Jef Raskin, co-creator of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, has received a $2 million dollar boost to his Humane Environment project (now know as RCHI). You can download an early version from the projects website, and Raskin hopes to finish the project within 18 months. Will this be a paradigm shift in user interfaces?
Raskin Receives $2 million in start-up funding to develop RCHI
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Raskin better bloody hurry up and make something I can use, I’ve got no opposable thumbs!
For someone obsessed with intuitive interfaces, he sure made a crappy, non-intuitive website.
So, basicaly, the guy is trying to start a revolution by creating a powerfull command-line shell ?
…
The interview is a complete fraud, it’s only saying “that’s a revolution, that’s wonderful, but if you want to know what we are talking about you’ll have to buy the book”…
seriously… he road the coat tails of the Mac to get a big name (he did not even get any of his ideas into the mac so go figure as to why it made him famous)
and his interface ideas are stupid.
Did anybody care to take a look of the flash demo? It is really impresseive. Now I can see what he is talking about. Sometimes it is difficuilt to imagine something one has never seen and in this case words cannot express this. Again after plying around with the dem and keeping in mind this is just a flsh programm I cann imagine what they can do with the “real” thing.
Dear Jef, please make your website suck less. Thanks.
It’s as bad as any “real” corporate website; I couldn’t find what I was looking for (information about RCHI, screen shots, a demo). And all monospaced? What is this, the DOS era?
On the other hand, it’s awesome that someone is funding some research into new/improved UIs.
– chrish
Amen To that Brother
Aye I’ve followed his ideas and seen the flash demo a while back. Good to hear he has some funding but one does have to wonder why it took so long.
This is really revolutionary!
Is Aza a clone of Jef?
Try the demo, I think this has some interesting potential… you can see something a bit like this in action in Mac OS X’s Exposé. It’ll shrink all of the current windows so they can be tiled on-screen, then you click the one you want to come to the front.
– chrish
Perhaps, but he is trying to improve user interfaces.
I’ve used a number of different systems, ranging from the Macintosh to Windows to the Amiga to OS/2 to Oberon to Smalltalk to BeOS to various Unix GUIs. They all used the same metaphores, even if those metaphores don’t work well for a given person or a given application.
Why do you think that command driven interfaces still have a strong following? It isn’t because it is inherently better. It is because it suits some people in some circumstances better. Software development is inherently “command” driven because you need to access a large body of commands (procedures, methods, whatever). Similarly, I would avoid doing much image processing in a command driven environment (though astronomers frequently do — see IRAF).
As for the demo: I’ve took a peek at the zooming one. It is a bit rough around the edges, but I found that it worked (for me) a lot better than I thought it would. Would I want to use it for everyday work? Probably not, but I’m certainly going to listen to Raskin a little more closely in the future to see if he can get rid of those rough edges.
As for the website: you have to consider who it is designed for! If you are designing a website for someone who is intimately involved with the early stages of development of a project, it is going to look a lot different from a website which is geared towards selling a product. No single metaphore, no single design, works in every case. One of the major problems with modern GUIs is they try to impose the same design on everything — whether it is appropriate or not!
Um, if that is how the user interfice works, its crap. I have to wait for it to zoom in, and zoom out. I loose time doing this. Expose on the Mac lets me switch windows quickly and easily with everything moving quickly so that I can keep working. Not zoom, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, ok, now I can read it. Ok, done reading, Zoom out, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, ok, now I can see the thing that was on the other end of the user interface. Lets Zoom in now, wait for it, wait fo…….
I followed all of the directions for installing under windows, and I still haven’t been able to get it to work under either XP or 2000. Anyone else have any luck?
It’s a bit academic, but it does raise some interesting points (like countering the claim that “zooming out” always helps the user when they are lost).
http://www.advogato.org/article/788.html
Direct link to SWF demo[8MB]:
http://www.raskincenter.org/main/img/zoomdemo.swf
Yeah I just tried it out now. What seems to be the problem? Have you got it to download? Btw I just used CVS with Cygwin instead or TortoiseCVS.
The instructions on the website are too wordy.
I installed everything as directed (I used TortoiseCVS). Everything installed individually, but when I clicked on the file, nothing ever loaded.
Try executing run.bat from cmd and post what appears (if anything). I would imagine its missing a module or something.
His ideas are good but radical. He should find a way to incorporate it into contemporary user interfaces. Or rather, user interface scholars, designers and experts should find a way of incorporating some of his ideas, when appropriate, into their projects.
Jeff Rascin is an idiot.
He had nothing to do with the original Machintosh (except
if you believe his version of the story with which noone
else agrees). He was fired from Apple 3 years before the Mac came out.
He had a chance in the 80’s and he put out his crappy interface ideas in the form of a product. It was crap, and it didn’t sold well.
He haven’t contributed anything to UI design for ages.
I’ve just though, maybe it is because you don’t have python in your PATH?
wow.
sometimes this forum surprises me.
remind me not to try to do anything innovative and new, that might be considered different, because I might get flamed on osnews.
Well, he got out of Apple for hating the mouse for non-pixel secting (image editing). I kudos him for that alone!
Putting money into research is always a good thing. You may never know; Raskin may create the basis of future user interfaces.
> It’s as bad as any “real” corporate website; I couldn’t find what I was looking for (information about RCHI, screen shots, a demo). And all monospaced? What is this, the DOS era?
Well, i searched the page for “demo” and find it.
The diference from that rudimentar demo and Mac OSX’s exposse is that the demo deals with data more directly.
But yes, very similar behaviours indeed. that was also the 1st thing that came to my mind. Maybe the 2mi are from apple paying some patent for it?
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Inve…
I first saw something almost exactly like Raskin’s demo at the Georgia Tech campus bookstore running on an SGI a little over 15 years ago. The only difference being that they were running applications instead of static content. I believe it was a demo written by a student working at the store in his spare time, though I had seen a number of similar things in student projects and in actual use at the same time (we had this wacky 3-D gopher client back then…).
A GUI like in the zoom demo was probably innovative 20 years ago. Today, it’s merely the product of dredging up discarded ideas and technology to see if any of them are of interest today — which is something that, in itself, may not be a bad idea.
There’s nothing particularly interesting about Raskin.
I don’t like the zooming interface, and really the desktop would become far to cluttered if everything is kept there. When adding new stuff we would have to arrange it on the desktop. This all adds up to more work for the user.
All the recent UI “research” sounds to me like people making a problem were there isn’t one. 3D Desktops like Looking Glass and Zoom Desktops are just silly. Power users and developers are fine with the current system of folders. At best the new UI research could hope to benefit the “newbies”. But this is a misdirected for at least 2 reasons.
a) newbies will be confused by 3D and zoom and any other glitz – newbies want super simple
b) there are no new newbies being created – all children who are likely to ever own a computer are learning the basics of folders at a young age. the ‘newbie’ (potential) market is not growing. it is stupid to develop a new UI “for the masses” when it is really a shrinking market that would be interested in the UI
I do think there are a few things that could be done to make the user interface a little better. Email, browser history and address book could be integrated right into sub-directories of ‘My Documents’. This way a newbie has one starting place to find/search for anything. And the search tool could be better.
Furthermore, the true future market for UI is not so much what the UI looks like. The future of UI is more about access from every where – we will have one desktop that we can access from any computer any place on Earth. We can access that desktop from a Mac or PC, from a Notebook or a Cell Phone. Everything in your desktop/my documents will be accessible no matter what computing device you use.
IBM and Microsoft and Sun (and others) all know this is the future. It doesn’t take much effort to guess how they will solve this problem of ‘universal access’. So if people are handing out 2 million for “zooming desktops” – allow me to suggest something else. Give me 2 million so I can developing an open alternative to the IBM/MS/Sun solution of universal access. I’m serious! Really, I am. It would be my dream job. apwhite at tds.net if you got big money to throw around
>>Will this be a paradigm shift in user interfaces?<<
If the interface is anything like the website I have my doubts.
I am not impressed the zooming is neato but not earth shattering. You would think that UI developers could come up with a better website. Personally i think its the toold we use to interact with computers that are the biggest waste of time. Can’t wait till i can just plug a wire into my skull and go for it.
The picollo project deals with ZUI (Zoomable User Interface) Maybe they weren’t the first, but it seems that they’re further ahead. I could be wrong though.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/
Based on the flash demo, it would seem Jef has re-invented the thumbnail view.
When run.bat is clicked, nothing happens apart from a DOS windows flashing briefly.
So, I run it from a command prompt and it comes up with “‘python’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.”
Python is installed and located in C:Python23
Anyone have any ideas?
> I do think there are a few things that could be done to make the user interface a little better. Email, browser history and address book could be integrated right into sub-directories of ‘My Documents’. This way a newbie has one starting place to find/search for anything. And the search tool could be better.
Anyone that suggest that the ‘My Documents’ approach is any good, don’t know that he himself is already to biased toward what he uses today
The BeOS and now Mac OS has a integrated email/contact system.
now, back to the ‘My Documents’ approach:
This is so wrong that even microsoft opted to use TWO completely diferent trees to the same data.
you have
c: > docs and settings > your name > my documents
and you also have
desktop > my documents
and besides that, you have:
fake pointers to hardcoded folders (try to open the desktop and press “go one level up”, windows says that you’re already on the top most level) and shortcuts to the drive tree. AH! that’s too much even for me. go figure out for my grand dad…
What the hell would you people expect from a website?
a caucasian, a black and a japanese with ear-phone and a wide smile?
perty flash introduction page?
a left-side menu with columns that highlight as you move your mouse?
Grow up, please.
reading that forum realy makes me happy that a few people can be politic enought to hold that much money for somethin inovative.
Let’s just hope that it doesn’t have the same end as the Canon Cat
The web site about user interface needs to improve its own user interface.
The demo only zooms in/out? Is that all?
The text is unstylized. Remindes you of good old 1970’s era?
There is a big gulf between UI scientists and Website Designers, cope with it. Don’t confuse scientists with designers.
The demo is a … DEMO. It is supposed to demonstrate a principle, not showcase a product. In this case the point was to demonstrate what a zooming UI is.
When run.bat is clicked, nothing happens apart from a DOS windows flashing briefly.
So, I run it from a command prompt and it comes up with “‘python’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.”
Python is installed and located in C:Python23
Anyone have any ideas?
You have to set the PATH for Python.
How can you tie interface concept to an existing OS anyway that has its philosophy and graphics layer already? Maybe, when designing a new OS that’s appropriate.
“So with Fairplay, it’s either lose audio quality or stay locked in to iPods. Neither of these is an acceptable option to me. Of course, you could always just buy/rip CDs (unless they’re copy-protected), but then you could use whatever the hell you wanted.”
Or strip the DRM and convert to MP3, ending with the same quality as you would from a ripped CD.
“No, I was responding to a different question. The reason why it sucks worse than Fairplay is because the files are harder to convert to something I can use on non-Audible devices. At least with ITMS, the process is pretty automated.”
Umm, you can burn a CD.
“Read what I wrote – you can get the tunes in mp3 or ogg if you want, hence no DRM (which I suppose is why it’s illegal in the uS).”
And you still see this as an option?
“Easy, companies will take something very seriously if enough people quit buying their product.”
So you think people are going to stop buying music, and not steal it? They are just supposed to be happy with what they already have. I have never met anyone who considered their music collection to be complete. Never.
“So what happens if you reinstall the OS or switch computers?”
Then you deauthenticate the computer. It’s very simple. Maybe you should read up on how this works before complaining about it.
“I don’t mind DRM in general, so long as I have a GUARANTEE that my music is going to play when I want, where I want, and how I want. None of this ‘only on xyz portable devices’ bullshit.”
Again, what can’t you do?
“Sure it does. In the case of Fairplay, I can’t play the music on non-iPod devices without losing audio quality. That is a big deal to me.”
You can convert stripped files to MP3, ending up with the same quality you would from a ripped CD. Then again, you are paying for compressed music. If you want full quality downloads, you’re out of luck.
“Well, it WASN’T like that until CD burners came along – now I’m not willing to go back.”
Yes, it was like that. It was illegal to copy music. There were countless lawsuits and legal battles over cassettes when they came out. It’s just easier to infringe on copyrights now.
“So I will contacting the California State Attorney General regarding Apple’s deceptive business practices (non-returnable merchandise) and going back to the PC world. Apple is too insanely greedy and not worth dealing with.”
The most you are going to get is for Apple to give you the price difference, which they will do anyway. Companies can’t support buyers remorse, especially one so silly.
” Let’s look at it this way. Normally with compressing music, the formula is like this:
Original source –> (audio quality loss) –> Compressed format
In regards to converting a DRM file to non-DRM, the formula goes like this:
Original source –> (audio quality loss) –> DRM format –> (MORE audio quality loss) –> non-DRM compressed format.
On my system, I can tell the difference between the original AAC and the converted mp3 files – that’s enough for me. There is a difference between CD and AAC but that bad, IMHO.”
Maybe you should learn how to compress music properly.
“Unless you just want to copy a bunch of random songs to the Shuffle, you’ve still have to undergo the process of firing up iTunes and choosing which tunes (or playlists) you want to copy over. Seems it would be faster to do this using Explorer.”
Hence why that’s still an option. And seeing as iTunes can be set to open automatically, it’s not a hard thing to start it. After that, it’s just a matter of preference in what you organize with.
Eeek, wrong one.
What I meant to post was…
So what exactly is the purpose of the zooming UI? Everything right in front of you at once? Okay, cool, I can dig that. But I have way too much stuff to be right in front of me. Hence why there is such a race to make searching so much better than it is now. Back when you could have all your files on the desktop, this would’ve been great. Not only have them on the desktop, but have them always open and accessible. But my desktop is only so large, and I don’t want to have one so big I have to turn my head to see things.
I think the biggest problem here is the input devices. Zooming and moving about like that don’t work well with a keyboard and mouse. You’d need something else to move with because holding the mouse to move and then zooming and working with the mouse inside applications is going way overboard. Then for zooming, you’d need variable speed zooming. The harder you press the zoom button the faster it zooms.
The demo reminded of a Red Dwarf episode, in which there was valuable information hidden in the full-stop of Rimmer’s swimming certificate…the crew never found it.
“All the recent UI “research” sounds to me like people making a problem were there isn’t one. 3D Desktops like Looking Glass and Zoom Desktops are just silly. Power users and developers are fine with the current system of folders. At best the new UI research could hope to benefit the “newbies”. But this is a misdirected for at least 2 reasons.”
I completely agree. A lot of interface research is done for its own sake and not to solve real productivity issues (Loooking Glass, give me a break). Raskin is a hack who had one decent idea (the Mac, which ended up being completely different from his initial concept). His “solutions” to the so-called interface mess are esoteric concoctions with no practical real-world value. Regarding the investment Raskin conjured up probably solely on his dubious claim of being the “father” of the Mac, I can be reminded of this proverb:
A fool and his money are soon parted.
That’s a cool $2 million down that drain.
That’s pure unadulterated bullshit. Looking Glass is an attempt to blend 3d eye candy with USEFULNESS, not something many seem to care about when doing any interface, let alone a 3d one. Right now, it’s merely a nice add-on (kinda like metisse).
RRT3 has all the funky zoom features he wants, and it’s all-mouse. Zoom in, zoom out, rotate, pan, zoom, yaw, all in one two-button mouse with a scroll wheel. You can use the modifier keys as well.
And it’s smooth & fast.
(a) The story is about THE, not how good or bad somebody thinks the website is. As I mentioned earlier, developers have different needs than casual browsers. The link was to the developer portion of the website. The casual browsers were supposed to be somewhere else.
(b) The story is about THE, not whether or not Raskin invented the Mac. (I, for one, think that Raskin loves bloating his ego. That doesn’t mean Raskin is wrong about everything else.)
(c) HCI research is about improving how people interact with machines. Data collection tends to be based on (somewhat) scientific principles and not what somebody thinks a user interface should look like.
(d) The assumption that one interface meets all needs is idiotic. Would you have everyone write emails by selecting words from a menu? Would you have everyone do graphics design behind a VT100 (a real terminal, not a terminal editor)? Does any sane engineer have airplane pilots dig through three levels of menu items to lower the landing gear? Think about it.
(e) Finally, anyone who doesn’t understand why Raskin is doing this hasn’t read his book. I have read his book. I’m not entirely convinced that spatial organisation is the best way to go, but I can see it having several advantages and it being more useful in certain cases. Hierarchies have several advantages and are useful in other cases. Keyword searches have several advantages and are useful in yet other cases. Read “The Humane Interface”, read “The Trouble with Computers” (Landaurer), and read several other serious treaties on user interfaces. Maybe then you will understand what it is about. Until then, you are just arguing from that hole in your behind.
A better user interface isn’t about better eyecandy. It is about better approaches.
I’m a software developer who doesn’t touch type. I’ve tried, but I never got much faster than I am anyway. I rarely copy text by typing, and I can generally keep up with my train of thought.
For that reason I’ve never really gotten cozy w/ vi and company: I admit it’s fast, I just don’t work that way.
THE (for text) strikes me as a very modernized vi, with the same pros and cons. Some neat ideas, but not compelling enough to switch. I like the idea of the Leap, but I’m not ready to trade every other Find mechanism for it (and Raskin is right up there w/ RMS when it comes to half measures.)
If I maintained a text editor or had the free time, I’d hack Leaping in and see if I found myself using it a lot.
The main problem with 3D interfaces is that, well, you still have problems locating things. It’s just the space is represented differently.
For all those interested, take a look at Railroad Tycoon 3. It implements a 3D zoomable interface. It’s a bit better mapped conceptually, because you fly over the topography of the US (or Europe, or whatever) looking at the landscape, resources, trains, competitors, etc. It’s basically a geographic information system (GIS) with a killer interface.
Take that, and try and represent “documents and projects.” In RRT3 they didn’t go all the way because it’s a bit clunky to get to resources, but I could see how you could take RRT3’s interface, add voice control (for removing or adding layers of information), and have something really useful in the Real World.
How would that work for documents? What kind of topography could you map your information to that makes sense?
There’s actually a MacOSX thing called 3D-Space VFS that tries to do a 3D filesystem, but it really shows what the problems are in this kind of thing.
Way back when (in the era of OpenDoc) there was a movement to separate documents from the programs that made them. Users don’t really think about “Word”, they think “I need to write a letter.” That sort of idea has gotten traction in display (think your web browser + plugins), but it’s difficult to figure out how to do that on the creation side. That idea seems to be embedded in THE, because as far as I can tell there aren’t content editors in the project, just viewers.
I’m surprised he got $2m. Maybe he’ll make something useful.
” add voice control (for removing or adding layers of information),”
Voice control is a hard thing to work out because most computers are in rooms with other computers. Think of a cubicle based office where people are not only on the phone all the time, but also talking to their computers.
BTW, I thought OpenDoc was a great idea.
I’d like to see you try get a good overview of what your *nix home directory contains with cmdline or a regular file manager.
ls -laR | less # yeah, right, like you’ll remember even a percent of the info whizzing by
Konqueror/Finder/Nautilus to home folder and open all fold triangles. Yeah, right, you’ll need to scroll five minutes to see all the files, and visually searching is downright impossible.
See, the point here is that MODERN INTERFACES SUCK.
Search tools are not solving the problem of “I don’t know what I’m looking for, I want to explore to find out”, they’re solving the problem “I know what I’m looking for, I just don’t know where it is.”
Applications aren’t solving the problem of “I want to add a picture to my paper”, they’re solving the problem of “You need a special application with which you can open a picture, and then maybe export it in a form that is understandable by another application and then maybe you can add it to your paper but there’s no guarantee. Oh, and adding a 3D object to your paper is patently impossible, as is using image effects on your text. Have a nice day!”
If you’re thinking of coming up with a new kind of UI, all the heavy lifting and conceptual crap is almost done. The thing that’s missing is good engineering and the feedback that comes with it.
One problem with the academic UI field is it’s all theoretical, which means that the ideas are basically all BS.
The only way to tell if a UI works or not is to implement it. Only then can you learn what works and what doesn’t.
It’d be a fun time to be in UI research.
So instead of having silly folders of stuff you never look at anymore cluttering up your desktop or a sprawling Documents folder, you can just zoom away from it and start new things. Later, when you are feeling nostalgic, you can zoom in further than you have gone in weeks and chuckle to yourself.
Sounds great. And who the hell is Jef Raskin, like I care.
I think it is fruitful to consider new interface ideas with a willing suspension of disbelief.
This seems like a good way to incorporate a temporal aspect into working with computer desktops, which the masses and the geeks both would totally dig.
What would happen to commonplace applications in a zooming interface? I can imagine a much more intuitive build of CVS working in an interface like this. eg, I remember coding that bit last spring around mardi gras… and then you zoom down into your desktop and suddenly stop when you see those pictures your friends emailed you from that weekend fly by, and there you are, status and log from the commits around that time! Absolutely brilliant.
I havent set any PATH’s, just followed the instructions…
How do I set the PATH for python then?
Its ok, I have set the PATH but now it says it cannot locate MSVCR70.DLL
I have found the file but where should it be?
Should I place it in the root of the python directory or in WindowsSystem32?
All sorted, thx anyway
So, at the moment its just a text editor……?
Just a small note. The basic principle behind the ZUI is that it should be easier to navigate and find things this way than in a filesystem, based on the brains superiour abillity to navigate and remember locations vs. its inabiliity to remember lists of data.
As others have said, read the book, it is easy to digest and much of the information is good to know. Fits law, modality, latency and ways to measure UI efficiency is just some of the interesting bits in the book. Granted some parts of the book is devoted to Raskins ego and special implementation ideas, but the rest is solid.
it not the one who want make revolutionary interface look this project
http://www.lainos.net/
maybe is dead but the idea is cool , functionally ? dunno but are cool