Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin ( March 9, 1943 in New York; † 26 February 2005 in Pacifica, California ) was an American computer scientist. He was a designer of interactive user interface (English User Interface) and is often called the father of the Macintosh.

Biography

In 1982 he married Linda S. Blum, with whom he has three children. In December 2004 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he died on 26 February 2005 in Pacifica, California, at the age of 61 years.

Raskin came as employee number 31 the beginning of the 1980s to Apple and was responsible for many things that are now taken for granted, including, for example, drag and drop with his work in the field of computer interface design.

He headed the Macintosh development team initially, was later replaced by Steve Jobs. Project participants indicate that the project after the departure of Steve Jobs Raskin was driven in a different direction. The name came from Macintosh Raskin and goes back to the name of his favorite apple variety McIntosh. After his departure, the name of the computer in Bicycle should be changed, but it could not prevail.

Raskin was previously computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD ) and presented at Apple his former student Bill Atkinson a, in turn, an important basis for the graphical user interface, first the Lisa and then created the later Macintosh.

After college, Raskin founded the company in 1975 Bannister & Crun that created technical documentation. Raskin himself was hired by Apple after he had written a manual for it.

Raskin is the developer of the writing system Canon Cat, but all his ideas of design in the construction of the device were not implemented.

Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface attracted considerable attention. He describes there criteria for the evaluation of user interfaces and propagated so-called Zooming User Interface ( ZUI abbreviated, also called 2.5D GUI ). Most recently, he tried (formerly The Humane Environment, short THE) put into practice his ideas for a new type of user interface Archy, a project that will be continued by his employees under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial -ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Since June 2010, there is an additional software for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which attempts to realize these ideas of zooming interface. On that site a free trial version is available.

Works

  • The Humane Interface, Addison -Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-37937-6 (English: The intelligent interface, ISBN 3-8273-1796-7 )
  • A Hardware - Independent Computer Drawing System Using List- Structured Modeling: The Quick - Draw Graphics System, Pennsylvania State University, 1967
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