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ArchyArchy is a computer program whose purpose is to demonstrate and propagate a new synthesis of several precedents in graphical user interfaces, for computers of many types. It had been developed under the leadership of human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, but his death in February 2005 leaves some ambiguity about the future of the project. Archy embodies Raskin's concepts of a "humane interface" by using various proven elements within a version of a Zooming User Interface (ZUI), under an open source license. Archy used to be called The Humane Environment or The Hessling Editor. On January 1, 2005, Raskin announced the new name, and that Archy would be further developed by the non-profit Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces, which has received $2 million in funding. "Archy" is a play on the Center's acronym (R-CHI), and an allusion to Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel poetry, which is now in the public domain. Yes, they named their software after a bug. Archy can be compared with Project Looking Glass from Sun Microsystems and with Microsoft Research's Task Gallery prototype. Unlike them, however it starts off with a cleaner sheet. Sun and Microsoft are building interfaces which are meant to be placed atop existing systems or to continue them in some way. Archy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Canon Cat and Apple SwyftWare, and can be quickly described as a combination of the Canon Cat's text processing functions plus a modern Zooming User Interface. Basic concept 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 cater to the poor, the blind, the young, the aged, the technology-averse, those not in the first world as well as technologists and computer specialists. This ambitious plan to build a general purpose environment that is easy to use for all audiences is based on designing for the common cognetic capabilities of all humans. The basics include the goal to make the whole interface modeless. In order to achieve this, modal features of current graphical user interfaces like windows and separate applications are removed. LEAPing A main innovation of the interface is the LEAP, a means of moving on-screen via an incremental text-search tool. The system provides two commands invoked through dedicated keys, LEAP-forward and LEAP-backward, that move the cursor to the next and prior position that contains the search string. LEAPing is performed as a quasimode operation: press the LEAP key and, while holding it, type the text that you want to search; finally release the LEAP key. Special keys are also provided for searching document landmarks such as sections, pages, line endings, and the end of a document. This process is intended to habituate the user and turn cursor positioning into a reflex. Commands The second feature is intended to provide the power of a command line interface to a GUI. Command names can be inserted and executed in any place of the interface. This reduces the need to move a mouse pointer to a menu bar or toolbox to execute commands, and allows for quickly composing the results of several commands in sequence. Since a command can be used anywhere, applications are obsolete as the core of the interface's design. Installing a new package of commands will provide a set of functionality related to a common task. This way the user is not restricted to the closed environment of a single application in order to use these functions. Rather, the API is exposed to the interface so that these functions can be used system-wide and combined in ways unforeseen by the designer. Ideally, commands could be installed in the system one by one, increasing flexibility, so users need only install, buy, or otherwise procure only what they need. Zoomworld Archy's Zooming User Interface (ZUI) element is called Zoomworld. It is a spatial, non-windowing interface: an infinite plane expanding in all directions and zoomable to infinite detail. Extra information on an item is provided by "flying" closer to the inspected object, and the destination points of hyperlinks are inserted in place instead of being represented by a textual reference. Browsing in this Zoomworld can be done with a mouse; leap functions are used as a search facility. Project members claim that a similar, but limited, zooming interface was tested in real world applications with remarkable success. In 10 minutes, users became efficient at using this radically new interface for a complex application — a timetable for multiple hospitals. A simple ZUI is found in the Squeak Smalltalk programming environment and language. Persistence Archy relies on all content being persistent. The concept, and need, to save temporal edits of a document is eliminated. The system state is preserved, and safe from crashes or power outages, so work cannot be lost. If, while one works, the system crashes, or power goes off, one simply restarts the system and takes up working, right where one left off when the problem occurred. External links
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