13 ms·

The Canon Cat

180 points by maguay 4y ago

Ebree 4y ago
"Parents" buy PC for children's better grades (misunderstood as education process), read: to throw their responsibility for teaching kids away; and SPhones/Tablets to make kids happy read: avoid them & avoid raising them completely. (instead of creating the best educated friends you never had) In era of Telly being religious altar & oracle, buying a boring tool without feature of entertainment and non-marketable as colorising life / uplifting status seems incomprehendable. If, only boring tools were available children having other options would still not use them without pressure / good faithed convincing / bribery, so only these without other alternatives would use it. Extreme majority is not teached to teach & convince/evangelise. What they know is forced through obligatory schooling or coerced by popular media reeducation disguised as entertainment & socialisation. It conditioned minds and culture to prefer a sweet poisoned fruit or fool's gold over juicy beef steak earned through hard & uncomfortable. And it's even marketed as free willed choice & freedom.. Families teaching & training kids can fit in a statistical margin error. Not counting ideological training though.. which vary between better or even worse, usually just mirroring the present & future telling magic window. Digressing Being a loner born under communist occupation as kid dumped on with an old german-languaged windows-like "pc" & printer, with only some black-white architect-work apps, i can say from experience: God damn all foreign languages (Babel tower curse..); Bless universal language of self-explainatory images & idiotproof systems with one choice one action principle, learning by exploring & building own features from simple blocks on fly. Words, icons, images are descriptors & ideograms. If we count numbers as pictures then words are made of pictures too - just with predefined abstract meaning behind each composition. We can map, plot and precisely group common words and their meanings & relationships on machine learning multidimensional graphs. So you can also use these algorithms nowadays called AI to find each word's & meaning's image/icon approximation counterpart. It would be weird if nobody yet tried it and geberelise it for most common worldwide languages. It would create the only truly existing allhuman Lingua Franca. ∆∆∆ Image wins by representing direct visual & intuitive least abstract meaning. Like icons with human gestures. Like emotions. It's direct representation of real distinct thing you keep in visual memory along with all other instances of this idea/class & it's common relations to other things. But if you don't give a fully separate choice you will never know which symbolic system is better in a fair fight. Just the border between both is blurred & has no codifier. In time universal self-explanatory meanings will mutate adding new popular abstractions & both will merge. Like me eventually learning the Mordor Lang words on the clicked magic boxes.
rubenv 4y ago
I'm sure this may be interesting, but with such low contrast it's simply impossible to read.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I understand the mild annoyance but this is a problem easily solved by clicking the "Toggle reader view" button on your browser.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    And you could install an extension to get rid of those "subscribe to the newsletter" popups etc. Or you could let the authors know they're doing things wrong. Applying technical solutions to bad content sources only encourages their existence. Edit: in this case, the article didn't seem unbearably low contrast to me. I guess mileage may vary with monitor.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      > Edit: in this case, the article didn't seem unbearably low contrast to me. I guess mileage may vary with monitor. Hence my suggestion for a technical solution. Additionnally the beauty of the web is that for the most part[1] the user has full control over how he want to show the content as the code is interpreted locally. Custom css, your own fonts, which js you execute, your own page treatment. You can do whatever post treatment you want with the content provided. [1] Lazy loading through javascript makes it a bit less true but it rarely concern opinion/text stuff and for the most part web applications on which data can be also accessed through an api. The rest are dubious social medias that try to steal your life, attention span, privacy and make you an addict for commercial purpose and are best avoided like all hard and dangerous drugs.
      - nottorp 4y ago
        > Additionnally the beauty of the web is that for the most part[1] the user has full control over how he want to show the content as the code is interpreted locally. Custom css, your own fonts, which js you execute, your own page treatment. You can do whatever post treatment you want with the content provided. Your time is free?
kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO all "big of IT" have done their best to castrate users ability to use a computer instead of being used by it like a piece of a machine. Computing is power, if users get such power they improve, becoming less easy to milk and steer. That's why we see a war against the desktop concept from Xerox, initially by IBM and then by all others.
- blowski 4y ago
  Linux and emacs might be massively powerful in the hands of a competent, experienced computer user sitting mostly at their desk. For somebody with less time and competence, a tablet can give them much more power because they can use it straight away, in many situations.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    You can use Emacs straight away too. Every version I have installed in the last few years uses CUA (Common User Access) key assignments for copying and pasting and a toolbar that makes it easy to open and save documents.
  - kkfx 4y ago
    GNU/Linux as a bootloader to Emacs can give a competent, patient and experienced computer user an usable enough desktop to get a real damn desktop system to work with, and that sorry state is not due to nature of such system but lack of real development toward a generic target. Just see mails in Emacs, in a classic desktop word mails would be base64-encoded/makeself-alike archives files to be dropped in the recipient mail server, a FAR simpler thing than IMAP. All the end users have to do is choose an available domain name, with a main address and any alias they like. In the present world nothing stop a dev write a simple Email package in Emacs wrapping fetchmail/maildrop/notmuch to offer a simple config and automatically do the rest, only it's not there because we are too few to use Emacs like that and so there is no interest in such development. Similarly office guys have FAR MORE interests in present directly and simply in org-mode instead of wasting time in PowerPoint/Impress/*, but they simply do not know org-mode even exists. The few org-mode users have not much reasons in a tremendous education effort who should start from schools instead of wasting public resources to feed some GAFAM surveillance business to teach equally complicated, but limited and limiting tools, to children. Consider that: a modern tablet i NOT at ALL more friendly than Emacs, it's easier only because being far more widespread people already know that with knowledge absorbed a bit at a time as we absorb our mother language in our childhood and when we start learning it formally we already know it more than enough. Let's say you want to know your spending habit: how a modern tablet on-sale can really be powerful? How on contrary can serve such and so many other purposes well in Emacs/org-mode? In a fictional world how powerful is just grab their transaction from ofx FEEDS (not manual exports) in a local fully-integrated application instead of wasting time on countless of spying crapplications and slow services for doing very limited things with them? It's better for you a computing centered on you or one who use you for someone else profits just living some breadcrumbs to keep yourself engaged? It's better a fully integrated computing or a service-centered one?
emptyparadise 4y ago
Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface is a very good read. I didn't find myself agreeing with many of its proposed solutions to HCI problems, but it does an incredibly good job of identifying the issues that we still have to this day with user interfaces.
- kabanossen 4y ago
  Agree, it's an eye-opener. Must-read for everyone working with design or UX.
omar_alt 4y ago
A simple low energy computer that does one task like word processing or act as a terminal client with an ink display would be a useful for focusing on one task without distraction. I personally would love to have a low energy terminal device that I could work in for hours however my pessimism tells me there is not enough demand to scale this.
- thejosh 4y ago
  Would the refresh rate not be an issue for this?
- maguay 4y ago
  The closest, today, feels like eInk tablet devices like the Remarkable—though it's built more for sketching and handwriting notes than typing.
- prvc 4y ago
  The Freewrite has been around for a while.
  - lproven 4y ago
    See my reply above.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Those things already exist: https://shop.boox.com/collections/eink-tablet https://shop.boox.com/collections/eink-tablet Associated with the keyboard of your choice. But also very easy to DIY by plugging an old laptop or a raspberry pi to an e-ink display/monitor and set it up to automatically start a text editor at boot time. Even a raspberry pi zero would handle that task superbly. I am not sure what prevents you to do that except lazyness if this is really something you want.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    > I am not sure what prevents you to do that except lazyness if this is really something you want. The problem with a general use machine is you can always alt tab out and procrastinate. If you're the one who set it up, you're the one who can un set it up.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
The keyboard is intriguing: the two "LEAP" keys before the spacebar, obviously to be used with the thumbs, are not dissimilar to what some ergonomic keyboards are now using. Apparently they're both labelled "LEAP" on the top of the key while on the side it's written "LEAP AGAIN" (that's what I see from googling a few images). On Wikipedia it says these keys are for "incremental string search".
- robinhouston 4y ago
  They're briefly explained later in the article. It sounds as though they function similarly to ? and / in vim.
  - whartung 4y ago
    Closer is eMacs ^s and ^r. You csn type ^stext and it will jump to the next instance of ‘text’. Keep hitting ^s and you continue searching. Pedantically it’s a keystroke less than / <enter>. The distinction is that the Leap key is more like a shift key bs how vim and emacs works.
    - retrocryptid 4y ago
      Yup. Jef was big on eliminating modes, so came up with the LEAP "semi-mode". Emacs ctrl-s enters a mode that you use ctrl-g to escape (or at least that's what I use, there are probably many other ways to exit search mode.) Subsequent ctrl-s presses in emacs is the equivalent of the "USE FRONT" / "LEAP AGAIN" key press.
    - robinhouston 4y ago
      You're absolutely right! I was weighing up whether to analogise it to Emacs or vi, and in my haste I made the wrong choice.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Is anyone aware of other apps that clone Cannon Cat's leap feature? I've always wanted to implement in my own editors, but it's never quite reached top of the list. VIM search is similar in some ways, but not sure it's really the same thing. I don't know VIM well, but it seems to be missing many of the little details, anyway would be interested to know about any other apps.
Razengan 4y ago
Most of the ideas and rules there, like "auto-save changes, restart where you left off, and make commands accessible everywhere" have been a core of the Mac experience since over a decade and a big reason for why I've loved them since jumping ship from Windows.
- lproven 4y ago
  Kinda sorta, but they came to Mac OS X about 20 years after the Cat.
jFriedensreich 4y ago
I think it boils down to icons + mouse vs text and keyboard. Imagine a mac without susan kares icons that played such a big role in making it feel truly human and developing an emotional attachment. Among so many great UI guidelines is that outlier with a dislike for icons with a minor and solvable (hover + tooltips) reason.
jessegrosjean 4y ago
If you are interested in Canon Cat these are two good sites: - Documents: http://www.canoncat.net http://www.canoncat.net - Web based emulator: https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat
predictsoft 4y ago
The other day was a story about the CueCat. I always got confused between the CueCat and the Canon Cat!
Roark66 4y ago
The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer words. Also having each widget take a lot more space forces the designer to really think about the value of adding one vs hiding it. Multilevel menus are IMO definitely better. If the app is a real productivity app people will spend ages in adding an ability to add "shortcuts" to some most often items will provide power users with ability to reach them quickly.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  Icons are used for a very good reason; us humans have a remarkable visual memory. Also we can distinguish icons by appearance faster than by words. Also words are language specific, icons... it's more complex... I can't provide evidence of this ATM but I did do a degree in a related subject. (I'm ignoring significant visual impairment here)
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I once designed an app with a lovely iconic interface. The customers hated it. The next release had a lot more text. For one thing, icons tend not to translate well. We're best off using ISO icons[0], but designers hate them, and always insist on reinventing the wheel. [0] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      > We're best off using ISO icons Hm, first time seeing this and not getting any good results. Here are the results for "save" https://i.imgur.com/UC4H3jE.png https://i.imgur.com/UC4H3jE.png. Are you sure any of these are meant for a technical context?
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        The first one is "to indicate the entered data is saved" and it's been registered since 2004. I think it's more in the context of forms and less about saving a modified file. Never seen it before either.
al_be_back 4y ago
More like Canon Emacs!
- guenthert 4y ago
  For those unfamiliar with the device that comment might be too cryptic (it was for me), but meanwhile I found its FORTH manual [1], where it says: "Products designed by Information Appliance Inc. (IAI), such as the Canon Cat, have a number of unique features. One of them that directly affects third-party software development is the principle of editor-based software." [1] http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20tForth%20Documentation.pdf http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20tForth%20Documentation.pdf
forinti 4y ago
It's interesting that the Cat came out in 1987, the same year as the Cambridge Z88. The Z88 cost 250 pounds (about US$400 at the time), which would make it a lot cheaper than the Cat.
- Lio 4y ago
  The Cambridge Z88 is immediately what jump to mind on reading this for me too. I still sometimes wonder if I should finally buy one. They were wonderful little machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88
  - mst 4y ago
    I had one of those! Very cool piece of kit for its time.
rob74 4y ago
I can totally understand why the Canon Cat was a flop. At the time it came onto the market, mouse-driven GUIs were largely seen as the thing of the future, and those didn't have to be explained: moving the mouse and clicking was like pointing your finger at the screen and tapping it directly. And then this weird thing with no GUI and no mouse comes along. Its UI may have been easy to use too, but it probably needed a lot of explaining and getting used to before you could internalize it, so only a few power users really made the effort to familiarize themselves with it.
- retrocryptid 4y ago
  It came out in '87, 3 years before windows 3.0. Macs were still twice as expensive as PCs and accounted for something like 3-5 percent of new computer sales. DOS was the most popular PC OS at the time, and wasn't known for its user friendliness. So the idea of a "turn it on and start typing" machine had some cachet. I think the near absolute lack of marketing is what doomed the Cat and IA.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Apple 2e and 2c was still popular in 87 and probably sold more than Mac in that year.
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
It's funny that many of the principles like "Auto-save changes", "Restart where you left off", "Make commands accessible everywhere", "Use words instead of icons" are qualities I enjoy on Emacs, and qualities that derived from the Lisp machines also. The only conflicting point is "Never allow customization", which I guess is where typical user needs diverges from expert user. Everything else seems to be universal of good UIs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- retrocryptid 4y ago
  What customizations do you want to make? I made a few macros in FORTH, but that's probably not what you're talking about. Plus, those macros were stored on floppies, not nvram or a hard disk, so you had to remember which macros you put on which disk. But yeah, you can't change the desktop image on the Cat (cause there is no desktop.) And you can't change window border width (cause there are no windows.) It's a very focused interface.
- 0x445442 4y ago
  Yeah Cat vs. Mac is just a proxy for Lisp Machine vs Smalltalk.
  - msla 4y ago
    I'd be happy if you didn't impugn Smalltalk so, as it was a marvelously customizable system.
  - transfire 4y ago
    Didn’t the Cat use Forth?
    - 0x445442 4y ago
      It may have. I was speaking from a UI perspective.
retrocryptid 4y ago
I take issue with the "forgotten" moniker. I use my cat every other day.
elzbardico 4y ago
It just shows the genius of Steve Jobs. Jeff's Macintosh would be an utterly boring, dumb, and limited machine.
- timbit42 4y ago
  It wasn't designed to be a general purpose computer. It was designed to be a word processor.
  - lproven 4y ago
    No, not from what I've read -- a lot! -- not at all. That is like saying "a bicycle is designed to be a two-wheeled car, where the user provides the power and balances it." Sounds awful and very impractical. The Cat was designed as a device for entering, storing and manipulating data, primarily textual and numeric. It was also designed to be extensible, and could send and receive that info, do simple computations on numbers, including sets of them in rows and columns. It was a lot more than a word processor, and with a very different, and from the sound of it, better UI than any word processor ever.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
Every time the Canon Cat comes up, I'm surprised no-one mentions the Amstrad PCW family and Locoscript. It was launched two years before the Canon Cat, and not only made it to market but had roughly the same market penetration in the UK as lightbulbs. Given that a lot of Amstrad stuff wasn't exactly known for being the highest quality the PCW8256 and 8512 were surprisingly good for the £400 they cost (about a grand in today's money, roughly half the price of the Canon Cat). You got a fairly chunky computer about the size of a 14" TV with a green screen monitor which had a not-ridiculous persistence so no flickering and a fairly "gentle" colour. The 3" disks were a bit weird. The keyboard was a nicely clicky "spring over membrane" design that felt nearly as good as a proper mechanical one (not a patch on a Model M but better than most!) and had a bunch of buttons for commonly-used functions. If you pressed any of the modifier keys the menu at the top of the screen would change to show you what you could do. It even came with a dot-matrix printer that could do graphics after a fashion. You could buy a posher version with a white screen and a daisywheel printer, too, but they were more expensive and the printer was extremely slow and noisy. It was only slightly harder to get started with than a biro and a notepad. I wish Locoscript had won instead of MS Word.
- lproven 4y ago
  Yes and no. In terms of the function, yes. I have 2 PCWs and had another when they were new. I really like them. But the PCW was a clever application of old technology, using some then-fairly-recent but far from state-of-the-art tech to enhance some obsolete tech to make a minimum viable tool. It was a beefed-up CP/M machine, with a big RAMdisk, a hires graphics display, and a (very good) word processor as the primary app. The best word processor on any 8-bit ever, IMHO. But it was a lot more flexible and extensible than any of the other (many!) competing dedicated word processors of the time, because it had a big screen (using an old-tech CRT instead of a tiny grey LCD), and lots of storage for its obsolete OS, and a proper OS and so on. (All things that Amstrad failed to include in the PCW 10 and PCW 16, and so they flopped.) It was inspired to realise that rather than a crappy LCD, you could include a really good mono CRT. Rather than a crappy 16-bit chip, a really good 8-bit one. Rather than a crappy old disk, a much tougher but obscure new one, and make money on the media. Rather than a printer port and driver hell, a dedicated printer mechanism with no brains. Integrate it all so there isn't even a ROM. The Canon Cat was an inspired attempt to reinvent computing by getting away from the poor minicomputer-inspired UI conventions of 8-bit computers, by taking the basic hardware design and reinventing the entire software stack and UI from the ground up, using no existing tech other than a super-lightweight programming language. No OS, no apps, no concept of them. Barely even legacy minicomputer concepts like "files", and no "binaries" or "executables" or "programs" or "drive letters" of any of that 1960s/1970s historical baggage. It was a profoundly different take on the same core function. Any technological resemblance is almost a coincidence.
hallarempt 4y ago
msla 4y ago
I remember reading about Raskin's work on Ward's wiki, back before Ward and crew made it unusable. I wrote some pretty heated diatribes against it, which I'm not going to do now, but I will push back on one of his dogmas: > Never allow customization: Consistency, though, led Raskin’s perhaps most controversial idea, prompted by the trouble he saw customers have with documentation. “Customizations are software design changes that are not reflected in the documentation,” and as a documentarian, this could not stand. The designer knows best—something that comes through strongest in Apple’s products—and “allowing the user to change the interface design often results in choices that are not optimal, because the user will, usually, not be a knowledgeable interface designer,” said Raskin. “Time spent in learning and operating the personalization features is time mostly wasted from the task at hand.” Better a consistent, well-designed interface than one you could fiddle with forever. This is a meta-dogma, a dogma about being dogmatic about your design. Never allow the user to change your Holy Vision, because Your Beneficent Self, The Designer (Peace Be Upon You), has decreed it shall be such, such it shall always be, yea, unto the ends of the system's profitability, never allowing the user to grow in their knowledge of how to do their tasks, never allowing the user to bring their own domain knowledge to their tasks. There shalt always be an unbridgeable gulf between Designer (insert holy trump here) and user, and the user shall never trammel the Designer's Roarkian Vision. So mote it be, amen. It's High Modernism in software. It's the exaltation of One True Vision above the people who do the work and might, therefore, know something about how the work is done. It is, in other words, utterly shocking Jobs rejected the Canon Cat and its immense hubris. Probably because it wasn't Jobs' immense hubris.
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Its so ironic reading this, considering most of the “conveniences” of modern ios are clones of some popular tweak on cydia.
dang 4y ago
Related: Leap Technology (1987) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433 - Oct 2022 (40 comments) The Canon Cat: The Writing Information Appliance (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836958 - March 2022 (42 comments) Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap' feature [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 - Feb 2021 (31 comments) Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Canon Cat Emulation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 - Sept 2018 (2 comments) Canon Cat Resources – Jef Raskin's Forth-Powered Word Processing Appliance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 - June 2017 (23 comments) The Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 - Dec 2013 (30 comments) Canon Cat Documents Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 - Dec 2011 (8 comments) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 - May 2009 (15 comments)
lisper 4y ago
> design the computer to fit the human's needs The problem: different humans need different things. But Apple nowadays operates as if everyone needs the same things, at least in terms of UI/UX. If your actual needs (or desires) differ from Apple's preconceived notions, you are simply out of luck.
- asadlionpk 4y ago
  or are holding it wrong!
guenthert 4y ago
An article about the Canon Cat which doesn't mention that it was programmed in FORTH? Perhaps not essential to the UX, but when claimed "A predictable, documentable system must be entirely under Apple’s control,” FORTH, renown for its extensibility, in fact, complete blurring the lines between language, OS and application, seems a non-obvious choice.
dchest 4y ago
Software written in Forth. Here's a video showing its interpreter mode and Forth words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY
kaveh808 4y ago
I am currently working on a new 3D system, and have been thinking a lot about GUI design. My impression is that as applications have grown in complexity, there has not been a corresponding change in our approach to GUI design. I'm talking of desktop apps for doing 3D content creation (Maya, Houdini, Blender, etc). The menubar and hierarchical menus worked elegantly in the simpler days of the Xerox Star and Apple Macintosh, but the continued reliance on them makes me chuckle at times. The other day I decided to count the number of GUI elements visible in one such app. There were over 200. I can't prove this, but my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create confusion and anxiety in users. Or maybe users just learn to ignore the 90% of widgets they never need to use. I find it increasingly awkward to have to move the mouse to click inside a 16x16 pixel widget on a 4K screen. Most GUI actions are not inherently graphical (click on a button, menu, icon). One app has such a large contextual menu (with many submenus) that the menu includes its own search field, and users click to make the menu appear, then type in a few characters to locate the menu item they want, then click on the item. I can't help but shake my head and chuckle. My own attempts at coming up with something different have resulted in a series of (short) popup menus that can be invoked via keyboard. My hope is that users will develop muscle memory to go to the selection they want quickly. For example, hitting "C,C,C" (the "c" key three times) invokes, in order, the Create, Curves, Circle menus (each menu replaces the previous one) and creates a circle in the 3D scene. Been planning to make a video demo...
- angelgonzales 4y ago
  That’s why I always advocate for formal training and certification when it comes to using complex software. Sitting down for eight hours or 40 hours in a classroom setting allows users to familiarize themselves or master the other 90% of functions they aren’t normally aware of or haven’t used. There is software that needs to be complex because some job functions are complex, the big focus on collaboration in the workplace now results in people with fundamentally different job functions using the same piece of software which clutters up user interfaces as well.
- Baeocystin 4y ago
  >my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create confusion and anxiety in users Designers have been stomping all over presenting useful information under this assumption for the past 20 years. Speaking for myself, I am sick of the hypersimplification of what should be useful tools. Complex workspaces have complex needs, and that's OK. Doesn't mean we can't find ways to improve, but just hiding things isn't the answer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EricE 4y ago
There is no doubt Raskin had a lot of great ideas - I still wouldn't want to own or use a computer designed by him.
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  Well, AFAICT, he wasn't building a computer at all, he was building an appliance. Contrast with the "bicycle for the brain" model. I'm sure glad Jobs took over. (My ME/30, Classic, and Classic 2 concurs). ADD: Jef was designing for a user who knew nothing, Jobs for the user who could grow
lproven 4y ago
Great article, great machine. Probably the single most important computer of the late 1980s. I wonder if it would be possible to write an implementation of the Cat UI on top of Emacs?

180 points by maguay 4y ago

"Parents" buy PC for children's better grades (misunderstood as education process), read: to throw their responsibility for teaching kids away; and SPhones/Tablets to make kids happy read: avoid them & avoid raising them completely. (instead of creating the best educated friends you never had) In era of Telly being religious altar & oracle, buying a boring tool without feature of entertainment and non-marketable as colorising life / uplifting status seems incomprehendable. If, only boring tools were available children having other options would still not use them without pressure / good faithed convincing / bribery, so only these without other alternatives would use it. Extreme majority is not teached to teach & convince/evangelise. What they know is forced through obligatory schooling or coerced by popular media reeducation disguised as entertainment & socialisation. It conditioned minds and culture to prefer a sweet poisoned fruit or fool's gold over juicy beef steak earned through hard & uncomfortable. And it's even marketed as free willed choice & freedom.. Families teaching & training kids can fit in a statistical margin error. Not counting ideological training though.. which vary between better or even worse, usually just mirroring the present & future telling magic window. Digressing Being a loner born under communist occupation as kid dumped on with an old german-languaged windows-like "pc" & printer, with only some black-white architect-work apps, i can say from experience: God damn all foreign languages (Babel tower curse..); Bless universal language of self-explainatory images & idiotproof systems with one choice one action principle, learning by exploring & building own features from simple blocks on fly. Words, icons, images are descriptors & ideograms. If we count numbers as pictures then words are made of pictures too - just with predefined abstract meaning behind each composition. We can map, plot and precisely group common words and their meanings & relationships on machine learning multidimensional graphs. So you can also use these algorithms nowadays called AI to find each word's & meaning's image/icon approximation counterpart. It would be weird if nobody yet tried it and geberelise it for most common worldwide languages. It would create the only truly existing allhuman Lingua Franca. ∆∆∆ Image wins by representing direct visual & intuitive least abstract meaning. Like icons with human gestures. Like emotions. It's direct representation of real distinct thing you keep in visual memory along with all other instances of this idea/class & it's common relations to other things. But if you don't give a fully separate choice you will never know which symbolic system is better in a fair fight. Just the border between both is blurred & has no codifier. In time universal self-explanatory meanings will mutate adding new popular abstractions & both will merge. Like me eventually learning the Mordor Lang words on the clicked magic boxes.

rubenv 4y ago

I'm sure this may be interesting, but with such low contrast it's simply impossible to read.

prmoustache 4y ago
I understand the mild annoyance but this is a problem easily solved by clicking the "Toggle reader view" button on your browser.
- nottorp 4y ago
  And you could install an extension to get rid of those "subscribe to the newsletter" popups etc. Or you could let the authors know they're doing things wrong. Applying technical solutions to bad content sources only encourages their existence. Edit: in this case, the article didn't seem unbearably low contrast to me. I guess mileage may vary with monitor.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    > Edit: in this case, the article didn't seem unbearably low contrast to me. I guess mileage may vary with monitor. Hence my suggestion for a technical solution. Additionnally the beauty of the web is that for the most part[1] the user has full control over how he want to show the content as the code is interpreted locally. Custom css, your own fonts, which js you execute, your own page treatment. You can do whatever post treatment you want with the content provided. [1] Lazy loading through javascript makes it a bit less true but it rarely concern opinion/text stuff and for the most part web applications on which data can be also accessed through an api. The rest are dubious social medias that try to steal your life, attention span, privacy and make you an addict for commercial purpose and are best avoided like all hard and dangerous drugs.
    - nottorp 4y ago
      > Additionnally the beauty of the web is that for the most part[1] the user has full control over how he want to show the content as the code is interpreted locally. Custom css, your own fonts, which js you execute, your own page treatment. You can do whatever post treatment you want with the content provided. Your time is free?

kkfx 4y ago

IMVHO all "big of IT" have done their best to castrate users ability to use a computer instead of being used by it like a piece of a machine. Computing is power, if users get such power they improve, becoming less easy to milk and steer. That's why we see a war against the desktop concept from Xerox, initially by IBM and then by all others.

blowski 4y ago
Linux and emacs might be massively powerful in the hands of a competent, experienced computer user sitting mostly at their desk. For somebody with less time and competence, a tablet can give them much more power because they can use it straight away, in many situations.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  You can use Emacs straight away too. Every version I have installed in the last few years uses CUA (Common User Access) key assignments for copying and pasting and a toolbar that makes it easy to open and save documents.
- kkfx 4y ago
  GNU/Linux as a bootloader to Emacs can give a competent, patient and experienced computer user an usable enough desktop to get a real damn desktop system to work with, and that sorry state is not due to nature of such system but lack of real development toward a generic target. Just see mails in Emacs, in a classic desktop word mails would be base64-encoded/makeself-alike archives files to be dropped in the recipient mail server, a FAR simpler thing than IMAP. All the end users have to do is choose an available domain name, with a main address and any alias they like. In the present world nothing stop a dev write a simple Email package in Emacs wrapping fetchmail/maildrop/notmuch to offer a simple config and automatically do the rest, only it's not there because we are too few to use Emacs like that and so there is no interest in such development. Similarly office guys have FAR MORE interests in present directly and simply in org-mode instead of wasting time in PowerPoint/Impress/*, but they simply do not know org-mode even exists. The few org-mode users have not much reasons in a tremendous education effort who should start from schools instead of wasting public resources to feed some GAFAM surveillance business to teach equally complicated, but limited and limiting tools, to children. Consider that: a modern tablet i NOT at ALL more friendly than Emacs, it's easier only because being far more widespread people already know that with knowledge absorbed a bit at a time as we absorb our mother language in our childhood and when we start learning it formally we already know it more than enough. Let's say you want to know your spending habit: how a modern tablet on-sale can really be powerful? How on contrary can serve such and so many other purposes well in Emacs/org-mode? In a fictional world how powerful is just grab their transaction from ofx FEEDS (not manual exports) in a local fully-integrated application instead of wasting time on countless of spying crapplications and slow services for doing very limited things with them? It's better for you a computing centered on you or one who use you for someone else profits just living some breadcrumbs to keep yourself engaged? It's better a fully integrated computing or a service-centered one?

emptyparadise 4y ago

Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface is a very good read. I didn't find myself agreeing with many of its proposed solutions to HCI problems, but it does an incredibly good job of identifying the issues that we still have to this day with user interfaces.

kabanossen 4y ago
Agree, it's an eye-opener. Must-read for everyone working with design or UX.

omar_alt 4y ago

A simple low energy computer that does one task like word processing or act as a terminal client with an ink display would be a useful for focusing on one task without distraction. I personally would love to have a low energy terminal device that I could work in for hours however my pessimism tells me there is not enough demand to scale this.

thejosh 4y ago
Would the refresh rate not be an issue for this?
maguay 4y ago
The closest, today, feels like eInk tablet devices like the Remarkable—though it's built more for sketching and handwriting notes than typing.
prvc 4y ago
The Freewrite has been around for a while.
- lproven 4y ago
  See my reply above.
prmoustache 4y ago
Those things already exist: https://shop.boox.com/collections/eink-tablet https://shop.boox.com/collections/eink-tablet Associated with the keyboard of your choice. But also very easy to DIY by plugging an old laptop or a raspberry pi to an e-ink display/monitor and set it up to automatically start a text editor at boot time. Even a raspberry pi zero would handle that task superbly. I am not sure what prevents you to do that except lazyness if this is really something you want.
- nottorp 4y ago
  > I am not sure what prevents you to do that except lazyness if this is really something you want. The problem with a general use machine is you can always alt tab out and procrastinate. If you're the one who set it up, you're the one who can un set it up.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

The keyboard is intriguing: the two "LEAP" keys before the spacebar, obviously to be used with the thumbs, are not dissimilar to what some ergonomic keyboards are now using. Apparently they're both labelled "LEAP" on the top of the key while on the side it's written "LEAP AGAIN" (that's what I see from googling a few images). On Wikipedia it says these keys are for "incremental string search".

robinhouston 4y ago
They're briefly explained later in the article. It sounds as though they function similarly to ? and / in vim.
- whartung 4y ago
  Closer is eMacs ^s and ^r. You csn type ^stext and it will jump to the next instance of ‘text’. Keep hitting ^s and you continue searching. Pedantically it’s a keystroke less than / <enter>. The distinction is that the Leap key is more like a shift key bs how vim and emacs works.
  - retrocryptid 4y ago
    Yup. Jef was big on eliminating modes, so came up with the LEAP "semi-mode". Emacs ctrl-s enters a mode that you use ctrl-g to escape (or at least that's what I use, there are probably many other ways to exit search mode.) Subsequent ctrl-s presses in emacs is the equivalent of the "USE FRONT" / "LEAP AGAIN" key press.
  - robinhouston 4y ago
    You're absolutely right! I was weighing up whether to analogise it to Emacs or vi, and in my haste I made the wrong choice.
jessegrosjean 4y ago
Is anyone aware of other apps that clone Cannon Cat's leap feature? I've always wanted to implement in my own editors, but it's never quite reached top of the list. VIM search is similar in some ways, but not sure it's really the same thing. I don't know VIM well, but it seems to be missing many of the little details, anyway would be interested to know about any other apps.

Razengan 4y ago

Most of the ideas and rules there, like "auto-save changes, restart where you left off, and make commands accessible everywhere" have been a core of the Mac experience since over a decade and a big reason for why I've loved them since jumping ship from Windows.

lproven 4y ago
Kinda sorta, but they came to Mac OS X about 20 years after the Cat.

jFriedensreich 4y ago

I think it boils down to icons + mouse vs text and keyboard. Imagine a mac without susan kares icons that played such a big role in making it feel truly human and developing an emotional attachment. Among so many great UI guidelines is that outlier with a dislike for icons with a minor and solvable (hover + tooltips) reason.

jessegrosjean 4y ago

If you are interested in Canon Cat these are two good sites: - Documents: http://www.canoncat.net http://www.canoncat.net - Web based emulator: https://archive.org/details/canoncat https://archive.org/details/canoncat

predictsoft 4y ago

The other day was a story about the CueCat. I always got confused between the CueCat and the Canon Cat!

Roark66 4y ago

The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer words. Also having each widget take a lot more space forces the designer to really think about the value of adding one vs hiding it. Multilevel menus are IMO definitely better. If the app is a real productivity app people will spend ages in adding an ability to add "shortcuts" to some most often items will provide power users with ability to reach them quickly.

zasdffaa 4y ago
Icons are used for a very good reason; us humans have a remarkable visual memory. Also we can distinguish icons by appearance faster than by words. Also words are language specific, icons... it's more complex... I can't provide evidence of this ATM but I did do a degree in a related subject. (I'm ignoring significant visual impairment here)
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I once designed an app with a lovely iconic interface. The customers hated it. The next release had a lot more text. For one thing, icons tend not to translate well. We're best off using ISO icons[0], but designers hate them, and always insist on reinventing the wheel. [0] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    > We're best off using ISO icons Hm, first time seeing this and not getting any good results. Here are the results for "save" https://i.imgur.com/UC4H3jE.png https://i.imgur.com/UC4H3jE.png. Are you sure any of these are meant for a technical context?
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      The first one is "to indicate the entered data is saved" and it's been registered since 2004. I think it's more in the context of forms and less about saving a modified file. Never seen it before either.

al_be_back 4y ago

More like Canon Emacs!

guenthert 4y ago
For those unfamiliar with the device that comment might be too cryptic (it was for me), but meanwhile I found its FORTH manual [1], where it says: "Products designed by Information Appliance Inc. (IAI), such as the Canon Cat, have a number of unique features. One of them that directly affects third-party software development is the principle of editor-based software." [1] http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20tForth%20Documentation.pdf http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20tForth%20Documentation.pdf

forinti 4y ago

It's interesting that the Cat came out in 1987, the same year as the Cambridge Z88. The Z88 cost 250 pounds (about US$400 at the time), which would make it a lot cheaper than the Cat.

Lio 4y ago
The Cambridge Z88 is immediately what jump to mind on reading this for me too. I still sometimes wonder if I should finally buy one. They were wonderful little machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88
- mst 4y ago
  I had one of those! Very cool piece of kit for its time.

rob74 4y ago

I can totally understand why the Canon Cat was a flop. At the time it came onto the market, mouse-driven GUIs were largely seen as the thing of the future, and those didn't have to be explained: moving the mouse and clicking was like pointing your finger at the screen and tapping it directly. And then this weird thing with no GUI and no mouse comes along. Its UI may have been easy to use too, but it probably needed a lot of explaining and getting used to before you could internalize it, so only a few power users really made the effort to familiarize themselves with it.

retrocryptid 4y ago
It came out in '87, 3 years before windows 3.0. Macs were still twice as expensive as PCs and accounted for something like 3-5 percent of new computer sales. DOS was the most popular PC OS at the time, and wasn't known for its user friendliness. So the idea of a "turn it on and start typing" machine had some cachet. I think the near absolute lack of marketing is what doomed the Cat and IA.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Apple 2e and 2c was still popular in 87 and probably sold more than Mac in that year.

hcarvalhoalves 4y ago

It's funny that many of the principles like "Auto-save changes", "Restart where you left off", "Make commands accessible everywhere", "Use words instead of icons" are qualities I enjoy on Emacs, and qualities that derived from the Lisp machines also. The only conflicting point is "Never allow customization", which I guess is where typical user needs diverges from expert user. Everything else seems to be universal of good UIs.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
retrocryptid 4y ago
What customizations do you want to make? I made a few macros in FORTH, but that's probably not what you're talking about. Plus, those macros were stored on floppies, not nvram or a hard disk, so you had to remember which macros you put on which disk. But yeah, you can't change the desktop image on the Cat (cause there is no desktop.) And you can't change window border width (cause there are no windows.) It's a very focused interface.
0x445442 4y ago
Yeah Cat vs. Mac is just a proxy for Lisp Machine vs Smalltalk.
- msla 4y ago
  I'd be happy if you didn't impugn Smalltalk so, as it was a marvelously customizable system.
- transfire 4y ago
  Didn’t the Cat use Forth?
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    It may have. I was speaking from a UI perspective.

retrocryptid 4y ago

I take issue with the "forgotten" moniker. I use my cat every other day.

elzbardico 4y ago

It just shows the genius of Steve Jobs. Jeff's Macintosh would be an utterly boring, dumb, and limited machine.

timbit42 4y ago
It wasn't designed to be a general purpose computer. It was designed to be a word processor.
- lproven 4y ago
  No, not from what I've read -- a lot! -- not at all. That is like saying "a bicycle is designed to be a two-wheeled car, where the user provides the power and balances it." Sounds awful and very impractical. The Cat was designed as a device for entering, storing and manipulating data, primarily textual and numeric. It was also designed to be extensible, and could send and receive that info, do simple computations on numbers, including sets of them in rows and columns. It was a lot more than a word processor, and with a very different, and from the sound of it, better UI than any word processor ever.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

Every time the Canon Cat comes up, I'm surprised no-one mentions the Amstrad PCW family and Locoscript. It was launched two years before the Canon Cat, and not only made it to market but had roughly the same market penetration in the UK as lightbulbs. Given that a lot of Amstrad stuff wasn't exactly known for being the highest quality the PCW8256 and 8512 were surprisingly good for the £400 they cost (about a grand in today's money, roughly half the price of the Canon Cat). You got a fairly chunky computer about the size of a 14" TV with a green screen monitor which had a not-ridiculous persistence so no flickering and a fairly "gentle" colour. The 3" disks were a bit weird. The keyboard was a nicely clicky "spring over membrane" design that felt nearly as good as a proper mechanical one (not a patch on a Model M but better than most!) and had a bunch of buttons for commonly-used functions. If you pressed any of the modifier keys the menu at the top of the screen would change to show you what you could do. It even came with a dot-matrix printer that could do graphics after a fashion. You could buy a posher version with a white screen and a daisywheel printer, too, but they were more expensive and the printer was extremely slow and noisy. It was only slightly harder to get started with than a biro and a notepad. I wish Locoscript had won instead of MS Word.

lproven 4y ago
Yes and no. In terms of the function, yes. I have 2 PCWs and had another when they were new. I really like them. But the PCW was a clever application of old technology, using some then-fairly-recent but far from state-of-the-art tech to enhance some obsolete tech to make a minimum viable tool. It was a beefed-up CP/M machine, with a big RAMdisk, a hires graphics display, and a (very good) word processor as the primary app. The best word processor on any 8-bit ever, IMHO. But it was a lot more flexible and extensible than any of the other (many!) competing dedicated word processors of the time, because it had a big screen (using an old-tech CRT instead of a tiny grey LCD), and lots of storage for its obsolete OS, and a proper OS and so on. (All things that Amstrad failed to include in the PCW 10 and PCW 16, and so they flopped.) It was inspired to realise that rather than a crappy LCD, you could include a really good mono CRT. Rather than a crappy 16-bit chip, a really good 8-bit one. Rather than a crappy old disk, a much tougher but obscure new one, and make money on the media. Rather than a printer port and driver hell, a dedicated printer mechanism with no brains. Integrate it all so there isn't even a ROM. The Canon Cat was an inspired attempt to reinvent computing by getting away from the poor minicomputer-inspired UI conventions of 8-bit computers, by taking the basic hardware design and reinventing the entire software stack and UI from the ground up, using no existing tech other than a super-lightweight programming language. No OS, no apps, no concept of them. Barely even legacy minicomputer concepts like "files", and no "binaries" or "executables" or "programs" or "drive letters" of any of that 1960s/1970s historical baggage. It was a profoundly different take on the same core function. Any technological resemblance is almost a coincidence.

hallarempt 4y ago

msla 4y ago

I remember reading about Raskin's work on Ward's wiki, back before Ward and crew made it unusable. I wrote some pretty heated diatribes against it, which I'm not going to do now, but I will push back on one of his dogmas: > Never allow customization: Consistency, though, led Raskin’s perhaps most controversial idea, prompted by the trouble he saw customers have with documentation. “Customizations are software design changes that are not reflected in the documentation,” and as a documentarian, this could not stand. The designer knows best—something that comes through strongest in Apple’s products—and “allowing the user to change the interface design often results in choices that are not optimal, because the user will, usually, not be a knowledgeable interface designer,” said Raskin. “Time spent in learning and operating the personalization features is time mostly wasted from the task at hand.” Better a consistent, well-designed interface than one you could fiddle with forever. This is a meta-dogma, a dogma about being dogmatic about your design. Never allow the user to change your Holy Vision, because Your Beneficent Self, The Designer (Peace Be Upon You), has decreed it shall be such, such it shall always be, yea, unto the ends of the system's profitability, never allowing the user to grow in their knowledge of how to do their tasks, never allowing the user to bring their own domain knowledge to their tasks. There shalt always be an unbridgeable gulf between Designer (insert holy trump here) and user, and the user shall never trammel the Designer's Roarkian Vision. So mote it be, amen. It's High Modernism in software. It's the exaltation of One True Vision above the people who do the work and might, therefore, know something about how the work is done. It is, in other words, utterly shocking Jobs rejected the Canon Cat and its immense hubris. Probably because it wasn't Jobs' immense hubris.

kjkjadksj 4y ago
Its so ironic reading this, considering most of the “conveniences” of modern ios are clones of some popular tweak on cydia.

dang 4y ago

Related: Leap Technology (1987) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433 - Oct 2022 (40 comments) The Canon Cat: The Writing Information Appliance (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836958 - March 2022 (42 comments) Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap' feature [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 - Feb 2021 (31 comments) Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) Canon Cat Emulation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 - Sept 2018 (2 comments) Canon Cat Resources – Jef Raskin's Forth-Powered Word Processing Appliance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 - June 2017 (23 comments) The Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 - Dec 2013 (30 comments) Canon Cat Documents Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 - Dec 2011 (8 comments) Canon Cat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 - May 2009 (15 comments)

lisper 4y ago

> design the computer to fit the human's needs The problem: different humans need different things. But Apple nowadays operates as if everyone needs the same things, at least in terms of UI/UX. If your actual needs (or desires) differ from Apple's preconceived notions, you are simply out of luck.

asadlionpk 4y ago
or are holding it wrong!

guenthert 4y ago

An article about the Canon Cat which doesn't mention that it was programmed in FORTH? Perhaps not essential to the UX, but when claimed "A predictable, documentable system must be entirely under Apple’s control,” FORTH, renown for its extensibility, in fact, complete blurring the lines between language, OS and application, seems a non-obvious choice.

dchest 4y ago

Software written in Forth. Here's a video showing its interpreter mode and Forth words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY

kaveh808 4y ago

I am currently working on a new 3D system, and have been thinking a lot about GUI design. My impression is that as applications have grown in complexity, there has not been a corresponding change in our approach to GUI design. I'm talking of desktop apps for doing 3D content creation (Maya, Houdini, Blender, etc). The menubar and hierarchical menus worked elegantly in the simpler days of the Xerox Star and Apple Macintosh, but the continued reliance on them makes me chuckle at times. The other day I decided to count the number of GUI elements visible in one such app. There were over 200. I can't prove this, but my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create confusion and anxiety in users. Or maybe users just learn to ignore the 90% of widgets they never need to use. I find it increasingly awkward to have to move the mouse to click inside a 16x16 pixel widget on a 4K screen. Most GUI actions are not inherently graphical (click on a button, menu, icon). One app has such a large contextual menu (with many submenus) that the menu includes its own search field, and users click to make the menu appear, then type in a few characters to locate the menu item they want, then click on the item. I can't help but shake my head and chuckle. My own attempts at coming up with something different have resulted in a series of (short) popup menus that can be invoked via keyboard. My hope is that users will develop muscle memory to go to the selection they want quickly. For example, hitting "C,C,C" (the "c" key three times) invokes, in order, the Create, Curves, Circle menus (each menu replaces the previous one) and creates a circle in the 3D scene. Been planning to make a video demo...

angelgonzales 4y ago
That’s why I always advocate for formal training and certification when it comes to using complex software. Sitting down for eight hours or 40 hours in a classroom setting allows users to familiarize themselves or master the other 90% of functions they aren’t normally aware of or haven’t used. There is software that needs to be complex because some job functions are complex, the big focus on collaboration in the workplace now results in people with fundamentally different job functions using the same piece of software which clutters up user interfaces as well.
Baeocystin 4y ago
>my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create confusion and anxiety in users Designers have been stomping all over presenting useful information under this assumption for the past 20 years. Speaking for myself, I am sick of the hypersimplification of what should be useful tools. Complex workspaces have complex needs, and that's OK. Doesn't mean we can't find ways to improve, but just hiding things isn't the answer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

EricE 4y ago

There is no doubt Raskin had a lot of great ideas - I still wouldn't want to own or use a computer designed by him.

FullyFunctional 4y ago
Well, AFAICT, he wasn't building a computer at all, he was building an appliance. Contrast with the "bicycle for the brain" model. I'm sure glad Jobs took over. (My ME/30, Classic, and Classic 2 concurs). ADD: Jef was designing for a user who knew nothing, Jobs for the user who could grow

lproven 4y ago

Great article, great machine. Probably the single most important computer of the late 1980s. I wonder if it would be possible to write an implementation of the Cat UI on top of Emacs?