"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.