Fisking Raskin

Today I'm going to make fun of Jef Raskin! Let's get right to it!

Among his criticisms of graphic user interfaces (GUIs), Macs and Windows, as told to BusinessWeek are: pull-down menus hide information that users might want to see; text editors require too many keyboard movements...

Yeah! Damn you Apple, and damn you Microsoft! Why don't your text editors have telepathic interfaces? All these keyboard movements are getting in the way of my writing!

Oh, and about pull-down menus -- where else would you like those options to be placed? On little palettes floating around the screen? I know that my monitor isn't big enough for that.

Raskin and his company, T.H.E. (The Humane Environment) are working on a new type of command structure (dubbed simply THE) that merges the strengths of the graphical user interface with the flexibility of command-line systems common in more complex software.

"What project are you working on, Jef?" "THE." "The what?" "THE." "Nevermind!"

As for Apple, which Raskin left in 1982, purportedly after Steve Jobs increasingly muscled in on the Macintosh project, Raskin says there are major flaws with most reports of the company's history.

Yes. Current historical records neglect to mention Raskin's superior intellect. You know, because Raskin is smart. Smarter than you. Smarter than all those morons who stayed at Apple and actually shipped something.

...he bristles at being called "one of the creators" of the Mac, saying that he is "the" creator.

Gosh, Raskin's really obsessed with "the"! Anyways, I don't understand how you can be the sole creator of something that debuted in 1984 when you had left the company two years earlier. Did Apple just sit on your miraculous creation for two years and then release it? I suspect that some other people had a hand in creating the Mac.

Finally, Raskin does have some advice for Apple, especially in its development of the Mac. "Hire me to lead the design of the next generation of interfaces, and thus let Apple become No. 1 again," he says.

Spoken like a true consultant.