On Tue, 22 May 2001, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
> > unit made by Cannon called the Cannon Cat any info on this would be most
> Jef Raskin's own site is at http://www.jefraskin.com/ . He has some very
> interesting ideas about UIs and I find his work facinating, although the
> average geek seem to miss his point (in the last year there have been two
> articles on Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) about Jef Raskin and the general
> population there hasn't been kind to Jef).
Raskin is brilliant, but what he likes is not going to be well received
here. By analogy, I think that an automatic transmission, automatic choke,
etc. are neat ideas, but I do NOT want them on MY car. I don't think that
I "miss the point", just that I prefer manual control of most systems, no
matter how "neat" or "clever" an automatic system is.
If you put a disk into a drive and the computer can't read it, do you WANT
the computer to go aghead and format it without asking?
The Cat DID have a mouse input. ("as do ALL cats") And Raskin claims
credit for the Mac having only one button on its mouse. (because 2 or
three buttons would be too "confusing") I have heard that the particular
"confusion" was:
1) the user would have to look away from the screen to see which button
they were pushing
2) it is hard to explain to the user to push a specific button, but easy
to say "push THE button"
Anyone know WHICH "confusion" it was?
[BTW, if you velcro a PCJr keyboard to the top of a mouse, then you have
the RIGHT number of buttons, and no longer need to take your hand off of
the keyboard to mouse! (most other computers have keyboards that are too
massive to do that]
Raskin says that the Cat had graphics. That it was CANON's decision to
never mention the existence of the graphics in any of the user literature.
The reason: the machine came with a daisy wheel printer that couldn't
print graphics.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Tue May 22 2001 - 20:31:43 BST