Raskin zoomable desktop manager for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

Raskin zoomable desktop manager for Mac OS X

raskinformac.com

58 pointsmicheljansen30 comments

Can I piggy back on this to spruik my Mac window manager here?

I posted a separate submission this morning but it hasn't seen any attention and I thought it would really appeal to HN's:

Window & tab switching with 'type to search' for OS X http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675963

The interaction modes look very shiny but in the same way "Minority Report" looks shiny. As to the name, I'll wait until Aza chimes in one way or the other but prima facie it feels pretty weird.

Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day.

Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't want to. The UI doesn't invite the user into interaction so much as it does gawking.

"The Humane Interface" is a fascinating book, but if you read it again and pay close attention to Jef's interaction design ideas, you'll realize they're all extremely "out there" and, in the end, pretty unusable. Case in point: the Canon Cat.

That is also "a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day."

Additionally, Jef's involvement in the development of the Macintosh's user interface has been vastly overstated... mostly by himself. Evidence for this can be seen in reading his own essays which predate his 1981 "history of the Macintosh" (in the older essays, it's clear that his vision has little to do with the Macintosh at all), and online repositories of Apple stories like folklore.org where many people report that Jef had the habit of laying claim to everyone else's ideas.

Example: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=The_Father_of_The...

The end result is basically this: everything Raskin worked on except the Mac is weird and experimental, and not practical or enjoyable.

His reputation definitely has the Halo Effect going on, but sadly, if you pay close attention, it's clear that the emperor may not be naked but he is certainly not fully clothed.

My reading of folklore.org jives with what you're saying. The Mac as originally imagined by Raskin was not the Mac that eventually shipped (for better or worse).

Considering Raskin's ideas about user interaction as "out there" is a matter of perspective. Touch screen interfaces that are now common today were once considered "out there". His love affair with the Canon Cat wasn't just a personal obsession. He made (what I considered to be) a group of well reasoned arguments about why it was so good based on the concepts it brought into reality. Off the top of my head I can recall automatic file saving (with no consideration to the file system) being one such argument. This feature will be shipping in the next release of OS X (Lion). If Raskin's ideas in the Humane Interface were "out there", then I take that phrase to be synonymous with "avant garde".

The zoom UI he talks about in another chapter (and what the OS X app Raskin has attempted to implement) seems like a strong candidate for a general data exploration and discovery UI. What he put forth in the book was conceptual, and no one has yet made a commercially or critically appealing implementation. That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just mean it hasn't happened.

Sadly in 2011 most of the objects I deal with aren't files.

What do you mean?

Databases, network connections, processes?

Bookmarks, message threads, tweets, emails, source code commits, issues, etc.

I have to wonder about a UI tool whose website adds 60px of blank space to the right.

It's actually 135px if we're nit picking.

Ha! Must be a browser thing; I actually measured it with xScope.

It depends on the width of your window. This is a quite common bug that only shows up when the browser window is too narrow. Since their website is incredibly wide (it doesn’t even fit on my 1440px wide screen) it probably shows up for quite a lot of users.

My browser window is usually 700px or so wide which is why I encounter that particular bug all the time – especially on otherwise quite nicely designed websites. It absolutely breaks the website and sometimes makes it unreadable (try resizing the window and see what happens), forcing me to resize my browser window. Why don’t web designers like people like me who like to see more than one browser window at a time?

Because web design is a horrible abomination suffered by an enthusiastic few and a miserable many; because there is a fundamental, unsolved problem of presenting a specific amount of information (not too much, not too little) to users in a medium which can be radically different from user to user.

A design that would look good on your layout would look terrible on another user's widescreen; a design that would look good on a widescreen will look awkward, at best, on your setup.

It doesn't help that so many people are still clinging to CSS as the primary answer for this, since it is completely ill-equipped to deal with this problem.

While I'm probably one of the first to experiment with new, innovative computer interfaces, I closed Raskin after about 60 seconds of trying to use it.

For starters, I couldn't get it to actually pinch zoom, making it near impossible to read any file names. The scrolling itself was so fast that I found myself flying around the screen without any ability to recognize where I was or where I wanted to go. Images had a consistent and ugly black border. Files seemed to be resized and ranked without any plausible order. Loading was slow, slow, slow. There were no keyboard shortcuts to allow me to quickly flip through a row of images. The viewpoint would not stick to a column or series of images, causing me to easily lose my place. The font rendering was horrid.

I could go on...

I know a lot of people might read this first and skip it, like I almost did, so I want to mention that it actually worked pretty well for me. There are some shortcuts but nothing to move around to next row, next file, next column, etc. I plan to leave it running on a Space anyway and see if it turns out useful. I think that the larger the monitor, the bigger improvement over Finder. It would be fantastic for a touchscreen.

Yep, worked as advertised for me. It was a little slow but I think that's because it was still analysing my drive.

I personally have no use for it but it certainly worked well enough.

An interesting concept, for programmers it would be great, if they supported something along the lines of 1996s "Software Visualization in the Large", by Thomas Ball and Stephen Eick [1]. I did something like that (i.e., marrying the visualization with a file management metaphor) quite a while back in Eclipse, but never got around to maintain it. Too bad, because I kind of liked it. (And it was different from AspectBrowser, too.)

[1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89....

Screenshots for your plugin?

I was surprised to find this has nothing to do with Aza Raskin

I'm not very comfortable with the idea of them using Jef Raskin's name in that way. Perhaps it's a well-meaning tribute from their point-of-view but from mine it seems like a sleazy attempt to capitalize on someone else's reputation.

You realize that Aza Raskin is to Jef Raskin as George W Bush is to George HW Bush, right?

It was "Inspired by Macintosh visionary, Jef Raskin"[1], who was Aza's father.

[1]: http://raskinformac.com/#features

Yeah... I got that far, but it still has nothing to do either of them.

Jef presented the idea of a zoomable interface in his book "The Humane Interface" and a zoomable interface was a part of THE/Archy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

There was also some research in the 70s and early 80s, especially the Spatial Data Management System by Christopher Herot.

Now that I've looked at it, I think I'm glad neither are involved.

It looks somewhat like the new Microsoft OS / phone screen

I tried to love it. I couldn't do it though.

The previews of files are great if you work with images. Not so great for source code though.

i work with images (and code too) .. but with my mid 2010 macbookpro it gets too slow to be usefull .. i think this kind of interface just need the next (or the next next) chip generation. than you can design a application like that the way it's supposed to be - ultra fast, with every label changing size to be readable .. etc etc .. nice try though ..

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