7 ms·

Canon Cat

carapace 6y ago
See also Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface". (And by "see also" I mean "stop what you're doing, get a copy, and read it now.")
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Yep. While there are only a few techniques I would use unchanged, the book's philosophy has been very formative. The focus on allowing users to form habits has particularly stuck with me as a principle with important non-obvious results (e.g. no adaptive menus).
  - pavlov 6y ago
    It’s also a principle that’s useful for resisting trend-based redesigns in SaaS products where users typically don’t have a choice of staying with the old design. Most web apps are the polar opposite of Raskin’s principles: highly modal screen-based UIs with low information density (because the designer loves airy padding and big fonts), constantly getting tinkered and unintentionally preventing habit formation.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I was one of the early in-house reviewers of the book, and it absolutely changed my life. One of the things that really struck me about it: the manuscript was written in double-spaced courier, with sketched out hand drawings. Coming from one of the designers of the Macintosh, the manuscript could have come from a Canon Cat. And that was the Right Thing. The formatting would be done by professionals. (I learned that after I put in an enormous amount of work formatting my own manuscript.) He did the thing that got the job done, putting the words in my hands and the hands of those who would make it look nice.
sp332 6y ago
The interface implemented a lot of ideas from The Humane Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface One of those is to avoid "modes" where the same key does different things depending on context, because people are bad at tracking that kind of thing. So when modes are needed - like typing to search instead of entering text - it uses "semi-modes" that require holding a key down so you don't forget what mode you're in.
- CapriciousCptl 6y ago
  That’s interesting! I wonder how big a problem it really was. Vi kind of took the opposite approach I guess.
  - innagadadavida 6y ago
    > Vi kind of took the opposite approach I guess. What made this easy to work with is you can easily hit escape and it will put you in edit mode and you can easily build muscle memory to do this quickly.
    - sp332 6y ago
      Escape puts you in command mode. There are several ways to get into an editing mode but 'i' works.
  - momszack 6y ago
    Not really. Vi has fewer modes than just about every word processor or editor in history. It has 3 core modes (2 major ones). Most word processors have countless more “modes” for even doing things like search and replace, and emacs has the mini buffer. The vi design principal is that a limited number of modes used frequently is better than numerous specialized ones used leas frequently. Any HCI dweeb that thinks 2 clearly visible modes is somehow inherently less usable than any alternative can fight me. And they’re full of shit on this in general. It’s not like they have the quality data to prove this, it’s always been something that has been taken for granted, avoid modes, just because there are a few examples (some catastrophic) of it being done poorly. Edit: I mean really has anyone seen an experienced user use vi? You think from the HCI navel gazers that they would be half the time fumbling over what mode they’re in. Less talk, more observation.
corytheboyd 6y ago
It’s a bit hilarious to look back on this keyboard with added application specific keys and wonder why they couldn’t have been replaced with keyboard shortcuts. I’m sure the state of “normal” UX as we know it today didn’t exist then, at least with respect to something as fundamental as the keyboard.
- brudgers 6y ago
  Back in those days, it was ordinary for application software to ship with cardboard over-the-keyboard templates showing the commands associated with key combinations. The user could swap them out between different applications. Using key combinations for the operating system would have encroached on “application space.” Even today the standard keyboard has dedicated home, page down, delete, keys (etc.). The cardboard overlay became less viable as bespoke keyboards were replaced by commodity designs with arbitrary key layouts and spacings.
  - gkop 6y ago
    The overlays generally encompassed only the top row of the keyboard (which is an island) right? So they indexed the top row and the row immediately below. At least those are the kind I remember and are easy to find on Google images. Or were there also larger/full keyboard overlays that made use of the other gutters between islands of keys? Also, I remember these for the Model M keyboard layout. What other standard keyboard layouts were popular for the cardboard guides?
    - lproven 6y ago
      Since everyone followed the IBM keyboard layout, the templates fitted virtually every keyboard. Right now I'm typing on an Apple Extended keyboard from about 1987 and it has little pegs at top right and top left corners of the casing for the keyboard templates to hang on. Before the Extended layout, the F-keys were in a vertical double row to the left of the QWERTY block, as shown here: https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_keyboard There were some F-key cardboard templates to fit over those keys, but they were less common -- partly because the original PC was so limited, maxing out at 640 kB of RAM and a 4.77MHz CPU, and not coming with a hard disk as standard, just 360 kB floppy drives, so that apps tended to be small and simple and not have very rich functionality to learn and remember. But 3rd parties made ones you could stick on, e.g. https://imgur.com/gallery/pwNQZ9S https://imgur.com/gallery/pwNQZ9S
chris_wot 6y ago
This article is in the present tense, is it still available?
- lproven 6y ago
  No, but they do turn up on eBay occasionally.
the_only_law 6y ago
I always thought these look cool. It’s on the list of machines I’ve never seen for sale sadly.
lproven 6y ago
I have never played with one, only studied the videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c ) and documentation. It was a very radical UI. If you added programs, they just added new functionality to the existing editor. So, for instance, a spreadsheet module might mean that suddenly, when loaded, you can do operations like SUM{...} or MEAN{...} on a table of numbers in the editor. I've long wished that someone would implement the Canon Cat UI as an Emacs module. It would seem to me that Emacs has all or most of the necessary functionality already.
Grumbledour 6y ago
The Internet Archive provides an Emulator of the Canon Cat at https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat

See also Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface". (And by "see also" I mean "stop what you're doing, get a copy, and read it now.")

andrewflnr 6y ago
Yep. While there are only a few techniques I would use unchanged, the book's philosophy has been very formative. The focus on allowing users to form habits has particularly stuck with me as a principle with important non-obvious results (e.g. no adaptive menus).
- pavlov 6y ago
  It’s also a principle that’s useful for resisting trend-based redesigns in SaaS products where users typically don’t have a choice of staying with the old design. Most web apps are the polar opposite of Raskin’s principles: highly modal screen-based UIs with low information density (because the designer loves airy padding and big fonts), constantly getting tinkered and unintentionally preventing habit formation.
jfengel 6y ago
I was one of the early in-house reviewers of the book, and it absolutely changed my life. One of the things that really struck me about it: the manuscript was written in double-spaced courier, with sketched out hand drawings. Coming from one of the designers of the Macintosh, the manuscript could have come from a Canon Cat. And that was the Right Thing. The formatting would be done by professionals. (I learned that after I put in an enormous amount of work formatting my own manuscript.) He did the thing that got the job done, putting the words in my hands and the hands of those who would make it look nice.

sp332 6y ago

The interface implemented a lot of ideas from The Humane Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface One of those is to avoid "modes" where the same key does different things depending on context, because people are bad at tracking that kind of thing. So when modes are needed - like typing to search instead of entering text - it uses "semi-modes" that require holding a key down so you don't forget what mode you're in.

CapriciousCptl 6y ago
That’s interesting! I wonder how big a problem it really was. Vi kind of took the opposite approach I guess.
- innagadadavida 6y ago
  > Vi kind of took the opposite approach I guess. What made this easy to work with is you can easily hit escape and it will put you in edit mode and you can easily build muscle memory to do this quickly.
  - sp332 6y ago
    Escape puts you in command mode. There are several ways to get into an editing mode but 'i' works.
- momszack 6y ago
  Not really. Vi has fewer modes than just about every word processor or editor in history. It has 3 core modes (2 major ones). Most word processors have countless more “modes” for even doing things like search and replace, and emacs has the mini buffer. The vi design principal is that a limited number of modes used frequently is better than numerous specialized ones used leas frequently. Any HCI dweeb that thinks 2 clearly visible modes is somehow inherently less usable than any alternative can fight me. And they’re full of shit on this in general. It’s not like they have the quality data to prove this, it’s always been something that has been taken for granted, avoid modes, just because there are a few examples (some catastrophic) of it being done poorly. Edit: I mean really has anyone seen an experienced user use vi? You think from the HCI navel gazers that they would be half the time fumbling over what mode they’re in. Less talk, more observation.

corytheboyd 6y ago

It’s a bit hilarious to look back on this keyboard with added application specific keys and wonder why they couldn’t have been replaced with keyboard shortcuts. I’m sure the state of “normal” UX as we know it today didn’t exist then, at least with respect to something as fundamental as the keyboard.

brudgers 6y ago
Back in those days, it was ordinary for application software to ship with cardboard over-the-keyboard templates showing the commands associated with key combinations. The user could swap them out between different applications. Using key combinations for the operating system would have encroached on “application space.” Even today the standard keyboard has dedicated home, page down, delete, keys (etc.). The cardboard overlay became less viable as bespoke keyboards were replaced by commodity designs with arbitrary key layouts and spacings.
- gkop 6y ago
  The overlays generally encompassed only the top row of the keyboard (which is an island) right? So they indexed the top row and the row immediately below. At least those are the kind I remember and are easy to find on Google images. Or were there also larger/full keyboard overlays that made use of the other gutters between islands of keys? Also, I remember these for the Model M keyboard layout. What other standard keyboard layouts were popular for the cardboard guides?
  - lproven 6y ago
    Since everyone followed the IBM keyboard layout, the templates fitted virtually every keyboard. Right now I'm typing on an Apple Extended keyboard from about 1987 and it has little pegs at top right and top left corners of the casing for the keyboard templates to hang on. Before the Extended layout, the F-keys were in a vertical double row to the left of the QWERTY block, as shown here: https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_keyboard There were some F-key cardboard templates to fit over those keys, but they were less common -- partly because the original PC was so limited, maxing out at 640 kB of RAM and a 4.77MHz CPU, and not coming with a hard disk as standard, just 360 kB floppy drives, so that apps tended to be small and simple and not have very rich functionality to learn and remember. But 3rd parties made ones you could stick on, e.g. https://imgur.com/gallery/pwNQZ9S https://imgur.com/gallery/pwNQZ9S

chris_wot 6y ago

This article is in the present tense, is it still available?

lproven 6y ago
No, but they do turn up on eBay occasionally.

the_only_law 6y ago

I always thought these look cool. It’s on the list of machines I’ve never seen for sale sadly.

lproven 6y ago

I have never played with one, only studied the videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c ) and documentation. It was a very radical UI. If you added programs, they just added new functionality to the existing editor. So, for instance, a spreadsheet module might mean that suddenly, when loaded, you can do operations like SUM{...} or MEAN{...} on a table of numbers in the editor. I've long wished that someone would implement the Canon Cat UI as an Emacs module. It would seem to me that Emacs has all or most of the necessary functionality already.

Grumbledour 6y ago

The Internet Archive provides an Emulator of the Canon Cat at https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat