Talk:Jef Raskin

Untitled
Here is an ideal example of how to turn lemons into lemonade. The original contents of this page was the following graffito:
 * bibity bobity boooooooooo

So I looked up Jef Raskin on Google and took a couple of minutes to throw together a stub. --Ed Poor

"His first computer program, a music program, was part of his master's thesis."

How likely is it that this was really his "first" program? Maybe something like "first large-scale program" or "first significant program"?

__________

Will be adding. He was the 31st employee of Apple and coined the name Macintosh and Information Appliance Jondel

Family
Despite the mention of his son's authorship of the photo included, there is no mention of family and children in the text. Ought this be rectified? ~ Dpr 06:49, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * You are right. However, I just e-mailed Aza on Jef's passing to request permission for Jef's photos. During that difficult time, he immediately got back to me and gave the permission (Aza also mentioned he'd taken over the technical leadership of the Archy Project and Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces to "push forward with his dream and vision". I couldn't ask more (about the family, etc) so I said "Thanks" and substituted that lovely photo with the one originally on the article. Here's what I've been able to find so far, from [| his homepage], ref: his family:


 * 1992 Daughter Aenea Hannah,
 * 1987 Daughter Aviva Frieda,
 * 1984 Son Aza Benjamin,
 * 1982 Married Linda S. Blum


 * May be someone closer to Raskins can build on this? mu5ti/✏ 02:49, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

Tribute
Should we move that tribute to the talk page? mu5ti/✏ 22:37, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)


 * I thought it was a good spot to put that tribute. it shows how he is still looked upon as an important member of the computer world.  ZeWrestler 23:15 Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

Correction
The article says (as of 2005 Mar 14):

''Raskin takes credit for introducing Jobs and other Apple employees to the PARC concepts, but it appears this is not really the case. Raskin also claims to have had continued direct input into the eventual Mac design, including the decision to use a one-button mouse as part of the Apple interface, a departure from the Xerox PARC standard of a three-button mouse. Larry Tesler, among others, debates this claim.''

I will attempt an objective critique of the cited passage. Because Jef was such an early employee of Apple, I do believe he was one of the first people there to talk about PARC-developed concepts with his colleagues. In the summer of 1980, he helped me argue for reducing the number of buttons on the Lisa to one. In the summer of 2004, he told me in an email that he had concluded in the 1970's that a one-button mouse would reduce user errors. He said he did not know at the time that other people had reached that same conclusion a few years earlier. I think this was because the people at PARC who Jef met in the '70s only showed him software that relied on all three buttons on an early Xerox mouse. Although he helped the Lisa team to improve the Lisa mouse, Jef's Macintosh design was keyboard-centric. --Larry Tesler 06:33, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

As I recall, Jef told me that Jobs was not fond of him at the time, so he had to get other people to suggest that Jobs and others visit PARC. In the course of that, the visitors were primed with not widely known information about the PARC GUI work; the people they met with were very impressed with the quality of the Apple visitors' questions. Because of the looseness of the claims and counter claims for credit re introducing Jobs to PARC, I believe that both are quite true. --Dick Karpinski 19 Dec 2005 (If verifiability rules require documentation then this paragraph may have to be removed.)

jef.raskincenter.org unavailable
For months now I've noticed the main source of articles written by Raskin, the web site jef.raskincenter.org, has been down, and is either referred to in this article's references, or by other sites listed in references, such as usabilityviews.com. I've tried making contact with Aza to establish whether the content may be found elsewhere, so that the references could be updated, or alternatively whether the original site will be restored, but haven't been able to reach him. Anyone with suggestions on how to locate this valuable material, so that also the broken links in this article's references might be updated? CharlBarnard (talk) 06:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You can always try and use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. There's a high chance the linked page will be backed up there. Diego (talk) 10:27, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks Diego, I wasn't aware of this resource, and do find some of the content there, so will use that to reconstruct if I don't find an easier way! CharlBarnard (talk) 16:03, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Nobody's going to step up and mirror jef raskin's site? archive.org is OK, unless their files suddenly become unavailable (as I've often seen occur.) -wbeaty  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.95.172.173 (talk) 20:43, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * As of September 2014, it seems like the domain's current owner has set a robots.txt to prevent crawls from indexing it, and it somehow has made past versions unavailable in the Archive. If anybody had a backup of the site, or at least of the articles that lived in it, it would be really valuable to put it online again. Ajgelado (talk) 22:58, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Picture caption
The caption of the picture of Jef appears to be incorrect. At least, it appears that the model he is holding is that of the Swyft computer developed at IAI, rather than the Cat. The Cat got rid of the carrying handle feature in front of the keyboard. Now it is possible that this model represents some sort of proposed prototype for the Cat, just not the final design. In either case, the caption seems misleading. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jrsharp (talk • contribs) 02:30, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

It's an early model of the Swyft, made by Ralph Voorhees, prototype maker at IAI and fellow model airplane builder with Jef. It was non-functional but quite close in appearance to the final design, though smaller. The working Swyft was produced in a couple of hundred copies (if I remember correctly) by Sam Woo of South Korea. 24.154.34.36 (talk) 04:12, 8 September 2011 (UTC)R. Jeffrey Krause

External links modified
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Meanspirited
Some of Jef's friends originally expanded this article during the time that Jef was dying as well as after. (I was not part of that effort.) Several places, they were reaching, exaggerating. Later, individuals took them to task for this, and rightfully so. Unfortunately, the article has now ended up a strange stew of claims and counterclaims. The whole comes off as mean-spirited, somewhat literally, as the alterations took place after Jef was no longer here to counter them.

I'm in no way suggesting that the article does not now more closely reflect Jef's actual contributions. I am suggesting that someone ought to rewrite it so that the original claims——none false per my knowledge, just exaggerated——are carved back to their proper extent with the charges of Jef falsely claiming this and Jef falsely claiming that either removed or sectioned off into a single section documenting where Jef himself, in other publications, exaggerated. Jef is not responsible for his friends updating his Wikipedia page, so any exaggeration that exists on the page itself are not on him.

(Jef was my mentor and friend starting at Apple in 1978. I witnessed many of the events and evolutions involved.)

Bruce Tognazzini 17:37, 2 May 2022 (UTC)toghome — Preceding unsigned comment added by Toghome (talk • contribs)