Jef Raskin's THE

[pmyshkin]

Macintosh designer Jef Raskin was working on a user interface called Archy before he died recently. Some of the concepts in that system seem like they would be of interest to geekhackers, especially its focus on textual data and "leaping". The Archy project was terminated, presumably with Raskin's death, and now its ideas are still being carried on by Jef's son Aza in projects like Ubiquity and Enso.

Personally, I think it's a step in the right direction away from the overused "real-world" metaphor that dominate user interfaces today.

[IBI]

Ubiquity is going about it completely the wrong way round. It should be scanning incoming e-mails for addresses or local place names and then displaying maps for those, you shouldn't be including maps in e-mails that the recipient could be receiving on anything down to a tiny screen at 28kbps GPRS speeds.

Enso is just an old idea, I don't think that's where the future lies.