I'd always wondered what Raskin's version of the Mac would look like, especially since he's reportedly grumpy about how the heavily mouse-driven Mac turned out. He went on to create a device called the Canon Cat, which supposedly reflects his original vision, but sold poorly and was the victim of internal politics.

Interestingly, Raskin has re-surfaced with a project called The Humane Environment. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. To steal Raskin's own quote about OS X: "Yuk."

I was deeply disappointed by my initial experience with THE, and my impression did not improve after reading over the manual. Raskin's stated goal is to emphasize long-term power over short-term intuitive learnability, but he frankly fails on both fronts. Here's some of my gripes:

• First, it's a stupid name and a stupider acronym. It's hard to search on "THE", and it's hard to use it in conversation. And it's uselessly clever that the E in THE may stand for "environment" or "editor".
• The "big enhancement" is this so-called LEAP functionality, which is meant to replace the point-to-select gestures of the mouse. This functionality turns out to be no different from the same search-forward and search-backward functionality that you see in vi or Emacs. Worse, mouse-selection is intentionally disabled, so you have to use the keyboard navigation. This kind of searching is certainly useful, but it sucks as a primary navigation tool because it forces the user to keep track of all the intermediate results in the search. If I'm trying to jump to a sentence starting with "the" at the start of this paragraph, I have to recognize that I'm really going to have to use 'The "' as the unique string. And since I'm not a computer, that's hard for me, and distracting.
• Another thing that's intentionally broken is that the up and down arrows now scroll the window, instead of moving the cursor up and down in the window. Since my initial window doesn't have enough text in it to be scrollable, it means that I'm left with the initial impression (that I may not ever think to retest) that the up and down keys do nothing. This is extra damning since the left and right arrow keys do work as I expect. Hey, Jef: we do have a metaphor for scrolling the window easily. It's the scroll wheel.
• THE wants me to save every document I'm working on, before I start working on it. This is garbage -- there are many times when I'm just popping open a temporary buffer to jot some notes down in. Don't dictate my workstyle to me and call yourself "humane."
• Despite being written using the Carbon libraries, it insisted in launching in the Classic environment. I couldn't seem to toggle it into launching as a native OS X app.

I do understand that this is a very early alpha version, and that many of my gripes no doubt reflect rough, unpolished edges. But my biggest complaints have to do with the fundamental attitude of the app; this kind of swaggering "we know what's best for you, and we'll stuff it down your throat until you say thank you" approach that we really turns me off. (This was also one of my big complaints about Java, or at least the initial set of Java class libraries.) I wish these guys luck, and I'll check again when they hit beta, but I just can't get behind their dogma.  1:04:57 PM  (comments [])