Jef Raskin — Unable to Explain an Interface?
A WebWord reader passed along some good information about the Macworld Conference & Expo in Boston. Apparently, Raskin was unable and perhaps even unwilling to describe a new interface he is working on right now. In fact, he said that he wouldn’t describe the interface (”LEAP”) because that is how he sells books.
Maybe Jef was joking and maybe not. I respect his work but I don’t know him personally, so I don’t know how he interacted with the audience. In any event, I followed the reader’s link and it does seem that Raskin made some of the comments I described above.
As Raskin points out, explaining a GUI to people who only knew command line interfaces must have been very difficult. But, is THE or LEAP that revolutionary? That begs yet another question. What is coming next? What comes after the GUI? Voice interfaces with natural language? Thoughts?
July 15th, 2004 at 4:00 pm
From another blog posting on the conference…
“Pogue led off by asking Raskin, whom he’d introduced as the person who’d invented the Mac, how he felt about the fact that everyone thinks that Steve invented the Macintosh. Raskin, who seemed a little more serious and perhaps with more of an axe to grind than the others, alluded to how history provides a halo effect to some, and that for a while he hadn’t cared, but now he felt that history should be set right. He was the father of the Macintosh, he continued, as it grew out of projects he’d begun long before Steve joined the team.”
Read more!
July 16th, 2004 at 7:23 am
I have Raskin’s book right by my side on my desktop. The LEAP interface is the same concept as Mozilla’s FastFind “(start typing the first few letters of some text in the page and Firefox takes you there)”, but applied throughout the whole system (it even intends to replace the mouse and arrow keys!).
You could think that’s “just an incremental search” but if you have used Firefox, you can understand what a big improvement such a simple idea can be.
July 16th, 2004 at 9:32 am
That sounds interesting, but I’m not sure why he couldn’t just explain that.
July 16th, 2004 at 11:08 am
There is a demo of some of Raskins UI concepts on his web site. The LEAP explanation is correct. It is fast find. Type ahead search. Its been in emacs for ages.
The other thing is a status type message that pops up as a background to what you are doing. This is just a really interesting take on the status bar, one that you might actually see.