Jef Raskin On The Mac 539
der Kopf writes "Jeff Raskin, one of the creators of the Macintosh and inventor of the click-and-drag interface, states in an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian that "the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine."" While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP.
GUI design (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, Raskin's complaints about Windows and OS X being similar could come down to other explanations: 1) convergent evolution or 2) Microsoft blatantly ripped off Apple in look and feel and continues to do so. I am inclined to believe both options as there are simply efficient ways of interfacing with computers in a GUI paradigm. That said, how many times have we seen MacOS features show up in Windows some time later? I am by no means suggesting they are equivalent however. OS X is so much better than Windows in terms of function and interface, but Windows has made huge strides in the last few years, although I do find myself applying the "standard" Windows scheme on my XP machines.
Um, Yeah, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Boinc has a diffrent view (Score:5, Insightful)
That is quite odd of him to say. I just checked on seti@home [berkeley.edu], climate prediction [ox.ac.uk] and predictor@home [scripps.edu] via boinc, I don't see any Apple IIs on top of any lists. Well maybe the distributed computings teams should hire Jef Raskin and his Amazing Basic programming abilities - right?
I think sometimes, you wake up for an interview and haven't had coffee yet and say things that are not quite what you intended - it happens to me all the time ya know...
Re:The difference is (Score:3, Insightful)
That _is_ a nice sharpener (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that he's right that MacOS X is too complex to be a simple appliance. But I think that general purpose computers are by definition complex, because they can be used for *anything*, and his vision holds more true for specialized devices. For example, the iPod is elegant and transparent to use.
That being said, I'm sure that usability could always be improved. But I don't agree that there's not much difference between XP and MacOS X -- while they're similar at a very high level (mouse/windows/icons over multi-tasking OS, etc.), MacOS X is better in almost every detail. But it's best not to get into a religious war here. I can only guess that Jeff has such a radical vision for how computers could be that from his perspective XP and MacOS X aren't too different.
Hmm, kinda like Nader!
Re:GUI design (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an interesting point - we have had, in essence, the same UI experience since Windows 3.x, GeoWindows, and the original Apple user interfaces - it's all, at this point - increased productivity features and eye candy.
Moving away from this UI-locked experience requires radically different thought. While not touting the technology-forward-seeing abilities of movie producers and directors, you'll notice that most "UI" in future computers stand more for "User Interaction" than "User Interface" - that is, interaction becomes more integrated with daily life. Computers track eye movements, "read" thoughts, anticipate needs, and almost always have overly-simplistic and well thought out data displays (my favorites are displays on panes of glass.)
Point is, as pretty as the Mac OSX interface is (and it is...) making it prettier and reevaluating the decades-old principals of PC user interfaces and user interactions are completely different topics.
Can you say bitter, angry, rejected, scorned? (Score:2, Insightful)
If he's so damn pissed that he got fired and the Mac UI is in the toilet, maybe he should go and work on some Open Sores desktop project and get it right for Apple. Perhaps he'd like to modify the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (yeah, guidelines, not commandments) and then share his changes with the Mac community to point out what it is that Apple needs to change so desperately.
Otherwise, Raskin is just being a whiny bitch.
Re:GUI design (Score:2, Insightful)
not an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
You can always use it with a two-button mouse if you want.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the Apple Macintosh that doesn't. There is a difference between the operating system and the hardware - the combination provides an easy to use solution but does not restrict the user.
If you find a two or more button mouse that you like you are more than welcome to plug it into your Mac - and the buttons, scroll wheels and the like will work. Out of the box. Without extra software. In most applications.
All this because hte OS has been designed to cater for both modes of operation.
Die, mice, die! (Score:5, Insightful)
If he hadn't been replaced by Jobs as the team lead, the Macintosh would have no mouse, using keyboard function keys instead.
Re:Hooray for the Grauniad (Score:0, Insightful)
Unlike Bush and the US media who lied the US into a phony war thats killed more civilians than all terrorist attacks in the last 50 years!
Raskin's Bitterness (Score:4, Insightful)
Jef Raskin has good reason to have been bitter about the way the Macintosh has turned out. His description of the Mac's history ( http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html) provides a good introduction.
However, UI's have had to change as computing technologies have become more complicated. When the Mac was introduced, the Internet was still in its developmental stage; computer graphics were limited; and hardware devices were essentially permanently connected to the computer (no plug-and-play type technologies). The world changed, and the interface had to change with it.
It would be great to follow Raskin's advice and reevaluate the Mac GUI - however, it's apparent that Apple is constantly trying to do this. The X GUI has had changes (remember the purple window-shade type button in the X beta's?), and will no doubt continue to change. Right now we're looking at a (I'd say) fairly succesfuly merger of Mac OS 9 and NeXT UIs. But things can always get better.
I respect Raskin tremendously, but I would take his opinions with a grain of salt. His comments should be appreciated and considered, but I certainly don't believe that Apple has abandoned its quest for usability.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go... (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer is simple. One button is usually enough. Mac OS and all the available programs can live perfectly with "just" one mouse button. So why bother?
Re:What i like about XP (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you read the install notes on the box, or the website or during the installation process??? No.. Right that's your problem. All the info and minimum requirements are posted there.
I'm also burnt out on the brushed metal look, the costly updates and dodgy performance unless your willing to fork out big $$$
Explain to me how $999 iBook is expensive? or $799 eMac? If you don't like the look of the hardware. Well, tough. I guess you can buy anything in the gray ai32 world.
I can buy an old PC and know it will be slow - but it will work - and with everything plugged in
I won't even begin to digest this erronous statement. I will say one thing tho - minimum requirements. I have been burned by this before on the ai32 platform. Or have you ever tried using a scanner that had a proprietary pci card? I didn't think so.
Re:Boinc has a diffrent view (Score:5, Insightful)
What does the program do ? (Score:2, Insightful)
which is BS unless he specifies what his program did. I mean a simple "Press any key to continue" is going to be so much more effeicient tha na dialog box with "Do you want to save your settings? --- Yes No OK Cancel SaveToDisk Abort "
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:5, Insightful)
You lose sugarpuff:
A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete.
As another poster so helpfully expanded on for me, Mac OS X has an entire Unix subsystem and feature set that are designed for power users and developers. Your average user knows nothing of these, nor do they need to. That doesn't stop people from documenting all those extra "cool" features in OS X.
Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.
An unsubstantiated statement. I suppose he felt that his statement about the manual should have given him the right to make this statement, except for that statement being based on flawed logic.
My original vision is outdated and irrelevant.
He recognizes that the original Mac interface is unsuitable. But then he goes on to say:
The principles of putting people first, and designing from the interface to the software and hardware, are as vital today as they were then.
Ok. But what does that mean? He gives no examples of proper interfaces, nor does he explain why OS X fails to achieve the "People first" status.
And the iMac G5? Was the original iMac a step on the correct path?
The unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk?
Ouch. You'd almost think he doesn't like the thing. But then he says:
It is a practical and space-saving design.
So which is it?
The truth of the matter is that he didn't actually make a single significant point in the entire article. He made several claims to the effect of Mac OS X being "a poor user interface", but never once gave an opinion as to why or how to fix it. Granted, that may be the fault of the editor, but then we need a better article. There were NO points made in this one.
Re:Boinc has a diffrent view (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is This Personal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair enough. The article didn't state that clearly, so I didn't realize that he simply hates all interfaces.
One thing I do find amusing, however, is that he's apparently a big proponent of Zooming User Interfaces [wikipedia.org] like Pad++ [umd.edu]. Yet the ultimate irony is that the Display PDF layer of Mac OS X makes it the perfect OS to add Zooming interfaces to! Apple has clearly demonstrated this with the Éxpose feature. Somehow, though, that doesn't seem to sink in with this guy.
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Because every time you want to add a feature, you should redesign the OS from the ground up.
There's some good background on Raskin at Folklore.org [folklore.org], including my favorite, I Invented Burrell [folklore.org]
Notoriously whiny (Score:3, Insightful)
Jef Raskin, who is often mis-labelled as "The Father of the Macintosh" (despite the fact that he left the Mac team three years before the Mac's unveiling) has been a notorious critic of Apple. He bashes the leadership, the GUI, and the hardware. The more he does this, the harder it gets to construe it as anything other than sour grapes. Especially since his only real attempt at designing "his" computer interface was the complete flop of the Canon Cat [jagshouse.com]
Note to Jef: if your design is so awesome, make it happen! If it's that much better, I'm sure you'll get more than enough sales to rake in the bucks! I know that I, for one, would love to see what it is you consider to be the ideal interface!
Re:GUI design (Score:5, Insightful)
Having read his book, I don't think that that is the case at all. The main thrust of his dream OS is to get rid of a certain class of errors (modal errors) which cause problems, regardless of your skill level. Infact the more you become familiar with the system the worse they get. A perfect example of this is shortcut keys. I have to use a half dozen text editors in windows, (for various IDEs etc), each of which has keyboard shortcuts. After using an interface for a while you get used to it and the actions become reflexive. So I find myself constantly hitting the wrong shortcut key in the wrong program. Is find Ctrl-F, Ctrl-S, or Ctrl-E, F3, or Shift-F3? I reflexively hit Ctrl-F, to find myself with a forwarded email or error message. The Mac is better because more of the shortcuts are standardized and more applications actually follow them, but I still run into the error. These errors decrease my productivity slightly, but more importantly they make using the computer frustrating. It is impossible not to develop a reflex when you use an interface often, and when that reflex betrays me, and the computer does not do what I expected because someone swapped the gas and brake pedals out from under me, it makes me agrivated. So that is his primary vision - not necisarrily to make computers easier or more efficient but more pleasant. Concidering how much stress there is concerning computers even among people who know how to use them, I think that this is a laudable goal.
But in addition to that I also get the impression that he is overly obsessed with perfection in interface efficiency and elegence. Think of the kind of person who will spend days hand coding assembly, even when the same program written in python still has tons of CPU cycles to spare. His current prototype project to implement his OS seems bogged down in optimizing the low level atomic user interactions. Theortically, some of these changes will let me work faster, but in reality, my limiting factor when typeing is not how fast my fingers move, but how fast my brain words and rewords what I want to say. The same for 2D and 3D graphics.
His arguments in this article are also primarily esthetic - OS X is very complicated and no-one will every understand it all. It is the age old argument between an elegant, small well-designed system, and an amalgemation of existing parts which does the same tasks, but is 10 times more complex because it carries the baggage of compatibility.
I sympathize with his desires, but I don't know that complete elegance will ever win out over ugly practibility. Elegant systems are a joy to use for tasks that mesh with the flexibility built into the system, but once one needs to do something that doesn't quite fit the system, the grand design becomes an obsticle instead of a help, and those loosely bound, ugly amalgamations begin to look more appealing for the absolute freedom that they provide.
those who can do, those who cannot... (Score:5, Insightful)
The result an utter failure, Canon dropped the product in 6 months. Jef claimed that he did not get the support he wanted and had to make compromises on his vision. Bullshit, this man had his time to impress us with his interface expertise and product design skills. It was an utter failure.
Remember, Jef was a professor by training... his ideas are at best academic. If Jef had his way, the Mac would have been a glorified typewriter. It took the the genius of Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Steve Jobs among many others to give us the Macintosh. These guys are the true fathers of the Mac.
Jef has a case of sour grapes, being kicked out of the Mac team by Steve Jobs, and then having his beloved Cat being canned by Canon at Steve's insistence. Jobs, insisted the Canon drop the Cat, if they were to invest in NeXT. Canon invested close to $100M in NeXT!
What we are left with is an academic who time has passed by.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go... (Score:2, Insightful)
When you buy an apple you are expecting an appliance like computer, it comes in a pretty box, with all matching peripherals(dell does this too but in an ugly fashion). Apple gives you what you need to use your computer as they intended. Now you want something special or want that to be different than the pretty package they provide you. Sure we will let you here you go, we will even sell it to you. The problem is that you people think everyone wants and needs a 2 button mouse because PC's have two buttons, its what I'm used too, I'm afraid of change, I don't understand things that are different. Get over it. An apple is what it is, you want the extras buy them, but to piss and moan because your 2 button mouse doesnt have an apple logo on it is stupid.
I call bullshit on this one (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone can be credited with that invention, it would have to be Vannevar Bush with his prescient thoughts on the memex (ie pc). And if not him, then the guys at Xerox-Parc most definitely preceed this Raskin guy.
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:5, Insightful)
GUI for aliens or mutants (Score:2, Insightful)
on the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only relatively recently in the past few years, that a home consumer could get an offering from any OS vendor that was at least half assed stable and half assed secure and functional from raw noobs to advanced professional level users. Before that time, Macs had at least the security part correct, along with the GUI, and were 1/2 way to functionality across the board. that's a 2.5 rating out of 3. MS barely gets a 1.5 until recently, same with linux.. Now I would say that the top 3 OSes are tied at 2.5 still, but Mac got there a lot sooner. And if GUI isn't important, then why has it become an industry standard, across all vendors of the major OSes? Could it be because it's a good idea, that people appreciate the ease of use of GUI? I think so, so do all the folks who have developed and distributed such OSes. I'd say that's some fairly good proof.
There's a REASON that there is something beyond a CLI offered by EVERYONE now. And Apple knew this quite a long time ago and specialised in it, it wasn't an afterthought or a "me too" offering.
With that said, I switched fulltime to Linux once it hit a 2.5 rating on my personal home joe user scale, because it's freer, runs on cheaper hardware I can afford, and at least achieved parity with what I had before. I wouldn't have if it hadn't been developed to that point.
Raskin has always been a HUI snob (Score:4, Insightful)
The real test of an interface is its adoption in the public. This being said, OSX is a hit.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
"In the Good Old Days..." (Score:3, Insightful)
The world changes and raskin won't... Jobs gets it.
Out perform the competition and delight the user.
Raskin hasn't made a contribution in over 20 years.
Rage on old fart... It was better before... sure.
A friggin' free cellphone has better software than those "good ol days".
McD
Ugh. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Meta-Tab : a Windows first. Swiped by Apple for OS 8.5.
2. Windows that minimize to a dock/taskbar, rather than windowshade in place : a Windows first, and the Windows-like behaviour I hate the most about OS X. 9 Windowshades, goddammit. It's a third party hack on Windows and OS X.*
3. Preview-in-filebrowser : A feature that had been standard with Explorer and missing on the Mac until OS X.
There's others, but it's been awhile since I've been a regular Windows user, so I'd be hard pressed to recall others.
Raskin had almost nothing to do with the Mac as it's known now, or as it's been known for years- his own computer design concepts called for a command line interface, not a GUI. He gets a lot of credit for the Mac but the fact is that he left Apple long before it was ever released. MacOS System 1 was shaped much more by Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs and Burell Smith than it was by Raskin.
As for Windows useability.... ugh. Apple's ripped some features, but they're mostly good ones. Minus that whole "losing the windowshading" thing, which I'm still pissed about. If you want Windowshading without third party hacks, your only option these days is an X11 window manager.
Of course, that could lead me to ranting about the state of X11 "desktops" and how much of a letdown it is to see the big DMs turning into shit Win32 clones with bad implementations of all of the worst features of OS X jammed on top- and I've already strayed too far into troll territory, so I'll just stfu.
* You would think that with the zero-pixel borders around sides and bottom of non-Brushed Metal windows in OS X that they would have included windowshading or at least allowed applications to implement it on a per-app basis... but since ALL windows minimize to the dock, it's easy to make one hell of a mess out of it really, really fast in the process of working with Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks... not the cleanest solution in the world, thank you.
Wannn...... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I fear that Raskin has made himself irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe Raskin's approach also differs in that once the command pseudo-mode is entered, a list of available operations is presented, a feature I can't say vi would be worse off to implement. (I might be wrong about this, I don't have Classic installed right now to run THE and apparently he isn't offering it for download anymore...? [sourceforge.net])
I admit that I wish someone like Raskin could get funding from some entity like Apple (or Google?) to develop a truly revolutionary, next-generation operating system. But I've used THE, and it really doesn't seem like that is it. I couldn't get any real work done with it; I found its behavior very esoteric and unpredictable at times (the dual cursors were tricky, as was the behavior of selections).
It also doesn't seem to me that THE would be very amenable to extension to more common modern computer tasks than text-editing and running snippets of Python. Imagine trying to cut a home video [apple.com] or organize 30 gigs of music [itunes.com] or build sophisticated bitmap and vector art [adobe.com] with shift-space and a small library of universal commands.
Monotonous and limited interfaces like THE, it seems, are good for monotnous, mostly single-purpose devices (the Canon Cat, the iPod, to some extent the original Mac). But it seems impossible, to me, to build a system that has the power to do everything that a modern computer does without getting a little unwelcome complexity and inconsistency. Of course, I disagree with Raskin that OSX is just as bad as Windows in this respect--why he would say something like that really is beyond me.
My Litmus Test... (Score:3, Insightful)
She is not a programmer. She is a user. Worse a user who sez "why can't it just do this". She is brilliant in that her view has nothing to do with programming and everything to do with human interface.
She is quite happy with her Mac. Oh, sure, there are things she would prefer to be different (and she NEVER touches the command line interface). But, for the most part, she is happy.
She uses Peecees at works and find them utterly baffling (not that she doesn't use them, but finds them to be an affront to the user).
Raskin may find XP to be the same as OS 10. Fine, he is entitled to his opinion. But real users know the difference.
Re:GUI design (Score:2, Insightful)
However, he goes on to design what he calls the Humane Interface, and suddenly many of his arguments are based on sweeping statements that I have trouble taking at face value and that aren't well-supported. For example, he proposes doing away with folders, filenames, and indeed separate files altogether and allowing users to find whatever they need via an incremental search of their disks. Incremental search is useful, but I have trouble believing that most users would be able to remember the content, let alone the exact wording, of every document they wrote. I certainly find things myself according to where I put them (i.e. what folder, sub-folder, etc.).
For users who like hierarchies (who he feels are few), he proposes a system of pages, documents, and folders based on various numbers of page breaks. (Two for a document boundary, 3 for a folder boundary, etc.) To me this seems like shifting the burden of maintaining a filesystem onto the user to create the technical simplicity of a single document, and without empirical evidence I have trouble believing it's a good idea.
He goes on to add a zooming user interface to his system. I like ZUIs and think they're a neat way to browse hierarchies. But in the preceding chapters he has done away with hierarchical structure, and thus in adding a ZUI he is effectively adding a dual structure to his filesystem. Again, this seems to be increasing the burden on users' minds by asking them to track two parallel structures to their data.
As has already been pointed out by others, it also seems a bit odd that, in the end, so much of his book is devoted to scrapping the GUI in favor of something similar to the Canon Cat.
I agree with most of what Mr. Raskin has to say in this interview. Computers are inefficient and bloated. (I think the 1000-page manual example is a bad one, since the existence of numerous features is not in itself a problem for users uninterested in them.) User interfaces can be easier to learn and more efficient. Modern operating systems are converging on a GUI standard, which is great for cross-platform use but isn't pushing user interface innovation forward. In all these things he's dead on, and certainly not alone. But he seems to think he's found the answer, and I question whether he really has.
The Mac is better than it was a few years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Hawk [reference.com]
Re:GUI design (Score:3, Insightful)
Now you know how I feel about OS X and especially Expose. I don't know how many times I go to hit F9, F10, or F11 at work ... which is a pity when I'm in our Oracle forms.
Re:Not jaded at all (Score:5, Insightful)
When he has one, I'll give it a shot.
OS X is vastly more simple for a beginner to use than the old "System 7" Macintosh. He's coming at OS X the same way a Windows geek does, as somebody who is used to the way a different operating system does things, and therefore a slanted opinion about the way things "should" be done.
The dock, the new multi-tiered finder, and the "no button" mouse are all ultra-friendly on-ramps for a new user to get up and running on all the basic apps. Once the stuff "grandma" needs to learn to do e-mail and surf are mastered, digging deeper into the OS is remarkably simple. After a year or so with her first iMac, my previously-computer-illiterate aunt is comfortably trouble-shooting her own network issues.
The old Mac OS was simple and elegant for the apps and environments which existed in 1989, but ten years later it was getting awfully long in the tooth, and some of the paradigms which seemed like simplicity itself did not adapt well to the way people are using computers today.
Pat yourself on the back for making something which was way ahead of the pack at the time, Raskin, but stop being a crybaby now that your work has been eclipsed and made redundant.
You don't hear this kind of whining about the web from people who used to write CD-ROM encyclopedias, but this article is pretty much the same sort of thing.
Re:Wrong (Score:2, Insightful)