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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It is verifiably quicker and easier to use techniques in THE (mostly LEAPing) than to use the mouse.
You can measure how quick and easy they are. There are metrics to do this. They measure how quickly it takes to acquire an item by pointing to it with a mouse, and how quickly the corresponding action takes with via LEAP. They also measure how easy it is to learn and become habit. In just about all cases, LEAP wins. Read The Humane Interface. It is all detailed there and the author makes a good argument.
I think a big problem here is that people don't realise that there could be a better way. They think that the current WIMP metaphor is great. Maybe it is. But you can't use the good ol' Windows GUI as a baseline for evaluating things against... you have to take a step back, think about what a computer is supposed to do, and whether your user interface lets you do it.
THE isn't about fixing problems that you think you have. It is about fixing problems you never even knew were there (but which hurt a lot, regardless).
How do you handle several documents at once? You have several documents in your workspace, delimited by ` characters. How do you copy and paste between them? Use the COPY and PASTE commands. Can you use it with DTP? Probably; there's nothing inherent in the user interface which makes it plain-text-only (graphics editing might be a bit of a stretch though). Why is it running in a window in my screen shot? Because it is an alpha version... I presume that later versions will get rid of that.