I was startled to hear this morning that Jef Raskin had died. I saw Jef at a conference in November, and was pleased to see he was as enthusiastic as ever about his human-interface work. He didn’t seem ill at all. His current project was “THE” — The Humane Environment, which he’d recently renamed “Archy.” The rename was partly derived from the acronym for the nonprofit Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces (R-CHI) and partly from the title character of Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel poems.

Jef was a leader in thinking about human-interface design, and some of his ideas (notably the click-and-drag paradigm) are ubiquitous today in the computers we all use. He originated the Macintosh project at Apple — aimed at designing an appliance computer — and later followed through with his ideas in his work on the Canon Cat.

It’s not exactly a Jef Raskin story, but I couldn’t help thinking this morning of Andy Hertzfeld’s account of Burrell Smith’s imitation of Jef. Another story that suggests a bit better how central Jef was to the Macintosh project can be found here. A recent interview that gives you the flavor of Jef’s thinking and a sense of the range of his interests can be found here.

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