Media: Business Week hears Raskin's Proposal for Replacing GUIs

Jef Raskin, a veteran and leader of the Macintosh project at Apple in the early 80s that developed to the MacOS GUI, has become a vocal critic of the current limitations of GUIs, not least when GUI principles are applied to handheld devices with their imprecise input techniques.

Reflecting on GUI principles Raskin notes that 'Pull-down menus are slow and hide information that users might want to see. Text editors require too many keyboard movements. And shuttling between a keyboard and a mouse wastes too much time.' He argues that 'these flaws have to do with incompatibilities between the designs of both GUIs and command-line interfaces and the way our brains are wired'.

Raskin and his collaborators have created "The Humane Environment", referred to as THE, and its first output is a freely available text editor that can be downloaded from Source Forge. Salkever describes THE's principles as applied to the text editor, focusing in particular on LEAP, its model for navigating through documents that Raskin claims can save four seconds per action in comparison with use of the scroll bar. The author doesn't come out wholly in favour of THE's principles, but does appreciate that moving to a new interface paradigm is no small matter.

It's about time new GUI principles were widely debated - especially considering their proliferation to new devices and context - and it's encouraging that Business Week is taking up this debate.

Associated Link: Business Week: 'THE Key to User-Friendly Computers?' [subscription may be required]

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