Jef Raskin
Jef Raskin (born March 9, 1943 in New York , New York , † February 26, 2005 in Pacifica , California ) was an American computer scientist . He was a designer of interactive user interfaces (Engl. User Interface ) and is often considered the father of the Macintosh called.
biography
Raskin joined Apple as the thirty-first employee in the late 1970s and, with his work in computer interface design, was responsible for many things that are now taken for granted, including drag and drop .
He initially led the Macintosh development team, but was later replaced by Steve Jobs . Project participants point out that after Raskin's departure, Jobs pushed the project in a different direction. The name Macintosh came from Raskin and goes back to the name of his favorite apple variety McIntosh . After his departure, the name of the computer was supposed to be changed to Bicycle , but this could not prevail.
Raskin had previously been a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego and hired his former student Bill Atkinson at Apple , who in turn laid important foundations for the graphical user interface of the Lisa operating system and ultimately also of the later Macintosh.
After graduating from university, Raskin founded Bannister & Crun in 1975 , which created technical documentation. Raskin himself was hired by Apple after writing a manual for them.
Raskin is also the developer of the Canon Cat writing system , but not all of his design ideas were implemented in the construction of the device.
His book The Humane Interface received a lot of attention. It describes criteria for the evaluation of user interfaces and propagates so-called zooming user interfaces (abbreviated to ZUI, also called 2.5D GUI ). Most recently, he tried to put his ideas for the new user interface Archy (formerly The Humane Environment , THE for short ) into practice, a project that his employees are continuing 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 tries to realize these ideas of the zooming interface . A free trial version is available on the relevant website.
From 1982 Raskin was married to Linda S. Blum and has three children with her. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2004 and died on February 26, 2005 in Pacifica, California, at the age of 61.
Works
- The Humane Interface , Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-37937-6 (German: 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
Web links
- Literature by and about Jef Raskin in the catalog of the German National Library
- Recollections of the Macintosh project - Macintosh history from Raskin's perspective
- Folklore.org - Macintosh story with Jef Raskin from the perspective of Andy Hertzfeld (English)
- A switch is a world - Heise news ticker for Raskin's death
- Jef the movie - Documentary
- An idea by Jef Raskin - Novel Finder
Individual evidence
- ^ Andy Hertzfeld: The Father of the Macintosh - Who is the father of the Macintosh? , 1981
- ^ Andy Hertzfeld: Bicycle - Rod wants to change the name of the project , 1981
- ^ Raskin for Mac
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Raskin, Jef |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American computer scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 9, 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | new York |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 26, 2005 |
| Place of death | Pacifica (California) |