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Raskin zoomable desktop manager for Mac OS X

58 points| micheljansen | 14 years ago |raskinformac.com

30 comments

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[+] blownd|14 years ago|reply
Can I piggy back on this to spruik my Mac window manager here?

I posted a separate submission this morning but it hasn't seen any attention and I thought it would really appeal to HN's:

Window & tab switching with 'type to search' for OS X http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675963

[+] hinathan|14 years ago|reply
The interaction modes look very shiny but in the same way "Minority Report" looks shiny. As to the name, I'll wait until Aza chimes in one way or the other but prima facie it feels pretty weird.
[+] ary|14 years ago|reply
Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day.

Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't want to. The UI doesn't invite the user into interaction so much as it does gawking.

[+] joshu|14 years ago|reply
Sadly in 2011 most of the objects I deal with aren't files.
[+] grinich|14 years ago|reply
What do you mean?
[+] sunchild|14 years ago|reply
I have to wonder about a UI tool whose website adds 60px of blank space to the right.
[+] timerickson|14 years ago|reply
It's actually 135px if we're nit picking.
[+] timerickson|14 years ago|reply
While I'm probably one of the first to experiment with new, innovative computer interfaces, I closed Raskin after about 60 seconds of trying to use it.

For starters, I couldn't get it to actually pinch zoom, making it near impossible to read any file names. The scrolling itself was so fast that I found myself flying around the screen without any ability to recognize where I was or where I wanted to go. Images had a consistent and ugly black border. Files seemed to be resized and ranked without any plausible order. Loading was slow, slow, slow. There were no keyboard shortcuts to allow me to quickly flip through a row of images. The viewpoint would not stick to a column or series of images, causing me to easily lose my place. The font rendering was horrid.

I could go on...

[+] farnsworth|14 years ago|reply
I know a lot of people might read this first and skip it, like I almost did, so I want to mention that it actually worked pretty well for me. There are some shortcuts but nothing to move around to next row, next file, next column, etc. I plan to leave it running on a Space anyway and see if it turns out useful. I think that the larger the monitor, the bigger improvement over Finder. It would be fantastic for a touchscreen.
[+] dools|14 years ago|reply
Yep, worked as advertised for me. It was a little slow but I think that's because it was still analysing my drive.

I personally have no use for it but it certainly worked well enough.

[+] sb|14 years ago|reply
An interesting concept, for programmers it would be great, if they supported something along the lines of 1996s "Software Visualization in the Large", by Thomas Ball and Stephen Eick [1]. I did something like that (i.e., marrying the visualization with a file management metaphor) quite a while back in Eclipse, but never got around to maintain it. Too bad, because I kind of liked it. (And it was different from AspectBrowser, too.)

[1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89....

[+] joshu|14 years ago|reply
Screenshots for your plugin?
[+] jgmmo|14 years ago|reply
I was surprised to find this has nothing to do with Aza Raskin
[+] allertonm|14 years ago|reply
I'm not very comfortable with the idea of them using Jef Raskin's name in that way. Perhaps it's a well-meaning tribute from their point-of-view but from mine it seems like a sleazy attempt to capitalize on someone else's reputation.
[+] oh_sigh|14 years ago|reply
You realize that Aza Raskin is to Jef Raskin as George W Bush is to George HW Bush, right?
[+] geekylucas|14 years ago|reply
I tried to love it. I couldn't do it though.

The previews of files are great if you work with images. Not so great for source code though.

[+] tiagok|14 years ago|reply
i work with images (and code too) .. but with my mid 2010 macbookpro it gets too slow to be usefull .. i think this kind of interface just need the next (or the next next) chip generation. than you can design a application like that the way it's supposed to be - ultra fast, with every label changing size to be readable .. etc etc .. nice try though ..