The Humane Interface

I've been reading Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface" with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Raskin's Laws of Interaction should decorate every office of every computer company.

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

He is just right: about getting rid of all the modes, unlimited undo forever, file systems as a broken metaphor etc. It's funny how most of commercial UI goes in exactly the wrong direction -- with more chrome and less efficiency. Unfortunately Apple is moving in this direction to, with the most recent dashboard fad.

On the other hand it doesn't help that the book is badly edited and he jumps from topic to topic all the time. And it doesn't help that from time to time he's wrong. For example, suggesting that the user types just the password instead of username/password, and that the passwords would be system-assigned, is ridiculous. First, nobody would use a system rude enough to prevent them from picking a password. Second, to be both secure and memorable, the system-assigned passwords have to be long, which negates the savings of not having to type the username in the first place. The correct solution is simple: use two-factor authentication, with a token (such as a smartcard) that knows your username so you just have to type in the password.

Unfortunately I can't play with Archy since there's no Mac version. But there's a problem, right in the first paragraph:

a system that effortlessly boosts your speed and productivity by 20 percent or more.

20 percent is not big enough to make me switch. Revolutionary technologies must offer a 10x improvement to be successful. I hope that the Humane Interface catches on nevertheless.