Wily as a Humane Interface

Davor Cubranic <[email protected]> Mon, 29 Mar 2004 17:37:52 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.editors.wily
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I just finished reading Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface".
Surprisingly perhaps for the designer of the original Macintosh, he
proposes to do away with most of the current UI elements. What struck me
is his proposal to treat commands like any other text and execute them
by a special mouse click combination, just like wily/acme. Of course,
everybody on this list already knows that wily is a very productive
environment, but I was encouraged to see that it could perhaps be
extended to a more general (i.e., not so developer-focused) environment.

There are some neat ideas in that regard in Raskin's book. Perhaps some
of them could be adopted in wily? I know that most proposals on this
list have been greeted with suspicion of "feature creep", but I think
Raskin puts forward a convincing case for a consistent and efficient
user interface that is still very powerful and extensible.