-button-press, account of some of the differences between PARCs interface and the one I designed.
Jef (I was there
It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to do excellent UI design with a distributed contributing community. Having an open-source UI is fine, but for an interface to even aspire to a high degree of usability, it must be (in certain ways) consistent. It must allow the formation of habits so that it can be used without conscious attention, and it must not cause the formation of habits that will foster errors.
To meet these goals, and there are of course others, requires very careful design by people who deeply understand the principles of cognetics. These people are uncommon even in the interface design community, and exceedingly rare in the programming community. The problem is compounded by the legions of the ignorant whose criteria go no farther than "I know what I like" or "This works well for me."
What can profitably be open is the design specification. Input from many sources can be of great value, so long as there is a moderator with the requisite knowlege. This is not to say that different moderators might might not make different decisions, but that the final design decisions have to be made by, at most, a small and technically knowledgable group.
A number of commentators have mentioned "focus group" testing. Usability is not tested in focus groups. Desirability is closer to the kind of quality tested by focus groups.
One way to find out what jobs are available is to join a professional group such as the ACMs SigCHI. Our local chapter (BayCHI, which meets in Palo Alto, California) distributes a list of current openings.
raskinjef@aol.com
Clearly, the poster has not read the book.
It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to build interfaces (and usually they just rebuild old-fashioned GUIs with a few new wrinkles) without understanding the principles of interface design.
Just as you'd not look forward to working with a programmer who didn't know what a subroutine, a linked list, or what inheritance is, you can ask an interface designer if they know what Hick's law, GOMS analysis, and Fitts's law are. Ask, what is visibility, what are modes and what difficulties to they cause, and why logs to the base two often show up in interface analyses?
In fact, you can ask these questions of yourself. And if you don't know the answers, you don't have the basics and need some education before you start designing interfaces.
There's a lot more to know than these few items, either for programming or for interface design, but it is better to be viewing from the shoulders of giants than to be fooling around anywhere near their feet.
Fair comment. I should have made it clearer that I was talking about the interface to the OS, and not the underlying necessities. I was writing to users, not programmers, who see the OS rather differently.
Fortunately, most people were able to work around my sloppy language.
I agree, too. My own success is my greatest enemy.
At least this "arrogant jerk" did his homework. My book discusses the incremental search in emacs in some detail.
The humble genius who wrote the comment has put his humble foot in his humble mouth by not taking the time to find out what I did say.
And Leap was neat, it was carefully crafted and tested, and loved by thousands of users. I wonder if the humble genius actually tried it or interviewed users?
I'd love to hear humble's response.
I am not trying to sell books, just ideas. But *please*, get your fuel tank full of something more than hot air before you turn on your flame thrower.
If you don't want to see me have the satisfaction of getting a trifle of royalties from your purchase of the book, then borrow it from a library.
I admit to being a bit of a tease, and somewhat deliberately so, hoping that people will get around their preconceptions.
For example, people assume that "do the right thing" when you type (from the Wired article) is taken to mean to "open a word processor" Unless you make this assumption, there is no contradiction. Because opening a word processor (or opening any application) is never the right thing, for the reasons stated in my book, I am being consistent. Doing the right thing means to accept, display, and preserve what you have typed, in a way appropriate to the context.
I am writing more articles and maybe another book to give more details. It is certainly too much to put into a posting.
A freindly voice wrote that "I can't expect everyon to run out and buy" my book. If they want to read it, that's one good way to get it. Libraries are another. That's why I wrote the book, to put out ideas that didn't fit into a shorter format. I could have put it out on the web but a book from a major publisher carries more credibility, and makes it work better as a text (it is already in use in at least 11 universities). That's one good way to get ideas out to a particular audience.
When I used to talk about my ideas, people said, "why don't you write a book." Now that I've written one, I seem to be hearing "you can't expect people to actually go out and read it".
Is it really too much to ask that people who want to know about my ideas read my book and articles? If I want to know what John McPhee wrote about geology, or Wittgenstein about philosophy, I just get their books.
I do like the question "just describe the intended behavior". That's exactly the right question. The answer is in the form of either a detailed spec or a working system. The former I'm not ready to make public, and the latter requires either money or a cadre of helpful programmers.