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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"Don Cox asks if the environment is just for text editing. No. It is for any use, including photoshop, CAD, and
all. Even games. My book (sorry to mention it again) talks about how Photoshop could be made easier to
learn and use via our approach, as Mr. Cox asks me to consider (that
is, I already have). "
I don't find Photoshop in the index of your book. There is a very
brief mention of "Photo-processing programs" on page 104, in a
paragraph which confuses word-processing with layout design (DTP).
I brought up Photoshop because it has a particularly bad interface
(people have to go on courses to learn how to use it), and it is a
well known complex program, requiring both graphical and numeric
settings (and typing, when you are adding words to an image).
As for the idea that text editing should not use the mouse, it's true
that moving your hand over to a conventional mouse can be a break in
the operations. I use a large trackball, and this is much more like an
extension of the keyboard. In other words, some of the problems come
from bad hardware design (like one-button mice), rather than from bad
software design.
I used keyboard-only editors in the cp/m days, and find that a
mouse-operated menu bar at the top of the screen is a big improvement
on learning key combinations.
Why have none of the people who claim to be experts on interfaces ever
used Amigas? "About Face" even takes all its examples from Windows,
which is like writing a book on beauty and using the warthog as an
example.