internet person what draws the pitchers



vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

I've never gotten to try a Canon Cat, but it was the closest Jef Raskin ever got to shipping a full manifestation of his usability principles. I read his book The Humane Interface back in the early 00s when it was some of the only writing about interface design I could get my hands on. Jef's most strongly held opinion was that modes - different states for a UI where the same input produces a different result - were bad, led to errors both serious and merely annoying, slowed users down, and limited the potential of an interface. This was a few years before I learned vi and Emacs, and I can only assume that he considered vi an abomination. His compromise was "quasimodes", modes you had to consciously keep engaged, eg by holding a key down - so in his view CapsLock was bad design, but Shift keys were fine.

The Cat therefore had two dedicated "search backward/forward for string in the current document" keys labeled Leap beneath the space bar; you held one down and typed the string you were searching for, and it would take you there; and if you wanted to leap to the string's next/previous occurrence you tapped the same leap key again until you found what you wanted. The keys were apparently also used for simpler more conventional caret moving.

Raskin's later work centered on the Archy environment, an evolution of many of the Cat's ideas. It was text only - he saw icons as a dead end - and all documents existed in a single big text workspace you navigated by leaping. Instead of "applications" it just had different routines that could operate on selected parts of documents. It seems like he understood that this paradigm needed something else to scale to modern user needs, and the last bit of THI talks about Zooming User Interfaces, ie spatializing the one big document and letting you navigate it more like a giant canvas, which we see today in board-based editors like Miro and, say, Unreal Engine's Blueprint editor.

Raskin was deeply opinionated and cared a lot about treating users humanely - computers should be usable by everyone and never ever lose user data; handing people a bad interface was a form of harm. His vision was incomplete in multiple respects, but I admire his determination to keep charging ahead into ideas that were pretty far afield from where mainstream GUI design ended up. I think the book had a positive impact on my thinking as a young designer - and it's still useful to have a little voice in the back of my head asking "does this need to be a mode?"


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in reply to @eramdam's post:

in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

there's something quite charming about "no menus. we simply printed the menu onto the keyboard instead"

brings back memories of a computer class that taught us all to use wordperfect for dos, by memorizing function key shortcuts. there was an invisible menubar if you pressed alt but we were never told about it. also i think windows 95 was already out so this was obsolete in multiple different ways