Linked by Kevin Adams on Thu 26th Dec 2002 03:38 UTC
Pahtz writes: "A very alpha release of The Humane Environment (THE) for MacOS was made on Christmas Eve. Jef Raskin, creator Apple's Macintosh, and author of the book "The Humane Interface", is the leader of the open-source THE Development Team."
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THE is not for geeks. It's for everybody. It certainly is for people who have the time and desire to relearn everything they have already learned... and they should want to, because THE is so great that they'd be mad not to.
Well, that's the hype, anyway. Not convinced on whether it delivers.
At this point in time, THE is mainly for curious people who have read The Humane Interface and want to know whether the thing is really as good as Raskin claims. Admittedly, I've only tried it a few minutes (I should actually get used to it first, before being critical), but it certainly is interesting. The method for LEAPing seems clunky to me, but I guess that's what I get for not having a special LEAP key on the keyboard. Ditto for entering commands. But maybe I'm just not used to it, as said...
In fact, you really do need a special keyboard, or at least one with the commands printed on the front of the key caps, C64-style. Have a look at pictures of the Canon Cat on the author's web site.
It is only a little bit like vi (disclosure: I prefer it to emacs...). There are no modes, but there are quasi-modes; I make a big deal about this because Raskin does too. It also happens to throw the application-document model out the door. No applications in THE, just one big document.
In fact, I'd describe it best as a very smart typewriter. Literally. If you remember those electric typewriters, with bold and italic commands on the keyboards, it's like a smart version of one of them. May I be flamed for drawing that comparison :-)
Anyway, it's worth trying out.