I carry around a lot of frustration from not being able (due to time) to explore things I find interesting. I go to great lengths to manage my time as best I can in order to free up space for exploration. I have, as part of this site, an article category configured called “Exploration”. It’s a place for me to start storing ideas, interesting things I’d like to check out some day, etc.
I remember reading about Archy back in April when it was first released and mentioned on Slashdot.
What the heck is Archy? Archy is the beginning of an implementation toward the core principles layed out in Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface.
“We are tired of having to learn huge, arcane programs to do even the simplest of tasks; we have had our fill of crashing computers; and we are fatigued by the continual pressure to upgrade. The Humane Interface delivers a way for computers, information appliances, and other technology-driven products to continue to advance in power and expand their range of applicability, while becoming free of the hassles and obscurities that plague present products.”
It is, at its core, an operating environment based primarily around the idea that data and operations on that data are all that matter. It returns to the importance of computers as tools. It intends to do away with the continual learning curve imposed on us by what has become the modern operating system and its applications.
Today, Archy exists as a separate prototype application on top of your current mess of desktop, applications, and files. Tomorrow, Archy will stand alone, and there will no longer be desktops, applications, or files. In place of the current paradigm that abuses users with unnecessary complexity and loss of data will be a humane environment containing only your content, and commands that modify your content. To start working, you will zoom in to the content you wish to modify, and then modify it. No launching applications, no opening files, and no waiting.
It’s really rather difficult to explain clearly and almost requires spending an hour or two at The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces where Archy is based. There are some fairly short demonstrations viewable at the site if you’re curious to check things out for a few minutes. Keep in mind that it’s an alpha release and while it looks like just a weird text editor, it is extensible with Python for developing commands which can be executed against the currently selected text. It requires an open mind.
I was very sad to learn today that Jef Raskin passed away in February of 2005. I hope his vision, or the core ideas behind a lot of it, are implemented in the future. He was, by the way, the original lead on the Apple Macintosh design (he wrote the 400-page specification for it and saw it out for the first 3 years). He is responsible for the one-button mouse. He is responsible for “click and drag” with a mouse, something that might be hard for people today to grasp as revolutionary at the time. There’s plenty more about Jef and that doesn’t even touch on his many other interests outside of computing.
