• Work Processor
• Appliance vs computer

Jeff Raskin - Computer Pioneer - Human–computer Interface Designer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Pioneering_the_information_appliance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Environment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_User_Interface

http://www.humanized.com

Enso

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoomworld#Zoomworld

Jef Raskin wrote "The Humane Interface" about the fundamental issues of interaction design for usability of any computer based system. A summary of design rules:
http://nitpicker.pbworks.com/w/page/12451253/The%20Humane%20Interface

Canon Cat
http://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2

http://www.jagshouse.com/swyft.html

http://canoncat.org/
The Writing Information Appliance - It was a true information appliance which allows you to just type. It packs a surprising amount of power in a small set of tools and commands.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/canon-cat

http://canoncat.org/canoncat/onlinehelp.html

http://canoncat.org/canoncat/screens.html

canon cat google image search results

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/slides/canon-cat/

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/index.html

screen shot of the computer's info on font size and type
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/slides/canon-cat/A%20-502.jpg
"proprietary proportional font ... allows an average of 78 characters per line while requiring only 320 pixels in the horizontal direction. All the digits are of the same width so that numerical column line up.

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/swyft/index.html

At Information Appliance Inc., we decided to use the Apple II, as a development environment. Running our own Forth (tForth), we developed and tested the software until it was our own major tool for every task at hand. These tasks included word processing, spreadsheet, software development, communications (then over phone lines) and data storage and retrieval -- we were strong believers in the maxim that if the product isn't good enough for us, it's not good enough for our customers. Of course, we were aware that the converse was not true. If it was good enough for us, that didn't prove that it was good enough for our customers.

To assure that it was good enough for our customers, we did a lot of testing, and one of the results was that the testees nearly always wanted to know when they could get the software. After you've heard such a request repeatedly, the idea arises that perhaps we had an Apple II software product. First we supplied it as a ROM on a plug-in card, which was called "SwyftCard". This had the advantage of being a piece of uncorruptible and uncrashable software. A lower-cost alternative was then developed, with the software being delivered on a 5 1/4 inch floppy. This was called "SwyftWare".

We sold the rights to market SwyftWare to a company run by a friend in San Diego.

The code was extraordinarily well-documented and there was a test word for every word in the program, as well as a word that ran all the tests as an automatic suite so that we could check for side-effects whenever we made a change. It is to these methods I attribute the nearly unique accomplishment of Information Appliance: a piece of commercial general-purpose software in which no bugs were ever discovered. We had the same splendid results in designing the Canon Cat.

Some of the IA devices were prototypes and not the laptop versions, I think.

I think these were a finished design:
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/slides/iai/A%20-680%20SWYFTBA1.jpg

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/slides/iai/A%20-682%20SWYFTBAS.jpg

http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/siti/raskincenter/themovie.htm

Menu options at bottom of screen?
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/slides/canon-cat/A%20-668%20CATANDPA.jpg

Text align:
- left justify
- center
- right justify
- block or align on both sides, whatever that's called

Line spacing?:
- 1
- 1 1/2
- 2

Font size?
- I
- II

Video
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/canon-cat/

Canon Cat brochure images
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2272/2184364339_dff8aa6c04.jpg

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2158/2184351381_79b1f3df75_o.jpg

Work Processor

I like that description: "work processor."

"It can help you write and edit, communicate and calculate. It’ll even dial your phone."

Another image of yet another brochure for the Canon Cat
http://clickamericana.com/media/advertisements/the-canon-cat-word-processor-1987

Some of the brochure's text reads with my emphasis added:

The Canon Cat is the world’s first Work Processor. It’s a simple but powerful office machine. The Canon Cat is not a typewriter, electronic or otherwise. Yet minutes after you plug it in, you can be typing on the Cat like a veteran.

The Canon Cat is not a word processor. Yet it will let you write and edit faster than any word processor in the world.

The Canon Cat is not a personal computer. Yet it will let you do calculations right in the text, store information and communicate with other office machines.

What is the Cat? As we said, it’s the world’s very first Work Processor. It can help you write and edit, communicate and calculate. It’ll even dial your phone.

http://oldcomputers.net/canon-cat.html

The Canon Cat was designed by Jef Raskin, who in 1979 initiated the original Macintosh computer project while working at Apple (Raskin was Apple employee #31).

The Macintosh, so-named by Raskin, was to be an inexpensive, text-based, keyboard-controlled system meant for the average "person in the street" (PITS). After Steve Jobs took over the project while still in its infancy, Raskin left Apple to start his own company, Information Appliance, Inc., where he was free to develop his ideas without external influence.

Continuing his "user interface" (UI) concepts, he developed the SWYFT, a protoype system which eventually evolved into the Cat, after Canon bought and financed the development.

The Canon Cat is an single unit, with the keyboard, electronics, and monitor all housed in an ergonomically-design enclosure. A convenient carrying handle is formed into the enclosure, behind the display.

Although the Cat has a serial port and software routines to support input devices such as a mouse or pointing pad, none were released or supported by Canon. The Cat also has advanced graphics tools in ROM, but they were never utilized - the Cat as released supports text only.

The optional Cat180 (Canon PR100) daisy wheel printer can print only text, and it does it very well, but at only 18cps (characters per second).

All of the required software is permanently stored in system ROM. Floppy disks are required only to save and restore documents and other work. Approximately 80 pages (180kB) of text can be saved to each floppy disk.

The operator can easily and quickly save all current work to the floppy drive, by simply hitting a two-key combination - the entire 256K system memory is saved to the SSDD disk. When the Cat is restarted, the system RAM is restored from the floppy disk, allowing the operator to continue where last left off. By design, there is no operating system, as far as the user is concerned.

It's the "Leaping" ability of the Cat which gives it its name, as well as its unique ability to quickly move about within a large text document without using a mouse or cursor keys.

Navigation is performed using the "Leap" keys. With different Leap key combinations, it's possible to instantly jump to any paragraph in the document, any sentence, or any individual word to perform editing or correction. It's just as easy to return to the end of the document to continue writing.

The software is advanced enough to perform mathematical calculation right in the text document, using the [CALC] button. Columns and rows can be combined to act as a spreadsheet, allowing the use of advanced and complicated formulas.

The built-in 90,000 word dictionary helps minimize spelling errors, while the [EXPLAIN] key offers instant help on most topics and key useage.

The Cat has an internal 300/1200 baud modem, capable of connecting and transferring text (only) to and from another computer, or even another Cat. Simply highlight the desired text on the screen and hit [SEND] to transmit the text to the other system. All incoming text appears on the screen and becomes part of the current document. The Cat can also act as a 24-hour message center, saving all incoming messages to the floppy drive.

The Cat is actually much more powerful than let on by Canon, who marketed it as a closed-architecture secretarial workstation, not as the real computer which exists under the hood.

Because of poor sales, Canon discontinued the Cat after only six months. This was due to poor marketing, according to Raskin.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/28/2665791/jeff-raskin-canon-cat-humane-ui

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2158/2184351381_79b1f3df75_o.jpg

Some functions shown in the above image:

• phone : lets you automatically dial phone numbers.
• send : lets you communicate with other Cats or other computers.
• sort : lets you arrange in alphabetical or numerical order numbers, words, sentences and paragraphs.
• undo : undoes the last thin you've done, so you can change your mind.
• spell checker :
• LEAP : lets you get where you want to be -- instantly.
• learn : lets the Cat automatically do any repetitive task you want it to do.
• copy : lets you copy any amount of text.
• calc : lets you calculate.
• explain : answers your questions about the canon cat.
• print :
• highlighting : points out the text you want to do something with.
• memory gauge : always lets you know how much room you have left in your cat.
• built-in micro floppy disk drive :
• disk : lets you record what you've typed, or play it back.

Appliance vs computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_appliance

The term information appliance was coined by Jef Raskin around 1979. As later explained by Donald Norman in his influential The Invisible Computer, the main characteristics of IA, as opposed to any normal computer, were:

• designed and pre-configured for a single application (like a toaster appliance, which is designed only to make toast),
• so easy to use for untrained people, that it effectively becomes unnoticeable, "invisible" to them,
• able to automatically share information with any other IAs.

This definition of IA was different from today's. Jef Raskin initially tried to include such features in the Apple Macintosh, which he designed, but eventually the project went a quite different way. For a short while during the mid- and late 1980s, there were a few models of simple electronic typewriters with screens and some form of memory storage.

These dedicated word processor machines had some of the attributes of an information appliance, and Raskin designed one of them, the Canon Cat. He described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book The Humane Interface.

Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation CEO, predicted [in the mid-1990s] that information appliances and network computers would supersede personal computers (PCs).⁶ This prediction has not yet come true.

Norman wrote the book: "The Design of Everyday Things"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/in_appreciation_of_j.html

The philosophy of Archy, among other things, is to eliminate the artificial distinction between the Operating System and applications (just as in Jef's pioneering Canon Cat, where he eliminated the notion of files and documents). Why not make it that any command can be invoked at any time?

In other words, to add a different capability to the system, we don't need to write a specialized application, with its specialized command structure, but rather leverage the commands that already exist and add any news ones that might be required.

Among other things, this guarantees a consistency of operation not otherwise possible when each application has to rebuild many of the functions already existing in other applications.

Archy borrows from the pioneering work of Ken Perlin's Pad system, so that moving around material is done by zooming and panning (see the Pad system initially developed by Perlin and Fox and then by Hollan and colleagues

Perlin, K., & Fox, D. (1993). Pad: An alternative approach to the computer interface. Proceedings of 1993 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference.

[ http://mrl.nyu.edu/publications/sig93-pad/siggraph-93-origpad.pdf ]

I still have not fully digested Archy, but I urge more people to investigate the precepts, especially people who think that we have reached a dead end in the development of interaction paradigms for text. (I have made this claim, for example, arguing that although many novel interaction schemes are being -- and will be -- developed, for writing pure text, such as this essay, the mouse, keyboard, and screen serves me well. Does it?)

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7544389

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c#t=52

http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-card/

http://willegal.net/superproto/index.php?title=Swyft_Card

http://www.canoncat.net/cat/Cat%20Work%20Processor.pdf

https://www.flickr.com/groups/canoncat/pool/

http://www.quora.com/Design/What-advice-would-you-give-to-a-wannabe-product-designer-with-no-previous-knowledge

Jared Spool is right on. My mentor was Jeff Raskin (designer of the original Mac UI and many other cool innovations). What I learned from Jeff is that if you want to design a successful product that will be widely adopted the one thing you need to know all about is Habits.

People are creatures of habits. They have needs -- and often are articulate about those that aren't being met, or aren't being met regularly, or very well. But they aren't good at articulating a better way to meet those needs -- that is what the designer needs to do.

And the designer needs to start by understanding the user's existing habitual way of trying to meet those needs -- and they have to extinguish that existing habit, or there will be no possibility of adoption.

Next you need to address habit formation -- only when you make it easy to make a replacement new habit will adoption be ensured.

And finally you need to understand habit maintenance. Otherwise you lose people who have already tried your product.

Note that these issues are all about human cognitive psychology -- it doesn't matter whether you work in basic HTML and CSS, Ruby on Rails, Drupal, Python or any other technology -- if you don't get the habit management right technology won't save you, and if you get the habits right, the underlying technologies are invisible to the user.

Check out the early books and materials by people who founded the Association for Software Design (ASD), while the platforms and technologies they use may have changed a lot, people's motivations and the way habits determine their behavior have barely changed in recorded history. There is a lot of wisdom there.

#design - #ux - #history - #blog_jr