OSDev.org

Hello all!

Wikipedia.org wrote:The stated goal of Archy is to design a software system starting from an understanding of human cognition and the needs of the user, rather than from a software, hardware, or marketing viewpoint. It aims to be usable by disabled persons, the technology-averse, as well as computer specialists. This ambitious plan to build a general purpose environment that is easy to use for anyone is based on designing for the common cognitive capabilities of all humans.

The plan includes making the interface as "modeless" as possible, to avoid mode errors and encourage habituation. In order to achieve this, modal features of current graphical user interfaces, like windows and separate software applications, are removed.

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

They should have a website at http://www.raskincenter.org/, but when I enter the site I get the normal menu, but no content, only chinese adds. Does anyone else have this problem, and maybe know something about it?

It sounds like an incredibly interesting system, I'd very much like to see the implemention of the ideas listed on the wikipedia site.

Thanks in advance, and have a nice day

IT'S WORKING NOW! I'm in a hurry to mirror the site as I write

This is gonna be interesting!

EDIT: No it isn't, only the front page guess I was too quickly at getting the mirroring running.

berkus wrote:Archy looked interesting at one point. Now there are other applications with about the same idea but less hassle (I remember seeing one commercial software for windows with about the same approach).

Can you please give names/links to these other systems? That would be interesting! But if it's commercial it properly isn't that interesting again, you can't investigate it in the same depth at all, and I'm not paying for software.

berkus wrote:Archy looked like a nice thing to me, but lacking practical motivation to be on my desktop.

I wasn't planning on using it, just seeing the way they implemented their ideas, and maybe get inspired.

Archy and Enso both follow the same design philosophies outlined in Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface. It's a thought-provoking read; I recommend it.

Enso in its present form is commercial software, and a development dead-end. Humanized, Inc. has decided that Enso 2.0 and beyond (a complete rewrite) will be open source. At present the Enso 2.0 codebase is far from the maturity of Enso 1, but at least its a start. The Humanized folks have gone on to work for the Mozilla user experience team. The Firefox "awesome bar" and the Ubiquity add-on are two things they've brought to the web browsing experience.

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/04/21 ... firefox-3/

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

I believe the far-reaching plan is to unify Enso and Ubiquity eventually. That is, all software components can be thought of as providing "services." It doesn't matter if these services are local (spellcheck, play song, save file) or remote (send email, wikipedia search, share photo on Flickr). They will all be accessible through the unified command interface of Enso.

Regarding zoomable interfaces, I have looked into implementing a ZUI for window management by writing a Compiz plugin. IMHO this would be the easiest way to get a working prototype, but unfortunately it looks like the X server doesn't have a necessary feature (input redirection) for this to work quite yet.

Thank you for your comment pillow! That was some nice information there
I'm thinking about writing a ZUI for plan 9 in the far away future, gotta look a lot more into plan 9 though. Heh my motivation for writing my own OS have become quite smaller after having met plan 9. Which is a huge compliment.

If you haven't heard of the thing: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/.

Sorry for grammar and spelling errors if any, I'm tired.