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.”
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.”
Could anyone post some screenshots or point me to some on the net somewhere…sounds like a very interesting project, and I’d love to see what it looks like. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a powerbook so I can try it myself.
The editor described in the manual seems to be a _lot_ like vi.
No mouse required? Check.
Easy searching? Check.
Separate editing and command modes? Check.
This is good, because I _love_ vi. The fastest editor for touch typists ever! Emacs isn’t bad, but I get finger cramps using Ctrl and Meta on a PC keyboard.
I haven’t used it or read the author’s book, although now I plan to. I am wondering how new users learn what commands are available? With a GUI, the user can browse through menus, looking for items that might do what they want. How does The Humane Environment handle new users?
I agree with Raskin’s ideas about automatically saving and unlimited undo. This is something all applications should have. Raskin may have included these in his book, but the following are a few ideas I’d include.
I would also want the ability in all applications to view the Undo log and Redo an arbitrary sequence of events. I may have deleted something 20 events back that I now want, but don’t want to lose work in events 19-current.
I also want every application to save the Undo log with the document so that when work resumes, the Undo information is not lost. In this way, every application would have a revision history.
I think that one part of the future of computing is networking and enabling groups to work together effectively. To aid this, I would include the ability for multiple simultaneous users to work with an application and document.
After reading the manual for THE, “point and click “mouse powered” interfaces will be around for a long, long time. THE will be for geeks and people who have the time and desire to relearn everything they have already learned about using a computer.
THE is not for geeks. It’s for everybody. It certainly is for people who have the time and desire to relearn everything they have already learned… and they should want to, because THE is so great that they’d be mad not to.
Well, that’s the hype, anyway. Not convinced on whether it delivers.
At this point in time, THE is mainly for curious people who have read The Humane Interface and want to know whether the thing is really as good as Raskin claims. Admittedly, I’ve only tried it a few minutes (I should actually get used to it first, before being critical), but it certainly is interesting. The method for LEAPing seems clunky to me, but I guess that’s what I get for not having a special LEAP key on the keyboard. Ditto for entering commands. But maybe I’m just not used to it, as said…
In fact, you really do need a special keyboard, or at least one with the commands printed on the front of the key caps, C64-style. Have a look at pictures of the Canon Cat on the author’s web site.
It is only a little bit like vi (disclosure: I prefer it to emacs…). There are no modes, but there are quasi-modes; I make a big deal about this because Raskin does too. It also happens to throw the application-document model out the door. No applications in THE, just one big document.
In fact, I’d describe it best as a very smart typewriter. Literally. If you remember those electric typewriters, with bold and italic commands on the keyboards, it’s like a smart version of one of them. May I be flamed for drawing that comparison 🙂
Anyway, it’s worth trying out.
WordPerfect’s UI is very different from Word, yet people when given a reason to move are able to relearn to Word. The same case here. But in this case, IMHO, the users would be far more productive than in the old UI (unlike the WP to Word analogy).
tantalic, I’m also a screens addict, and I’m also typing in front of a PC, somebody link some nice THE editor screen shots, pls, we want to see the UI of UIs by the UI master.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Gelernter’s Scopevision (www.scopeware.com) way of managing files having them displayed in streams chronologically ordered (formely called Lifestreams). Though interesting, the idea seems a bit visually and functionally limited for the management of complex data, therefore I fail to see it as a desktop replacement at all.
The only metaphors that convince me so far as desktop killers, are those of PIMs (Personal Information Management) interfaces. And browsing through the Chandler PIM project (www.osafoundation.org/our_product_desc.htm), I came across a beautiful PIM (errrr yes, another project) that was completely new to me: The Haystack project at MIT (http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/)
1136×984 screen shot here –> http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/images/screenshot.jpg
I find the whole Haystack UI concept to be extremely clean and elegant, even icons seem under control. Certainly far more polished than the Chandler prototype: Vista.
Integrate media capabilities (in a GStreamer way) in those PIMs and there’s the desktop assasin and the human environment for me. Meanwhile somebody show us THE editor.
It is interesting to read Jef Raskin and it is even more interesting to see THE and to get an idea what he is striving for.
Because he created a lot of suspense, I expected some radical new. However after having a quick reading of the THE material, I guess it is less radical than I expected.
Will a different way of interpreting my key strokes and mouse movements really be such a big change?
I doubt it somewhat. But as I have not used the system I canot really tell.
Personally I believe new hardware (tablet pcs with formidable handwriting recognition, speech recognition, heck even brain wave pattern recognition..) will have a much larger impact.
Regards,
Marc
I think that we’ll be stuck with WIMP until the day I get home and I say to my computer ‘Hi, Janet, please order pizza, turn the heating on and start recording the movie on channel 6’. That could be made right now, so lets hope that one day it’ll happen…
Some of the comments here come from people who seem to think that the WIMP is here to stay for ever – don’t forget, this is coming from someone who played a (the?) major role in getting the WIMP metaphor widely acceptable in the first place when virtually all else was based on the CLI.
Having said that, it sounds like a cross between Vi (though more modeless – Vi Is very explicit on having modes), Oberon and the Andrew system (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/andrew-home.html) which wasn’t publically succesful. I don’t know if THE will ever take off, but it is nice to see empirical research being implemented when most people simply implement their opinions (which happens outside of OSS too).
The worrying thing that caught my eye was:
WASTE Text Engine © 1993-2000 Marco Piovanelli This document and accompanying software and interface design, additions, other documents, and changes we have made to WASTE and Python © 2001 Jef Raskin. When completed, the changes will be made available in accord with the agreements covering the use of Python and WASTE. Various parts of this work are covered by one or more patents and patents pending.
I’d like to see something like this spread and evolve, but I
think the patents, unless explained (as defensive?) will put
a big damper on that.
Some of the comments here come from people who seem to think that the WIMP is here to stay for ever – don’t forget, this is coming from someone who played a (the?) major role in getting the WIMP metaphor widely acceptable in the first place when virtually all else was based on the CLI.
Halfway — Raskin’s actual ultimate role was to get Apple interested in the idea of a bitmapped screen and display paper metaphor. But the WIMP as we know it was essentially designed for the first Mac OS by (in no particular order) Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Larry Tesler, and Bruce Horn. The Macintosh as it came out of these folks heads was not what Raskin wanted. THE is much closer.
I know someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the whole Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing device (WIMP) metaphor was pioneered by Xerox, not by Apple. Jobs and company made the first commercial success of it, but did not invent it.
Or am I mixing my metaphors again?
So, you write a book telling people how to design better user interfaces, build the interface, and then patent it so that no one can use the ideas in the book they bought that is supposed to help them. Hope it doesn’t work this way.
Is this environment just for text editing?
Text editing is a fairly simple task and really isn’t a problem for
most computer users. The problem is how to make a good interface for
the big complex programs such as 3D modelling and animation programs,
music composition programs (Cubase etc), architectural CAD, etc.
Let’s see Mr Raskin do a total redesign of Photoshop’s interface, so
that nobody would have to take a course to learn how to use it.
Or Quark XPress, perhaps.
(Photoshop already saves an undo history as you work. Saving this with
the image files would result in enormous files.)
that dude how wrote that article is way over my head..sorry…
[i]So, you write a book telling people how to design better user interfaces, build the interface, and then patent it so that no one can use the ideas in the book they bought that is supposed to help them. Hope it doesn’t work this way.[i]
Sad for two reasons. First because an idea that encumbered is doomed to fail in today’s world, and second because the idle, unused, patents will prevent anyone from trying similar ideas.
Rather than get these ideas out in the world,they might be making sure no one ever uses them.
This web site details the origin of the gui.
http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~sjr/links.html
That interface seems like a hell of an idea. Does anyone have a link to a testing version of the Ozone client and the required dependencies to run the beast on a Win32 system? Or even a Linux box?
This is nothing more than me airing my prejudices, but I cannot get over Raskin’s weird-beard “I am a scientific visionary!” photograph, or the relentless self-promotion of his website.
Here —> http://www2.iicm.edu/cguetl/education/projects/mischitz/Seminar.htm
This is my favorite one —> http://www2.iicm.edu/cguetl/education/projects/mischitz/images/star… (check out Brother Dominick)
I don’t think the topic here is getting rid of the WIMP, but about improving it, that is what The Human Environment and the other referred UIs are trying to do. The Desktop is not the only WIMP out there, it is just one of the very faces of a WIMP that most modern operating system have adopted. And I don’t think either that UI changes are going to be revolutionary, hold your tech-has-to-be-revolutionary horse, these UIs are just going to use and organize the screen space better for us, they are going to keep up with complex data better, they are going to be Internet wise. Netscape Constellation project (http://www.webreview.com/1997/02_07/developers/02_07_97_2.shtml) was far more Internet wise than Microsoft Active Web, before Constellation was doomed. It’s nothing new that Microsoft isn’t the most interested company in innovation. The only revolutionary change for GUIs at sight is bigger display resolution (obviously that is at hardware level).
Screenshots of THE are useless – it’s a text interface. Not even a command line, but using inline commands.
It appears to be a reimplementation of the Canon Cat interface, judging from what I read about the Cat in Jef Raskin’s book. A little disappointing, I’d love to see a proper implementation of a ZUI.
After seeing a lot of head-scratching by the various posters on this board, I have decided to bring up a screenshot of an editing session I’m doing. However, guys, find a way to actually run the program before commenting on it… be informed! Even if it does mean getting a Mac 🙂
LEAPing is still clunky on my poor old QWERTY keyboard (if only because I keep hitting / instead of ,), but I’m slowly getting used to the way selections work (which really is more humane). Alas, it uses colour to denote a lot of things (like the current selection)… I guess this is a stop-gap solution until they find a better way. With regards to patents, I thought that the copyright issues were with WASTE (the text engine) which they’re slowly overhauling?
Lastly, I’d have to agree that THE really is getting rid of WIMP… no windows, icons, menus or pointers in this thing. However, the same might not be said about Raskin’s idea of a zooming interface (also described in The Humane Interface).
http://www.calroth.net/temp/the.gif
Point and click ,baby, point and click. Keyboard for text, mouse for most everything else. It’s a mousey world out there, at least on the desktop. Couldn’t imagine my 63 year old mother trying to figure out which keystroke to fart with, when point and click is SSOO EEAASSYY. It only takes about 3 seconds to double-click an icon that says “FART HERE”
“THE will be for geeks and people who have the time and desire to relearn everything”
THE is not for geeks. it’s for people. reading the manual makes it seem hard, but it is extremely easy to use. Raskin is very, very thorough about his design decisions, and the result is both easy to use and fast. (point and click, which is supposedly here to stay, is *very* slow, and often confusing)
“Separate editing and command modes? Check.”
sort of. the command mode is actually a quasimode. this is essentially a mode that only exists while a user makes a kinetic gesture of some sort, in the case of THE, holding the shift key down.
This is vastly superior to a regular mode because short term memory fades quickly, but sensory input doesn’t fade, eliminating mode errors altogether.
Raskin would find vi strongly disagreeable, imo.
“I think that we’ll be stuck with WIMP until the day I get home and I say to my computer ‘Hi, Janet, please order pizza, turn the heating on and start recording the movie on channel 6’. That could be made right now, so lets hope that one day it’ll happen…”
Never gonna happen. There’s a bizarre link between speech recognition (very possible) and natural language processing (impossible) in many people’s minds. Speech recognition is simply an input method. My question is, how different is *saying* “Hi, Janet…” from *typing* “Hi, Janet…”?
The way I see this, is that it can be considered a derivation of emacs.
Present a common method of interacting with text efficiently, and then base your applications upon that methodology.
As many know, emacs has taken the paradigm of buffers of text and moving about them to Do Things to an amazing level of sophistication. However, many don’t necessarily like the way that a user navigates emacs.
Many people spend their entire day working in emacs, and have for years. Perhaps this new interface will be able to make a next generation emacs-esque system (or perhaps someone will just make a THI “mode” for emacs :-))
“Lastly, I’d have to agree that THE really is getting rid of WIMP… no windows, icons, menus or pointers in this
thing. However, the same might not be said about Raskin’s idea of a zooming interface (also described in
The Humane Interface). ”
It is running in a window on your screen shot. Let’s see a version
running on a plain cp/m or DOS screen.
How do you handle several documents at once, and copy text from one to
the other? Are the line-ending codes at the end of each line, or at
the end of each paragraph (as needed by DTP programs)?
How do you switch in this system from editing text to laying out a
page with graphics, typography, tables, footnotes, etc?
IMO Raskin is trying to solve a problem that has not been a problem
for 15 years. (However, there is a need for a mouseless editor for
handheld computers.)
I want to see his humane video editing program (with multiple
audio tracks).
Actually what you said about being able to walk into a house and start talking to your computer and have it do things is possible.
Lots of voice recognition software do this but they have been marketed almost exclusively as dictation tools and that is a shame. Tied in with a good macro recording tool you can have what you are talking about. It is just too difficult to initially set up at this time.
The part about home control is interesting. There have been some slick programs for home automation out on the market but most require a great deal of setup and re-wiring I believe to work.
The funny thing about the post is that everything you said is possible with today’s technology.
Nobody has figured out how to make it easy and more importantly how to sell or market it.
I think that what this guy is doing is great and all, and I think that a new text editor would be kind of cool, but I think he’s trying to fix a problem that is just not there. The fact is that when somebody starts a text document–whether it be in OpenOffice.org, WordPerfect, or Word–they use the mouse to do things like double-click on the program icon, change the initial font if they don’t like it, and then maybe type a heading. After that, it’s all keyboarding. You don’t need a mouse to type a paragraph, and many people don’t use a mouse to type a paragraph! If one needs to bold, they either click the B or use the keyboard command for bolding (CTRL+B or Apple+B). I don’t see how that does not work. I think a better way to save time would be to teach somebody those simple keyboard commands (bold, italicize, save, ALT+Tab), but those already work in all software.
What I’m getting at is that this man is trying to fix problems that we just don’t have. I believe that the major timesaver–simple keyboard commands–are what we really need to teach people to use. Sure, THE uses these commands, but so does Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, GoBe, AppleWorks, and hell, even high-end software like QuarkXPress.
If this guy wants to do something useful with an interface, he should look elsewhere. I think that desktop publishing (QuarkXPress, InDesign) would be the closest applications that could benefit from this, however that does not seem to be what THE is designed for.
Am I missing something, or is this just another text editor?
THE seems to be going in the opposite direction of intuitive/productive since it doesn’t seem to have a sound metaphor. The human mind tends to function spacially and associatively. Neither of these qualities appear to be present in THE.
I see the future having multi-tiered displays that allow for spacial representation and associative groupings coupled with VR and voice input devices.
It is very unclear how you can intuitively find relationships between multiple elements at a DOS prompt
Back over some of the latest posts. “the ozone client and the required dependencies”, “not even a command line, but using inline commands”, “LEAPing is still clunky on my poor old QWERTY keyboard”, “Raskin is trying to solve a problem that has not been a problem for 15 years”, “If this guy wants to do something useful with an interface, he should look elsewhere”. Raskin is a fool. Nothing delivers like a cursor. When I want to log onto the internet, I double-click the IE shortcut on my desktop, and away everything goes. No keyboard strokes to memorize, no relearning, and no loss of time by double-clicking an icon, as claimed by the demented MR RASKIN(LOST TOUCH WITH REALITY). The mouse is here to stay. Raskin can hate it but there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.
Back over some of the latest posts. “the ozone client and the required dependencies”
JEFFERY, the poster was commenting on Haystack, and asking seperate question about Ozone in Windows, both of which have absolutely nothing to do with THE.
It seems you’ve quoted statements from reading a whole bunch of comments, without ever trying to understand a point of view that is contrary to your own — only looking for fragments of text that can be mangled together to support your view, without regard to their intended meaning or context.
Questions you should ask:
What problem is Raskin trying to solve?
What empirical/scientific evidence does he use to support the design of his methods?
What are the external limitations in which his designs have to work within?
How well does THE address these issues? (this is where you can make criticism of THE)
There have been some good and bad posts by other people. The bad posts simply take Raskin as a fool, and state the most obvious and ill considered criticism. Have you considered Raskin has also thought about these issues and has already provided answers on his website? I have yet to see a criticism in relation to his solutions as stated on the website.
Bonus Question:
Why does Raskin allow the introduction keyboard short-cuts when it is so obvious it would be difficult for people to remember which short-cut does what function? Or as someone else put it:
Couldn’t imagine my 63 year old mother trying to figure out which keystroke to fart with, when point and click is SSOO EEAASSYY. It only takes about 3 seconds to double-click an icon that says “FART HERE”
Happy research folks!
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.
I was impressed that Kevin Adams picked up our early release of THE within a day.
I have some replies for the questions and comments:
Better than the screenshots that tantalic asks for is to find a freind with a Mac and just try it. Static screenshots look like a bunch of text, with perhaps some letters highlighted.
Reading the manual or the spec gives a better idea, but trying it is best.
Zan Lynx says that the editor seems to be a lot like vi. That’s a nice complimenet; when dealing with text you should not have to live a hand-to-mouse existence. But Lynx credits our design with having “separate editiong and command modes?” No way. We don’t have modes. That’s one of many details that makes THE more humane than vi (or emacs, which also has an incremental, though unfortunately modal, search).
I don’t want to sound like I’m selling my book, but a lot of Lynx’s (and others’) comments would be answered if they’d read the spec, the manual, (those two are free) and my book (which states the principles behind the design. It _really_ helps to understand *why* and *how* earlier designs have failed us as humans.
Lynx’s wish to have the undo log saved is a good one, and is exactly what our present system does. But Lynx says that every application should save and be able to view the Undo log. Check, except that we don’t have applications (the idea of applications is a mistake inherited from the punch-card days).
Jeffery comments that THE is for geeks. It was the non-geeks who loved the Canon Cat, which had a partial and earlier version of this interface, so the evidence says otherwise. He also notes that standard GUIs will be around for a long time. That is also true, they’ll hang on forever (we still have FORTRAN!). But fortunately it’s not an either/or situation. There’s room and need for both.
Calroth is right: you do need to get used to a new interface. Readers of this list are _very_ experienced with present methods, which makes you the hardest audience. And, as Calroth suspects, it works a lot more smoothly with the recommended keyboard. But it’s not a “very smart typewriter…”. Well, it depends on just how smart you mean, but you can program (so far, in Python, even changing the behavior of THE from inside THE), include pictures in documents, and do anything that any other OS can do. That’s a pretty zippy typewriter.
rajan r points out a key property of THE: it is “far more productive.” No known editor is as fast to use as the editing portions of THE.
m wants it on PCs. So do we. This is a volunteer effort, and we have a crew from around the world helping. Nobody is yet working on the PC port. Any takers out there?
Some correspondents confuse input media with the kind of interface details that THE embodies. Asking for voice input is one thing, asking exactly what you will say and how the system will respond is another. The design of THE applies to voice (or even direct mind) input.
With regard to patents, there is no restriction on using THE in any non-commercial way. But if you are making money using something I invented (as established by the existence of a patent and historical evidence), we should share the rewards. I think that’s fair. The software is open source, and will remain so. Unlike Apple, it is my intent to license at reasonable rates, which for a penniless start up might be very cheap indeed (I _don’t_ want to stifle creativity).
I appreciate the many supportive comments that were posted.
As for the history (what came from Xerox, what did I invent, what did others invent), that is a different matter. My website has an essay or two that discusses some of that. But I am far more interested in the future than in the past. I can say that the posted comments about what I wanted for the Mac and who did what are only partially correct.
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).
The documents on the site have some substantial errors (such as saying that I was hired by Apple from Xerox PARC: I never worked at Xerox PARC) but in general are pretty accurate and worth reading. There is a detailed comparison of how PARC’s products worked and what I invented for the Mac in an appendix to my book (maybe it _is_ worth reading — if only to get some facts straight :-).
Stew asks about the Zooming portion of THE: it’s coming along. Development takes time, unfortunately.
seaslug’s comments are right on. Thanks. He or she groks THE.
Steven Smith asks, “Am I missing something, or is this just another text editor.” I’d have to say that he’s missing the whole thing. We started with text editing commands because we need them to write software. As we go along, we (and others) are adding commands that do other things computers are used for.
Jefferey claims that I hate mice. No, I hate having to reach for a mouse when I’m typing. Graphic input devices, such as the mouse, are *essential* for graphics. When you are using one, you should not have to reach for the keyboard. Each tool has its proper place. Using a mouse in text is as dumb as trying to do graphics from a keyboard.
As Calroth and Dissapointed note, many comments are from people who have not taken the time to understand THE and therefore attack their own guesses as to why and how it works.
I have taken the time to write specs, manuals, and a book to explain this work. I do not think it is unreasonable to ask people to look at the available material and maybe even try the software before commenting.
This note was written in THE, by the way. We eat our own dogfood. I gotta get back to building software…
The method for LEAPing seems clunky to me, but I guess that’s what I get for not having a special LEAP key on the keyboard. Ditto for entering commands. But maybe I’m just not used to it, as said…
To really appreciate such an environment, you have to use it on a Cannon Cat, which some of the concepts behind THE were originally designed for. The two keys for leaping are located right below the space bar (they are side by side and each is half the length of the spacebar). Since your thumbs usually rest right around the spacebar area anyhow, it’s not that big of a task to hit LEAP. And since LEAP keys act like left & right cursor keys when you hit them by themselves (no having to use seperate cursor keys located in some far and distant section of the keyboard).
I’ve got a Cannon Cat, and one of the best things about LEAP is that it allows you to do an incremental search (like on emacs) for a work you’re looking for. You get a big speed boost from doing this because you don’t have to do a visual search+scroll for the targeted work, you just start typing it. And it’s far more modeless than, say, a “Find” dialog.
“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.
28th of December, Fools Day here at Spain (Santos Inocentes), I understand Fools Day at the USA is on April, and here I am reading Jef Raskin anwsers to comments on Osnews.com, pinch me.
I deduce by some of the comments posted that a fine implementation of the T.H.E. may require also an specific hardware interface, that is a keyboard that doesn’t get the user lost in F and/or shift keys. I wonder if a Dvorak type of keyboard is preferred. I think I´m going to buy me that Human Interface book.
In case this is not a hoax, thank you very much for your kind answers Mr. Raskin.
@ Don Cox
“Why have none of the people who claim to be experts on interfaces ever used Amigas?”
The Amiga interface is not as good as you seem to think. If you leave out things like the clear directory structure of AmigaOS and just analyze the graphical user interface, you will notice that it has as many flaws as most other interfaces. Although AmigaOS is well remembered for its multitasking, switching between applications (-> “screens”) can be rather annoying. In MacOS (and BeOS), users have a full list of all currently running applications which can be opened with just a single click. They just need to pick one and click again using their mouse. In Windows, all currently running applications are permanently shown in the task bar. There is no need to open any list at all, you simply choose an application and click your left mouse button. Both, the MacOS and Windows ways, are definetely easier than having to click on a small “switch to next screen” button several times (AmigaOS).
Obviously, this is just a minor example but I don’t want to give too many hints to our competition. Rest assured that there are *many* ideas on how to improve the original AmigaOS interface. Just wait for future versions of the MorphOS UI, and you will see what I am talking about.
It should not come as a surprise that an 8-years-old user interface leaves room for a LOI of improvements…
One poster above wanted to see ZUIs.
Well this already quite developed. There is a nice Java lib called “Jazz” (its successor will however be in C#, since its team has been bribed by MS
and there is another one called VTM, which is used in one W3C project for example.
At my last job, we created some nice interfaces with Jazz.
Regards,
Marc
Let me state that my comments are about the vast majority of home PC users out there. Most of the posts on this topic seem to apply to those who use a computer in their everyday/all-day job. Especially, complex computer tasks. The home PC user has a different set of requirements. I have, in my job encountered people who have had AOL as an internet service from day 1. When they switch to a local dial-up service and start using IE, they are totaly lost, and hate IE with a real passion. Think of them trying to learn THE!!!
“Although AmigaOS is well remembered for its multitasking, switching between
applications (-> “screens”) can be rather annoying. In MacOS (and BeOS), users have a full list of all
currently running applications which can be opened with just a single click. They just need to pick one and
click again using their mouse. In Windows, all currently running applications are permanently shown in the
task bar. There is no need to open any list at all, you simply choose an application and click your left mouse
button. Both, the MacOS and Windows ways, are definetely easier than having to click on a small “switch to
next screen” button several times (AmigaOS). ”
Don’t you use a screens menu? It works just like the menu on the Mac –
you get a list of currently running programs and select the one you
want. I find this simpler and more elegant that the Windows task bar
(clutter) or Alt-Tab (which is a similar list but you have to do it
several times to get to the one you want).
I have a lot of experience of using Macs from 1986-96, and the reason
I never bought one for my own use is the infuriating way in which all
the programs fight for use of the Finder screen. But in general, after
many years of using Macs, Windows and Amiga, I found that a modern
Amiga (ie with a current type of monitor) is the easiest to use.
That’s why I use them. Nothing stops me using another platform if I
preferred it.
However, the point is not which interface is better, but that the
“experts” have no experience at all of using Amiga (or BeOS) on a
regular basis.
Although THE may have some nice ideas, I found it quite troubling that they don’t have a screenshot on their website. No matter what, screenshots give a good idea about what the program is about, and may even cause people to try it, because after seeing it people may get interested even more.
THE is not a GUI. It is a text based interface. In all of its limited info, graphics are hardly mentioned.
“THE is not a GUI. It is a text based interface. In all of its limited
info, graphics are hardly mentioned.”
But in that case, why is it running on the Mac?
Surely DOS would be more appropriate, or Linux without a GUI.
@ Don Cox
“Don’t you use a screens menu? It works just like the menu on the Mac – you get a list of currently running programs and select the one you want. I find this simpler and more elegant that the Windows task bar (clutter) or Alt-Tab (which is a similar list but you have to do it
several times to get to the one you want).”
First of all, AmigaOS does not include any sort of screens menu by default. There are also Windows-like taskbars available as third-party tools for AmigaOS, yet I do not consider these as a part of Workbench/the Amiga GUI.
As for the Windows task bar, the Start button has one major advantage: Whatever program you are currently running, you can always start additional applications with just a few mouse clicks. In AmigaOS, you usually have to switch back to Workbench first, before you can start any software at all. This can be ineffective at times. (Yes, I am aware of things like ToolsDaemon but this is – again – not part of the UI that was designed by the CBM/Amiga guys. Also, note that ToolsDaemon is not something you would expect novice users to configure themselves.)
“I have a lot of experience of using Macs from 1986-96, and the reason I never bought one for my own use is the infuriating way in which all the programs fight for use of the Finder screen.”
Yes, I also like the Amiga way of having one screen for each (big) application. For some programs, it just makes sense to use a different resolution than for the desktop/Finder.
In Windows, all applications run essentially on the very same screen at the very same resolution. This may be acceptable in an everyday life situation, but from a graphician’s point of view this can be annoying sometimes.
“But in general, after many years of using Macs, Windows and Amiga, I found that a modern Amiga (ie with a current type of monitor) is the easiest to use.”
Well, please keep in mind that you are an expert user. AmigaOS definetely has its merits if you have learned how to use it over the years. But it is not too well suited for novice users, for instance.
“That’s why I use them. Nothing stops me using another platform if I preferred it.”
I am not saying that Workbench is a bad interface. However, it is old and MacOS/Windows do a couple of things better by now.
“However, the point is not which interface is better, but that the “experts” have no experience at all of using Amiga (or BeOS) on a regular basis.”
Well, the BeOS interface ignores a couple of rather important interface design rules.
According to Fitt’s law, corners and edges of the screen are special because they are infinitely large. No matter how far you move your mouse up, once it hits the top of the screen, it stays there. You cannot overshoot your target!
Unfortunately, the BeOS UI was not designed in a way to make actually use of this.
Same about the menu bar at the top of the screen found in AmigaOS and MacOS. You cannot overshoot it which makes it very easy to pick. In BeOS, however, the menu bar is put in a window which can be moved around. This is proved to be less efficient!
While I have always been interested in BeOS ever since it was announced, I must say that the BeOS UI definetely could have been better. It offers hardly anything that other OSes should try to imitate…
In BeOS, however, the menu bar is put in a window which can be moved around. This is proved to be less efficient!
The menu always sits in a corner of the screen.
It offers hardly anything that other OSes should try to imitate…
That’s why I spent a whole week trying to get the same functionnality with OS X UI, adding some little things like TigerLaunch, ASM, Browse Volumes, etc.
I do agree nevertheless that the BeOS UI “definitely could have been better”.
@ Manik
“The menu always sits in a corner of the screen.”
I was referring to menus containing options such as quit app, save file, etc. In AmigaOS/MacOS, those can always be found at the top of the screen. In BeOS/Windows, they are part of an application’s window.
OK! That menu bar! You’re right, it’s better in Mac OS.
“OK! That menu bar! You’re right, it’s better in Mac OS.”
Jeff Raskin quite rightly stresses the advantages of having the menu
bar attached to the screen in his book.
However, on the Mac, this can be confusing because the menus keep
changing depending on which program window (or the backdrop) is
active. On the Amiga, each program has its own screen with its own
menu bar, so the user is not confused. You can see from the look of
the screen which program is running, and you expect to see that
program’s menus.
The screen(program)-switching menu is on the top right corner, a good
Fitt’s Law position.
The next question is which is better, menus that stay open after you
click them, or menus that close as soon as you release the mouse
button. IMO the latter are faster and more efficient in use, but a bit
harder to learn for beginners. However, one is not a beginner for more
than a day or two.
@ Don Cox
“However, on the Mac, this can be confusing because the menus keep changing depending on which program window (or the backdrop) is active. On the Amiga, each program has its own screen with its own menu bar, so the user is not confused. You can see from the look of the screen which program is running, and you expect to see that program’s menus.”
As I am sure you will know, Don, not all Amiga programs open up their own screen. Internet browsers usually run in a window on Workbench. When running these sort of programs, things can get even more confusing than what you just described with regards to MacOS.
In MacOS, people can actually *see* that the menu bar changes as soon as they switch to another application. When switching between Amiga programs running on Workbench, they cannot see the change until they click their right mouse button and activate the otherwise _hidden_ menu bar options.
It can happen that someone tries to get to the command line prompt (Workbench menu) although the Voyager (browser) window is currently active. This then ends up with him moving his mouse to the upper left corner of the screen and wondering why there is no option “Type in command…”
“The next question is which is better, menus that stay open after you click them, or menus that close as soon as you release the mouse button. IMO the latter are faster and more efficient in use, but a bit harder to learn for beginners. However, one is not a beginner for more
than a day or two.”
Heh
You should really go and take a beginner’s course for computer illiterates. You would be surprised to see how seemingly ‘stupid’ (no offence!) some people can be. Not everyone is able to grasp the concepts of modern graphical user interfaces within a few days, not even weeks sometimes. And some of these people are actually highly educated in normal life…
In any case, menus that stay open, are proved to be easier to use for Joe User. However, this sort of thing should be configurable anyway…
thank you
“As I am sure you will know, Don, not all Amiga programs open up their own screen. Internet browsers
usually run in a window on Workbench.”
I think that would be highly unusual. It would never occur to me to
run a browser such as Voyager in a window on the Workbench screen.
This is just the kind of program that most benefits from the public
screens system.
I have come across a few Amiga users who mainly use Windows and prefer
to run all programs on one screen (and set up a Windows-like Start
menu). The same people would want a task bar and start menu on a Mac.
“Heh
You should really go and take a beginner’s course for computer illiterates. You would be surprised to
see how seemingly ‘stupid’ (no offence!) some people can be. Not everyone is able to grasp the concepts of
modern graphical user interfaces within a few days, not even weeks sometimes. And some of these people
are actually highly educated in normal life… ”
I’ve taught hundreds of beginners on courses of that type. However,
nowadays everyone seems to learn Windows in schools, and computer
beginners are rarely seen (by me).
@ Don Cox
>> As I am sure you will know, Don, not all Amiga programs
>> open up their own screen. Internet browsers
>> usually run in a window on Workbench.”
> I think that would be highly unusual. It would never
> occur to me to run a browser such as Voyager in a window
> on the Workbench screen. This is just the kind of program
> that most benefits from the public screens system.
Well, you are the first person that I know, who doesn’t run Voyager (or any other browser) in a window on the Workbench screen. I have seen plenty of screenshots showing various Amiga browsers running on Workbench, so I think I am not alone with my attitude.
> I have come across a few Amiga users who mainly use
> Windows and prefer to run all programs on one screen (and
> set up a Windows-like Start menu). The same people would
> want a task bar and start menu on a Mac.
Well, having a task bar at the bottom *and* a menu bar at the top of the screen seems like overkill to me.
Anyway, I would not run any application with more than 1 window on the Workbench screen. Things would get far too confusing when Octamed and Cinema4D shared the same screen…
> I’ve taught hundreds of beginners on courses of that
> type.
Well, I was asked about a hundred times how one can re-name files in MacOS by the same 4 or 5 people. After that experience, I knew that there is no such thing as an self-explaining interface. Even the ‘easy-to-use’ MacOS interface is obviously too complex for some people to be able to use it after ‘only’ 1 or 2 days.
> However, nowadays everyone seems to learn Windows in
> schools, and computer beginners are rarely seen (by me).”
Interestingly enough, most children get along with computers pretty well. It’s often older people who have serious problems learning how to use Windows or MacOS. Some cannot even understand the basic concept behind windows and icons, thus use the Start button all the time. If they cannot find something in the Start menu, it is non-existant to these people…
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]