I’m bummed. We have lost another computer pioneer. I had
this blog post to read from January … I am way behind on my reading
again … and when I went to check out the web site tonight I
discovered that Jeff Raskin passed away on February 26th. What a
bummer. This is some amazing work … on top of what he already
contributed to the world through his work on the Macintosh and GUI in
general. He will be sorely missed … I am in awe of his work and
contributions.
Raskin’s Humane Interface Receives Corporate Funding.
This article on Slashdot reports that the Humane Interface designed by Jeff Raskin
has received USD 2 million in funding from an unnamed “multi-national
corporation”, and the first implementation, which has been named
“Archy”, will ship in 18 months. The design of the interface is
described in detail in Raskin’s popular book (see this summary of his design philosophy).
The Humane Interface is designed to be as easy to learn as a GUI (or
easier) yet as fast to use (or faster) than command-line systems. It is
supposed to drastically cut down on the number of keystrokes and mouse
moves required to do editing tasks compared with traditional GUI
editors. For example, mouse moves are used only when doing graphic
operations such as resizing a window or working on a drawing or photo.
It also apparently includes elements of a zooming user interface (ZUI), as shown by this Flash-based demo.