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In The Guardian Raskin says, 'the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.'

He acknowledges Apple's accomplishments in design, he argues that the OS lets it down: 'the interface needs fixing. One only cares about getting something done. Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run.'

MacUser interview 11 June 2004

Jef Raskin: the man who should be king

If you thought Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the driving force behind the first Mac, think again - the original concept was the brainchild of Jef Raskin. Raskin officially joined Apple as employee number 31 in 1978 as director of publications. In 1976, prior to this position, he was responsible for writing the manual for the Apple II, and the format he developed for this went on to become an industry standard.

Raskin's concept was for a powerful, affordable and easy-to-use computer that people with little computer knowledge wouldn't be able to live without. He felt software was key to the whole user experience and it needed to co-exist seamlessly with the user; in essence, the screen had to mimic a piece of paper and be as simple to use. As well as the initial idea, the project needed a name. Raskin disliked Apple's trend of using women's names as codenames, a practice he considered sexist, so he chose the name of his favourite type of apple instead, the Macintosh.

Once the name and vision were in place, a small team of engineers began assembling what would become 'the computer for the rest of us'. As the Macintosh project was an underground operation, engineers had to beg, steal and borrow components from other divisions in Apple. This hand-to-mouth existence meant new ways around long-standing issues had to be thrashed out. Indeed, the team managed to solve problems that the much better-resourced Lisa team had taken years to accomplish.

However, competition with Apple's Lisa division was the least of Raskin's problems. Jobs, frustrated by the lack of input he was allowed over the Lisa project, had started looking for an alternative outlet for his talents. Originally, Jobs hated the idea of a cheap, compact computer and raged to anyone who would listen that it was doomed to failure. However, he changed his mind when the plans for the Macintosh project fell into his lap.

The arrival of Jobs in the Macintosh camp meant the end for Raskin, as he was forced off the project. Jobs insisted on a mouse (an idea Raskin disliked) and pressed the development team to breaking point. The Mac shipped, however, and Jobs will - erroneously - be remembered as the man behind the Macintosh. In fact, Raskin was the man with the vision and, by rights, should be championed as the inventor of the computer that set the tone for personal computing.

Twenty years after the launch of the Mac, Jef Raskin shares his thoughts with MacUser on Apple, computing and life in general.

MU: What is your favourite Apple product ever?

JR: Each has had its good and bad points. To have a favourite implies they can be ranked linearly, but there are too many parameters, and the space is multi-dimensional.

MU: What's special about Apple that makes people love it so much?

JR: I'd rather answer 'what used to be so special' because now there is little difference,

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except packaging, between a Mac and a Windows machine. Not no difference, but at home we have - along with six Macs (one for everybody plus my travelling iBook) - three PCs and one Linux box, and I can move from one to the other without having to think about it much. What used to be a night-and-day difference in usability has become a small increment in Apple's favor (or favour for you Brits).

MU: What was your favourite time at Apple?

JR: Being in the original garage in 1976; subverting the company into creating my dream machine; designing the Mac; writing some of the early manuals (especially the BASIC manual).

MU: What should Apple do next?

JR: Turn out a good interface. Mac OS X, from a user's point of view, has become a morass of obscure detail. Increasingly, we are sent to Terminal to find some piece of data or do some task, and users have to become Unix hackers. The software is bloated, under-documented, and constraining to developers. The old GUI has not scaled well, and Apple tries to fix it by adding, and adding, and adding instead of rethinking. It is gone from insanely great to insanely gross.

I can hear some of your readers rising in noisy revolt at these words; how dare anybody (especially its creator) say such things about our dear and beloved Macintosh Apples? But it is because I've moved on, grown and learned in the years since then, and am designing interfaces that make the Mac's GUI feel as clumsy to use as the Mac made the old DOS-based systems feel primitive. Apple merely changes colour, moves the furniture around, and accessorises. Instead of interface architects, Apple has been infested with decorators.

If Apple wants to regain its clear leadership in usability (and that's what counts to users, and to me), it should break away from the current paradigm and be as bold as it once was. I once offered Jobs the opportunity to let me build a new software system, but he was disinterested, just as he was disinterested in the Mac when I proposed it. When it came to interfaces. he never could understand them until you put one in his hands. So I'm developing cross platform now, and I'm as interested in helping as many people as possible to have a better experience when using computers. Morality demands that I write for Wintel machines first (Linux comes along free), and port to Macs when there is time.

MU: Is Apple's future in software or hardware?

JR: Jobs has always wanted to be a mogul in the entertainment industry and hobnob with the famous, even back in the Apple II days. He has achieved that. I think he has little interest in computers. Perhaps Apple has no future in software or computer hardware.

MU: Which person do you most admire?

JR: For what attribute? Once again you ask a question that linearises a complex matter. I can name many. Let's start with people named George: George Cantor for moving infinity out of philosophy into mathematics, George Washington for showing how a leader should relinquish power, and George Bernard Shaw for his humanity... Or we can do it by subject and admire Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein for their pulling from nature comprehensible laws; or Euclid, Gauss and Gödel for their contributions to mathematics; or people who have influenced me very directly, in which case I'd mention my very admirable parents and the teacher who taught me to be intellectually independent, L R Genise; or how about Claude Shannon without whose work on information theory I would have been lost.

MU: If you could change one thing, what would it be?

JR: To not have people assume you can rank every-thing one dimensionally. Or have everybody realise that killing people is not a way to solve problems.

MU: What was the last book you read?

JR: Derbyshire's delightful and fascinating Prime Obsession.

MU: What's your favourite holiday destination?

JR: Home.

MU: Have you ever been to Bill Gates' house?

JR: I beg your pardon?