techno.blog("Dion")

Jef Raskin, Mac pioneer, dies at 61.

Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.

Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin’s Pacifica, Calif., home.

Raskin, who named the Macintosh after his favorite fruit, joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31. The Macintosh was launched in 1984, but Raskin left Apple in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs.

Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when he first visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). (Apple is often accused of copying Xerox’s graphical user interface–GUI–into the Macintosh operating system).

Check out this demo of zoomable interfaces. We see some of this with F9 and company.

We still have so much to do wrt human-computer interfaces. Don’t you feel like a primate who can only poke and prod at things?

RIP.

You gotta love adding to “JS?” acronyms. Now we have JavaScript Templates, which, as Aslak talks about, can work well in the new world of Ajax.

Here

          

Jon Udell is spot on. We are going to annotate the planet. One of the ways in which we will do this is Google Maps. It isn’t just a way to look something up… it is a platform for us to use!

Take a look at how he took his GPS info. Still photos. Digital movies. And greated
a walking tour of Keene, MA using Google Maps.

It was inspired by Matt King.

See more Google Maps Hacks

I noticed that Google Maps has a slight change on the front page of its UI.

I mentioned the right hand side ‘Examples’ when I first saw the app. Having the text boxes and multiple search buttons was confusing.

Now Google has taken them out and has replaced them with sample text and ‘Try it’ links which run the sample queries.

It took me a bit to change my pattern of:

yp.yahoo.com

find the place that I want

map it

to:

maps.google.com

nameOfPlace in theTown

My next request is due to having my father-in-law with a Hybrid. Have you noticed how you can get obsessed with seeing your hybrid not use the engine, and watching it get energy back via braking etc?

There should be a ‘Show me directions that are most energy efficient for my hybrid” to complement “shortest distance” and “shortest time” ;)

There has been a lot of talk regarding the amazing new UIs that we can build with XmlHttpRequest, and the like ( a la Google Maps, TadaList, etc ).

Jesse James Garrett has given this set of technology a new name, and talks about it in Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications.

I am extremely excited about the technology, but can’t agree more with Jason Fried when he calls for some caution.

As with all ‘new ways of doint it’, we need to make sure that we don’t confuse the users. One of the sad truths of UI work, is that you often have to keep your UI in a state that users are used too, even if the purist in you thinks they know a better way.

So, its time for us to get creative, but end up with an interface that is as usable, as much as it blows away the customers! :)

I remember, back in the day, having to write a lot of <noscript> areas, and making sure that the application that we are working on works perfectly for those that choose to turn off JavaScript in their browser (or don’t have a JavaScript enabled one).

Has the tide turned now? Of course, you wouldn’t want to abuse JavaScript just for the hell of it, and when you can give a ‘backup’ to non-enabled peeps it should be done.

But, with the likes of Google Maps, maybe we are seeing the start of the JS/dHTML revolution.

Enable JavaScript to see this site. Enable JavaScript else you will have a poor experience.

I really like the clean design, and great use of the web that we have with Google Maps.

However, there are definitely some features which I would love to see in it (btw, I do know that this is just a beta!)

• Double Left Click: Center + Then Zoom In
• Double Right Click: Center + Then Zoom Out
• Let me store addresses in a nice drop-down list (like Y! and others)
• Integrate this with GMail for addresses “Dion’s Home”
• Let me see other countries ;) again, i know this is beta!
• Let me save direction results
• Don’t confuse with the sample boxes (put in a seperation line)
• Show bike paths
• Show canoe landing points
• Show trails
• Show cross country skiing trails :)

I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.

I thought that this Swiss JavaScript/dHTML mapping app was pretty cool.

Now Google has their own beta Google Maps.

I love the details here. Check out the shading that gets placed on the underlying map (from search results).

I hope they also support keyhole style zooming (which map.search.ch has). There is something fun about starting from a high level and zooming into an area ;)

One interesting UI choice is the ‘Example Searches’ on the right hand side. Where there are two text boxes (with their own ’search’ button), I naturally felt like typing in:

[address]
[city, state, zip]

and it took me a second to realize that they are seperate from eachother.

I am really excited about XmlHttpRequest being available in the major browsers.

One of the main reasons is that I think it really enables componentization.

Take the example of a portal, with 10 components on the screen. In the past the web application would have to round-trip to the server, and rerender everything. What a waste of time!

Now, with XHR, each component can talk back to the server if it needs too, and the rest of the page stays put.

Ok, more efficient, but is it that big a deal?

I think it is. The real power comes in when you think about having plugged in those 10 components from DIFFERENT SOURCES. That works just fine now, whereas it would be a real PITA as the portal software would have to coordinate everything in the past. Now, each component truly is its own component, and our clients talk directly to its server-side representation.

I expect to see a lot more ideas such as Y!Q, that make use of this.

I was impressed to see news.com using the referrer data (in this case, I was coming from Google) to enhance their interface:

Welcome, Google user!
If this story isn’t what you’re searching for, try these other News.com search results for “FOO”:

… insert other results …

This is a really smart use of context. In a stateless world such as the web, we often don’t know much. It is interesting to think about different ideas that we could put up based on where someone came from.

One crazy idea would be to get some general ‘poll’ data. E.g. imagine a political article. You could record how people came from the democratic undergroup, as compared to rush limbaughs site ;)