

Raskin zoomable desktop manager for Mac OS X - micheljansen
http://raskinformac.com

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blownd
Can I piggy back on this to spruik my Mac window manager here?

I posted a separate submission this morning but it hasn't seen any attention
and I thought it would really appeal to HN's:

Window & tab switching with 'type to search' for OS X
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675963>

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hinathan
The interaction modes look very shiny but in the same way "Minority Report"
looks shiny. As to the name, I'll wait until Aza chimes in one way or the
other but prima facie it feels pretty weird.

~~~
ary
Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane
Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After
using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful
for the day to day.

Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might
be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't _want_ to. The
UI doesn't invite the user into interaction so much as it does gawking.

~~~
ahoyhere
"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...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.txt)

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.

~~~
ary
My reading of folklore.org jives with what you're saying. The Mac as
originally imagined by Raskin was not the Mac that eventually shipped (for
better or worse).

Considering Raskin's ideas about user interaction as "out there" is a matter
of perspective. Touch screen interfaces that are now common today were once
considered "out there". His love affair with the Canon Cat wasn't just a
personal obsession. He made (what I considered to be) a group of well reasoned
arguments about why it was so good based on the _concepts_ it brought into
reality. Off the top of my head I can recall automatic file saving (with no
consideration to the file system) being one such argument. This feature will
be shipping in the next release of OS X (Lion). If Raskin's ideas in the
Humane Interface were "out there", then I take that phrase to be synonymous
with "avant garde".

The zoom UI he talks about in another chapter (and what the OS X app Raskin
has attempted to implement) seems like a strong candidate for a general data
exploration and discovery UI. What he put forth in the book was conceptual,
and no one has yet made a commercially or critically appealing implementation.
That doesn't mean it _won't happen_. It just mean it _hasn't happened_.

------
joshu
Sadly in 2011 most of the objects I deal with aren't files.

~~~
grinich
What do you mean?

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zachrose
Databases, network connections, processes?

~~~
joshu
Bookmarks, message threads, tweets, emails, source code commits, issues, etc.

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sunchild
I have to wonder about a UI tool whose website adds 60px of blank space to the
right.

~~~
timerickson
It's actually 135px if we're nit picking.

~~~
sunchild
Ha! Must be a browser thing; I actually measured it with xScope.

~~~
ugh
It depends on the width of your window. This is a quite common bug that only
shows up when the browser window is too narrow. Since their website is
incredibly wide (it doesn’t even fit on my 1440px wide screen) it probably
shows up for quite a lot of users.

My browser window is usually 700px or so wide which is why I encounter that
particular bug all the time – especially on otherwise quite nicely designed
websites. It absolutely breaks the website and sometimes makes it unreadable
(try resizing the window and see what happens), forcing me to resize my
browser window. Why don’t web designers like people like me who like to see
more than one browser window at a time?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Because web design is a horrible abomination suffered by an enthusiastic few
and a miserable many; because there is a fundamental, unsolved problem of
presenting a specific amount of information (not too much, not too little) to
users in a medium which can be radically different from user to user.

A design that would look good on your layout would look terrible on another
user's widescreen; a design that would look good on a widescreen will look
awkward, at best, on your setup.

It doesn't help that so many people are still clinging to CSS as the primary
answer for this, since it is completely ill-equipped to deal with this
problem.

------
timerickson
While I'm probably one of the first to experiment with new, innovative
computer interfaces, I closed Raskin after about 60 seconds of trying to use
it.

For starters, I couldn't get it to actually pinch zoom, making it near
impossible to read any file names. The scrolling itself was so fast that I
found myself flying around the screen without any ability to recognize where I
was or where I wanted to go. Images had a consistent and ugly black border.
Files seemed to be resized and ranked without any plausible order. Loading was
slow, slow, slow. There were no keyboard shortcuts to allow me to quickly flip
through a row of images. The viewpoint would not stick to a column or series
of images, causing me to easily lose my place. The font rendering was horrid.

I could go on...

~~~
farnsworth
I know a lot of people might read this first and skip it, like I almost did,
so I want to mention that it actually worked pretty well for me. There are
some shortcuts but nothing to move around to next row, next file, next column,
etc. I plan to leave it running on a Space anyway and see if it turns out
useful. I think that the larger the monitor, the bigger improvement over
Finder. It would be fantastic for a touchscreen.

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sb
An interesting concept, for programmers it would be great, if they supported
something along the lines of 1996s "Software Visualization in the Large", by
Thomas Ball and Stephen Eick [1]. I did something like that (i.e., marrying
the visualization with a file management metaphor) quite a while back in
Eclipse, but never got around to maintain it. Too bad, because I kind of liked
it. (And it was different from AspectBrowser, too.)

 _[1]_ :
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.7876&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

~~~
joshu
Screenshots for your plugin?

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jgmmo
I was surprised to find this has nothing to do with Aza Raskin

~~~
abrowne
It was "Inspired by Macintosh visionary, Jef Raskin"[1], who was Aza's father.

[1]: <http://raskinformac.com/#features>

~~~
jgmmo
Yeah... I got that far, but it still has nothing to do either of them.

~~~
codebaobab
Jef presented the idea of a zoomable interface in his book "The Humane
Interface" and a zoomable interface was a part of THE/Archy.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy>

~~~
neilk
There was also some research in the 70s and early 80s, especially the Spatial
Data Management System by Christopher Herot.

------
geekylucas
I tried to love it. I couldn't do it though.

The previews of files are great if you work with images. Not so great for
source code though.

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tiagok
i work with images (and code too) .. but with my mid 2010 macbookpro it gets
too slow to be usefull .. i think this kind of interface just need the next
(or the next next) chip generation. than you can design a application like
that the way it's supposed to be - ultra fast, with every label changing size
to be readable .. etc etc .. nice try though ..

