OSNews

THE is a nucleus to which commands are added. The commands are what you use to do tasks from checking email to rendering video frames. Superficially, this sounds like an operating system to which applications are added, but it is fundamentally different, especially from a human-centered point of view.

By adding individual commands rather than whole applications, which sometimes have hundreds or thousands of commands, you can install only what you need and understand. Companies that now make applications will also be able to sell commands or command sets using the same underlying engines that they currently offer. Because all commands are invoked in the same way (a property of the nucleus) there is a lot less for you to learn when you purchase new software. Commands never become invisibly hidden deep in a menu structure, and can be invoked at any time, just as in command-line systems -- but you never get locked into modes as in vi or emacs.

For complex tasks, complex software is often required. THE is not a "dumbed-down" system. If hundreds of commands are required for a specialized task, vendors will be able to provide that level of functionality. THE can handle any task that computers or information appliances can do at present. There is no loss of power or generality with THE compared to conventional systems; the only loss is in unnecessary complexity, size, cost, wasted time, frustration, and training -- just the things you want to lose.

These improvements are all made possible because in the two decades since the graphic user interface (GUI) was introduced there has been a great increase in our understanding of how people interact with technology. It would be wonderful if we could just tuck in a few loose ends and change a handful of details of present systems to have them work properly. Unfortunately, we have learned that the GUI concept has fundamental flaws that cannot be corrected by small changes. These flaws have to do with incompatibilities between the designs of both GUIs and command-line interfaces and the way our brains are wired. As we cannot change the way our minds work, we must change the interface design.

It was a careful and detailed study of ergonomics and cognitive psychology that led to the humane environment. The research background for THE, based on empirical studies by many scientists, is presented in Jef Raskin's book, "The Humane Interface".

THE's approach starts by streamlining the most common forms of interaction: use of the mouse and the creation and editing of text. These are tasks that you perform thousands of times; time and effort saved here benefits everything you do.

Because being able to work with text is so fundamental, and because most software is written with text, we have started by adding a set of word processing and programming commands to THE. Also, we have not yet released the specifications for the graphics elements of THE. This has led to some people thinking that THE is intended only as a hyper-efficient editor. Its scope is much wider.

[the above is a quote from jefraskin.com. Thanks to my webmasters. If you want to email me directly use jef[at]jefraskin.com]