Happy birthday jeff ruskin

“The interface should not harm a person or by its inaction allow a person to be harmed . ” Azimov-Raskin

In the photo: Jeff Raskin. That feeling, when you alone know how to make the interfaces right, and the whole world does not.

For those who do not know Jeff Raskin ( Jef Raskin ) - a specialist in computer interfaces, the author of articles on usability and the book "The Humane Interface", employee number 31 from Apple Computer, best known as the initiator of the Macintosh project in the late 70-x.

• Led Steve Jobs at Xerox PARC .
• Wore "Google-glasses" before the advent of Google.
• Hated the computer mouse.
• Created a computer cat .
• Did not like the GUI , dreamed of ZUI .
• He was not enough one cursor, he made two.
• He conducted the orchestra.
• He played instruments with Donald Knut and was also an organ fanate.
• Wrote a programming language for the humanities , which contained 6 instructions.

On the birthday ( March 9 ) of the old rebel Ruskin, I decided to share my thoughts about the interfaces in my life. Which interface helps you personally in life, serves as an "intelligence amplifier"?
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My first interface, where I was the most productive at the time (and for the tasks of youth) - DOS Navigator , then Total Commander changed it.

Perhaps my brain dried up after graduation, but it seems to me that everything connected with interfaces has only gotten worse (subjectively) since then. I even stopped looking and trying, started using the first thing that came to hand (for example, the built-in editor in Habré). But if you need to take up a serious project, where you need to “think,” I jump from the hammock and take off my skis to open ... CorelDraw X3.

Corel - the coolest thing after the white board for the whole wall and a dozen colored markers. In Corel there is a ZUI . Stable and working ZUI. For my tasks and that type of information (a lot of text and a lot of pictures) that I use to “think”, Corel fits almost perfectly (I haven’t found a better one yet). Although, no, Palantir seems to have ZUI too. (I am glad that habravchane move in this direction - icefall with his "Tectograms - a new generation of mayndmap" )

Under a cat there is a little heritage of Jeff Raskin.


Jeff Raskin and his "first apple"


Jeff and his portable pc


Jeff and his gang


Folding is great


Desktop


Ruskin has a patent for an airplane wing


Prototype "cats" of cardboard


Hammers and Screwdrivers


Cat in a cut


Gash your font for convenience


Double cursor: black is what can be deleted, gray is where printing will start.


Easter eggs inside the cat



User transparency


Raskin made a joystick for Apple //


Few comics

Poster

Together with Jobs, Raskin drew a syntax infographic hint

Jef Raskin said it was code.
Steve Jobs said it was art.
You decide.

Big picture

Book

The book must be read.

Interface elements can often be called familiar in that they can easily be used by a “blind” user. Interfaces built on the principles outlined in this book can often be used even by blind users - and in relation to what is outside our locus of attention, we are all in the most direct sense blind.

The task of designers is to create interfaces that do not allow habits to cause problems for users. We must create interfaces that, firstly, purposefully rely on the human ability to form habits and, secondly, develop users' habits that simplify the process of work. In the case of an ideal person-oriented interface, the share of the interface itself in the user's work should be reduced to the formation of good habits. Many of the problems that make software products complex and inconvenient to use are due to the fact that the human-machine interface does not take into account the useful and harmful properties of the human ability to form habits. A good example is the tendency to provide several ways to solve the same problem at once. In this case, many options lead to a shift in the locus of the user's attention from the task itself to the choice of path.

• Book in html (but with annoying ads)
• Habrastia with quotes
• List of articles Ruskin
• Article from Computerra "Fighter with the system"
• UPD : advised a detailed story about Raskin - "Bearded boy and his airplanes"

Full list of Ruskin Achievements

“I am only a footprint, but I am proud to be this footnote, and I myself have become. Ultimately, my work — identifying the principles and developing the theory of interface design, and this work, as many could have done what I did, probably also deserves no more “notes”. The emergence of a worldwide network looks like an essential part of the computer revolution, if you look back on this entire period of the discoveries of the century. ” Jeff Raskin

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Together with the company Edison we continue the spring marathon of publications.

I will try to get to the primary sources of IT-technologies, to understand how they thought and what concepts were in the minds of the pioneers, what they dreamed about, how they saw the world of the future. Why did you think “computer”, “network”, “hypertext”, “intelligence amplifiers”, “collective problem solving system”, what meaning did they put into these concepts, what tools they wanted to achieve a result.

I hope that these materials will serve as an inspiration for those who are wondering how to go “from Zero to Unit” (to create something that had never happened before). I would like IT and “programming” to stop being just “coding for the sake of dough”, and recall that they were conceived as a lever to change the methods of warfare, education, a way of working together, thinking and communication, as an attempt to solve world problems and answer facing humanity. Something like this.

0 March. Seymour papert
March 1. Xerox alto
March 2, "Call Jake." NIC and RFC history
March 3, Grace "Grandma COBOL" Hopper
March 4 Margaret Hamilton: "Guys, I'll send you to the moon"
March 5, Hedy Lamarr. And in the movie naked to play and torpedo the bullet into the enemy
March 7 Gorgeous Six: girls who had a thermonuclear explosion calculated
March 8, "Video Games, I'm your father!"