6/18/2023 0 Comments Jef raskin bookOnce the world had been subjected to the mouse he relented, but thought that the single-button design of the Macintosh mouse was confusing. Indeed he originally observed that the whole idea of a mouse was difficult to pick up metaphorically, noting that on seeing one for the first time many users would literally try to pick it up like Scotty in Star Trek IV. Raskin hated double-clicking intensely, due to “dysclicksia” (the inability to double-click accurately due to the precise movement and timing constraints imposed on the user by the computer during a double-click gesture). Applications in a Humane Interface are all based on a small number of different high-level, task-centred organisations and are invoked from the data they work with, not by double-clicking on an icon. This is most obvious on a smartphone or tablet, which is not a single UI but N different UIs dependent on how many apps you have. This extends to strict design restrictions on application software after all, applications are modes that the whole computer enters. This lack of modality runs deep, because modes make things easier for the programmer and harder for the user, and Raskin wanted to make things as easy for the user as possible. No trying to predict, as a vi user must, whether typing the letters o, d, d will insert the word odd on the current line or, the word dd on the next line. You can explicitly and temporarily switch modes, as with the LEAP keys, but at all times any particular keypress or combination of keypresses always does the same thing. If you are entering text, then you would have access to all of the text functions. If you are entering numbers, then you have access to all of the numeric functions like maths operations. The absence of a Caps Lock key reflects a deeper, more pervasive design choice: Jef’s computer would avoid modes as far as possible. In front of the space bar are two LEAP keys, that you hold while typing to search forward or backward through your document and go (leap) to the matching text. Instead, there is a dedicated “undo/redo” button redoing the last undone action is always an exact negation. Let us start with the simple things: no Caps Lock key on the Cat (or Macintosh-that-was not, or the Swyft to give it Raskin’s post-Apple name) so no CCIDENTAL SHOUTING WHEN YOU MISS THE A KEY. But to understand it, you can pick up his book, “The Humane Interface”. To see Raskin’s vision in practice, you have to find a Canon Cat which is very difficult because Canon’s typewriter division did not do a very good job of selling any. But the software would have been entirely different. From a hardware perspective the Mac would have looked a lot more like an Apple ][ than a Lisa, reflecting Raskin’s belief that the computer should be accessible to the masses (and by extension, affordable). It is what is on the inside that counts, and that would have been radically different. Outwardly, the Macintosh would have looked a lot like the one that was released: a little friendly box with a screen and a floppy drive on the front. He managed to avoid Steve Jobs’s ire for a while by not telling Jobs about the project, but after the Lisa failed and with Woz recovering from a plane crash, Steve needed something to do and checked in on what the former director of the documentation group was up to. Sometimes known as the father of the Mac, sometimes as its eccentric uncle, the project was originally under the direction of computer scientist Jef Raskin. It is a fairly well-known, but perhaps not broadly appreciated, fact that Apple’s Macintosh could have been a very different computer.
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