Reddit reviews The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jeff Raskin, cognitive psychologist and "Father of the Macintosh". This book fundamentally changed the way I think about designing software.

Jeff Raskin's book The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems is a classic source of inspiration. He was the original creator of the Apple Macintosh project, before Steve Jobs took over.

It's dated, but Methodology of Window Management is an interesting read to see how different and diverse user interfaces were before the sudden "standardization" of definitions and expectations that happened when the Mac came onto the scene.

After 1984, everyone tried to imitate the Mac, which itself was an imitation of some of the stuff developed at Xerox PARC. I agree with what Raskin wrote in Wired in 1993: "the first popularization of those ideas [was] on the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s, [and] we have had almost nothing really new in interface design."

Bill Buxton put it well: it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art.

You can read a good deal more about the Canon Cat and Jef Raskin's design philosophy generally in Jef's book: The Humane Interface.

I didn't realize it was written in Forth, however. Great link.

Read his father's book.

My favorite book has always been The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. A lot of the practical stuff he talks about (windows and buttons) was because he wrote this book from like a 1970's perspective, but he is a fucking genius.

Beyond the recommendation for information theory, the application of this mathematics to user interfaces is present in the field. (I'm not particularly familiar with the field, but I remember The Humane Interface discussing this application.)

hummm

tried that buff/dodge/buff , doesn't work for me

plus since I have several buff to activate (4 at the very least, then optional luckbringer, pleiad, etc..) i simply cannot have them all in shortcuts..

pressing second buff on a specific frame is imho incompatible while in a fight which is the whole point of the mystic art. (again imho)

queueing the buffs was an awesome way to get them all applied in an efficient way and this is broken.

broken because you get the sound fx but not the buff, or the shortcuts square icon animates but the buff is not applied , etc etc.

the GUI is inconsistent.

I have to wait, then check if buff is activated. this is just not acceptable .

if i turn the steering wheel to the right, i expect the car to turn right, not to have to maybe turn the wheel some more.. basic interface design..

these devs should read Jef Raskin

I read that this change in the behavior was in response to the fact that you would sometime spend two buff when pressing the button only once. well the quick fix is badly in so many ways...

wrong decision : force a delay

wrong implementation : the gui response and the sound fx response is not dependant on buff activating but on activation button being pressed

how i would have done it:

have an extra settings : allow reapplying of buff: yes no combat / out of combat

yes => you can activate a buff ontop of itself, renewing its timer

no => if a buff is active, you cannot re-apply it.

with condition in combat out of combat.

> PS: jef raskin is the true father of the macintoch

Give The Humane Interface a read. On top of its theoretical foundations it sketches a totally different UI model than the one that's become standard, and understanding the reasoning behind the model will make you look at user interfaces in an entirely different way.

The Humane Interface by the late Jef Raskin. It's amazing.

For information architecture, information display books i can recommend:

Information Visualization: Design For Interaction by Robert Spence

The Humane Interface by Jeff Raskin