Comment by jaysonelliot
1 day ago
You're making the error of judging Raskin's approach with the knowledge of user interfaces that a person in 2025 has. It's been 40 years since that interview. Many people today weren't even born yet.
In that 40 years, many UI conventions have sprung up, and we've internalized them to the point that they're so familiar we actually say they're intuitive.
But if you go back to the state of computing in 1986, or even earlier, when Raskin was developing his UX principles for the Canon Cat and the SwyftCard, he was considering computer interfaces that were almost exclusively command-line interfaces.
You're not supposed to "idolize" any designer or engineer. But I would highly encourage you to read The Humane Interface, learn about the underlying principles of usability and interface design, and consider how you'd apply them to a UI today, 40 years later. The execution you'd come up with would be different. But the principles he started from are foundational and very useful.
You're making the mistake of thinking I wasn't using computers in 1986 :)
I used GNU Emacs as an example for precisely this reason.
Emacs and a couple of key plugins can get you pretty darned close to the Cat interface. But here's the thing, Emacs is still behind the Open Genera interface which I believe, predates the Cat. And the extensability of the Lisp Machine/Emacs is superior to that of the Cat.
Raskin was a fan of "zoomable interfaces" as I recall. Remember reading about a huge canvas which you navigate and can zoom in and out of.
Today we have Miro and it works like that. I hate it.
I have a geographical memory, that worked well with paper and books, but I haven't printed more than two pages in the last 7 years and none of my work uses books anymore (I did buy a book for academic study last year).
Zooming, from a building, to a room, to a bookshelf, to a book/folder/boxfile, to the content and the location within the content worked with my brain. With digital files it just seems like a swamp I have to wade through. Microsoft are so antagonistic to my 'location' based thinking because Windows conceals where files really are.
I similarly remember things spatially, but maybe not quite as extreme as a fully zoomable UI. But I think it's the reason I like spatial desktops / file managers.
Completely agree. An infinite canvas sounds great until you need to find anything, then you end up with having to create a structure to it, and you rapidly end up grouping stuff into "pages" - Miro's "frames".
Further, I have read several sections of The Humane Interface, and I think it does contain some real insight, some of which we have unfortunately lost.
But I do not think that Raskin was channelling some remarkable stream of insight into these matters. And yes, "idolize" was more poking fun at people who use superlatives to describe him, in my opinion without much justification.