![]() ![]() That magic of being able to program a little, have parts of your text talk to other parts of your text, to have your documents be really alive and you can just cast magic at it. Doob and while it’s a very different take I think starts to get towards a little bit of what that vision of Archy was. There’s a recent project called Observable by Jeremy Ashkenas, and Mr. It’s supposed to be a full-on zooming user-interface (ZUI), so no matter where you are you can zoom out and grab your bearings, and zoom in ad infinitum, a much better way of doing folders and taxonomies.Ĭomputers have this incredible magical power and text can do so much more than just a Word document can do. ![]() Everything was in one long, conceptual document, but we know that human beings work very well with spatial memory, so what you want is to have all of your content and work projects stored spatially. There were no files, because the best label for a file is the file itself, the content of it. You want to tear it apart and just have functionality that you can use anywhere. If that is where bloat comes from, and if 95% of the feature requests for features in Word are features that already existed in Word, maybe it’s the application as a framework which is broken. Over time the applications have to continue to increase in size and subsume more and more functionality until every application starts to converge from different directions on the same kind of application. If you’re making Photoshop it needs to have spell check because you have a text editor in there, and if you’re making Word you need to have Photoshop abilities because you’re putting in photos and you’ll want to edit them. You can think of applications as walled cities - they have to develop all of their own infrastructure. Immediately your text editor was up and you could start working. The idea being that when you sat down at your computer it’s supporting the thing you need to be doing. What was the grand idea for what this could potentially be?ĪR: Yeah, this was a turning of computing over on its head. HC: I feel that Archy as ended up was a partial implementation of a much bigger vision. Something Jef said all the time was write the manual first, if you’re having trouble explaining how your product will be used, your users will have trouble using it. People who had been in Jef’s orbit for a long time, like David Alzofon who did a lot of the original manual writing for - it may have even been the Apple II - an incredible technical writer. We were working simultaneously on a contract for Samsung to redesign their phones and were thinking of doing it in a zooming concept and using that funding to fund the Raskin Centre for Humane Interfaces, RCHI, and turn that into the be-all end-all text editor, and that became Archy.ĪR: I sort of imagine it to be like those 80s movies where the motley crew assemble to win the Super Bowl and has a sumo wrestler and clown, that was the kind of crew. – A scan of a Canon Cat advert by Marchin Wichary (source)Īrchy really got going in my junior year of college, so that was 2003 when we started coding. After selling something like 20,000 units they shut it down. They had put the Canon Cat into the same conceptual bucket as an electronic typewriter - just shows you what the thinking was like at that time. Many of them had first come to light in the Canon Cat after the Mac, before getting shut down by Canon when an electronic typewriter failed. So after Jef published his book, The Humane Interface, there was a strong desire to take many of those concepts that Jef had continued to work on around what are cognetics and the ergonomics of the mind and make a utility product that really worked the way our minds did. At what point did it coalesce and come together as a project?ĪR: It’s been so long that I have to sort of dredge through the murky, muddy water of memory. HC: I wanted to start with the genesis of Archy. I recently spent some time getting it up and running properly on modern Macs so I decided to chat with him to get some insight into this interesting chain of projects. Jef lead a team to make that vision a reality in the form of Archy.Īrchy never quite fulfilled its grand ambition, but its legacy continued in the forms of Enso (a Windows-focused implementation), and then Ubiquity (for Firefox).Īza Raskin, Jef's son, was the common thread between all of these projects. Until then, I hadn't even realised that it was even possible to question core artefacts like files or applications. It showed a vision of a world of computing which was radically different from the prevailing paradigms. Many years ago I read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin which completely upended my notion of computing.
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